Privacy policy

This policy covers this website and the four portals at thesogar.com. It describes what we actually do with information, which is a shorter list than most policies of this kind.

What we collect

When you contact us. If you send an enquiry - through the form on our contact page or by email - we collect what you tell us: your name, your telephone number and email address, where the project is, what kind of project it is, and your message. We also record the date and the internet address the enquiry came from, so that we can tell a genuine enquiry from an automated one.

When you use a portal. Clients, business partners and business associates sign in to their own portal. There we hold the information needed to work together: your organisation and contact details, the projects and documents that concern you, the messages exchanged with us, and the invoices and payments between us. We keep a record of significant actions taken in the portal - who approved a document, who changed a status - because that record is what makes the account of a project reliable.

When you simply read this site. Nothing. This website sets no cookies, loads no third-party scripts and runs no analytics. See our cookie notice.

Why we hold it

• To reply to your enquiry and discuss whether we can help.
• To carry out the work we have agreed - which includes passing what is necessary to the professionals appointed to your project.
• To meet our legal and tax obligations, including invoicing and record-keeping.
• To keep the platform secure and to investigate misuse.

Who else sees it

The professionals appointed to your project see what they need in order to do their part of it - a structural engineer sees the drawings and the site, not your invoices. Business partners who introduced you see that the introduction became a project; they do not see your project's documents, costs or correspondence.

We use third parties to run the platform - hosting, and email delivery. They process information on our instructions and for no purpose of their own. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

We will disclose information where the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim.

How long we keep it

Enquiries that do not become projects are kept while there is a realistic prospect of working together, and reviewed after that. Project records are kept for as long as we may need them - a building outlives the project that produced it, and the drawings, approvals and accounts are often wanted years later. Financial records are kept for the period tax law requires.

We do not delete business records outright. Where something must be removed, it is marked as removed and stops being visible and usable, while the audit trail of what happened remains.

Asking us about your information

Write to info@thesogar.com and tell us what you would like: a copy of what we hold about you, a correction, or deletion where we are not required to keep it. We will ask you to confirm who you are before we act, and we will answer within a reasonable time. We have not appointed a separate data protection officer; requests are handled by the same team that answers enquiries.

If you have a portal account, much of this is answerable without asking us: your profile, your documents, your invoices and your messages are on your own screens.

Security

Signing in is required for everything except the pages of this public site. Files are never available at a public address - every download is authorised for the person asking, each time. Access is limited to your own organisation, enforced by the software rather than by hiding things from view.

Changes

When this policy changes we will update the date at the top. If a change matters to people we work with, we will tell them rather than rely on them re-reading this page.