Privacy notice

Who we are

If you only use the free plot check

You do not need an account and we do not ask who you are. You give us a place, typed in your own words, and a screenshot of a historic map viewer.

We never keep the screenshot. It is read and discarded inside the same request. It is not written to storage, not written to a column and not written to a log.

We keep, for seven days, what you typed, the link to the map you were pointed at, what the read found, and the date. If you decline the result we delete it immediately.

We also keep one thing about your connection, for forty eight hours. To stop one visitor using the free tool all day we count reads against a salted one way hash of your network address, with the salt held outside the database. It is not your address and it cannot be turned back into one.

If you have an account

What you give us on purpose is your email address, and, if you fill it in, the name, address, email and phone that print on letters you send. Those are the only account level personal fields we hold.

What you build is everything you record about your project: the plot, the budget, the programme, the specification, the enquiries and orders, the site diary, the safety paperwork, the snags, and every file you upload. Both storage areas are private and nothing is served from a public address.

We hold your evidence and we do not interpret it. Your own files come back exactly as you uploaded them, byte for byte.

Information about other people that you put in

This is the part worth reading carefully. A build record is full of other people: an engineer's mobile number, a contractor's contact, the person who signed an induction, the party who returned a price, and your own written opinion of a business you dealt with.

We hold it because you recorded it. We do not use it for anything of our own, it leaves with you when you export, and it is deleted when your record is. There is no separate clock for it.

Why we are allowed to hold it

Who else touches it

We use a small number of providers and we sell nothing to anyone. There is no advertising, no analytics and no tracking anywhere in the product. That is measured rather than promised: the codebase contains no analytics, tag manager, session recorder or error reporting service, and the only cookies are the ones that keep you signed in.

The historic map viewer is a link, not a service. We host, licence and serve no maps. You look at a third party's viewer in your own browser and send us a screenshot of what you saw.

Our database and our files are in London. The model provider is in the United States, so a document you send to be read leaves the United Kingdom for the length of that request. Nothing else does.

The features that read documents

They run only when you press the button, on the document you chose. Nothing is read in the background and nothing you file is sent anywhere on its own.

We record which model produced a draft and on what date, so that question stays answerable later, and we count how much you use in pages. That meter holds the project, the purpose, the model and the counts. It holds no part of any document.

Anything we draft is shown to you separately from anything you wrote, and nothing goes out in your name until you have settled it.

How long we keep things

How it is kept safe

• Everything is sent over an encrypted connection.
• There is no password. You sign in with a link sent to your email address, so there is no password for us to hold or for anyone to steal.
• The database enforces, row by row, that an account can reach only its own data. That is a rule inside the database rather than a check in our code.
• Both file stores are private. Nothing is served from a public address.
• Keys and secrets are held on the server and never sent to your browser.
• The database is backed up every night.

Cookies

Only the ones that sign you in: a session cookie from our sign in provider, and a short lived one that completes a sign in link. No analytics, no advertising, nothing that follows you anywhere.

Your rights, and how to use them

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict what we do with it, ask for it in a portable form, or object to what we do with it. Write to hello@themodernhousebuilder.co.uk and we will deal with it within one month.

Two of those you can already do yourself without asking. You can export your whole record, including your own files byte for byte, whenever you like. And the free plot check deletes itself.

If you think we have got something wrong you can complain to us first, and you can complain to a regulator at any time: the Information Commissioner's Office if you are in the United Kingdom, or the Data Protection Commission in Ireland.

Changes

If we change how we handle your information we will say so here, and we will tell you at least thirty days before it takes effect if the change affects you.