Privacy

What the forms collect

There are three ways to write to the practice. The enquiry form asks for six things: your name, an email address, a mobile number for WhatsApp or SMS, where the lot or house is, what you need, and a description of the project. The chat box asks for your message, an email address and a mobile number for WhatsApp or SMS, all three required. The careers form, for anyone looking for work, asks for your name, a mobile number for WhatsApp or SMS, an email address, your town, the kind of work you do, your years of experience and a few words about your work.

Each message also carries the page you sent it from, your connection’s IP address and the time, and these go into the email and the stored copy described below.

Nothing else is asked for. Like any website, the server that hosts this one and Cloudflare, which delivers it, keep ordinary request logs of the pages loaded and the address that loaded them.

Where it goes

Each posts to a handler on this site’s own server, which turns what you sent into an email to a single mailbox, and keeps a copy in a file on the same server, outside the public site, so an enquiry is not lost if the email fails. Careers details are kept in a file of their own, apart from client enquiries. If that file cannot be written, the copy goes to the server’s error log instead. No form service is involved, though the message still passes through Cloudflare and the email servers that deliver it.

To stop one connection sending again and again, the server also keeps a small file named with a hash of the IP address, listing the times of that connection’s sends within the past hour.

That request happens only when you press the button. Loading a page here also contacts Cloudflare, for the bot check and the page counter, and Google and Microsoft, for the visit counting described below.

Page counts

This site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics. Cloudflare, which delivers the site, adds its counting script to each page, loaded from static.cloudflareinsights.com. It counts page views without cookies: it sets none, stores nothing in your browser, does not identify you and does not follow you to other sites. The count goes back to Cloudflare, through this domain or through cloudflareinsights.com.

The practice sees totals only: how many times each page was viewed, the site a visit came from, the country, the kind of device and how fast the page loaded.

Counting visits: Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity

Pages here load Google Tag Manager, from www.googletagmanager.com, which loads Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity. The practice uses them to see which pages people read, which buttons they press, and where an enquiry gets stuck, so the site can be made easier to use.

Google Analytics records the pages you visit, how you arrived, your rough location from your IP address, your device and browser, and the actions this site reports to it: opening the enquiry form, a form that did not send, an enquiry or chat message that did, a press on a main button such as Start your project or a tool’s Check this room, opening and closing the chat box, a click on a link to another site, a page that was not found, and how far down a page you scrolled. It never receives your name, email address, phone number, the details of your project or anything you typed. Its data goes to google-analytics.com and analytics.google.com.

Microsoft Clarity records how pages are used: clicks, taps, scrolling and mouse movement, which it can play back as a recording of the page. The enquiry form, the careers form and the chat box are hidden from it, so a recording shows an empty box where you typed. It loads from and sends to Microsoft’s clarity.ms, and syncs its cookie through c.bing.com.

Both set cookies to tell one visit from the next. Google Analytics sets _ga and _ga_XDL6P04DJ0; Google sets them for two years, and current browsers cut that to about 13 months. Clarity sets _clck for a year and _clsk for a day, and keeps _cltk in your browser until you close the tab. Microsoft sets MUID, CLID, MR, SM, SRM_B and ANONCHK on its own domains, clarity.ms and bing.com. What Google and Microsoft keep, and for how long, is decided by them and set out in their own privacy statements. Google’s advertising features are off, so nothing here is used for ads.

This site keeps two notes of its own in your browser, neither of them a cookie: your cookie choice, for a year once you make one, and your country as Cloudflare saw it, until you close the tab, so the banner knows whether to ask.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, none of this loads unless you press Accept on the banner. Everywhere else it loads by default. Wherever you are, you can change your choice here, and Reject stops it loading on every page after that.

Change your cookie choice

What is not collected

• No other analytics: no Plausible and no server-side counter, nothing beyond the page counter and the two services above.
• No cookies set by this site’s own code; its pages keep only the two notes described above. Cloudflare, which delivers the site, sets one cookie, cf_clearance, for its bot protection, kept for up to a year. This site never reads it.
• No advertising tag, no advertising cookie and no tracking pixel.
• No account, no login, no profile. You are never asked to identify yourself to read anything here.
• No third-party stylesheet or font. The two typefaces are served from this domain, so no font provider sees your visit. The third-party scripts are Google Tag Manager, with the Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity scripts it loads, and Cloudflare’s two: one for the bot protection above, served from this domain, and the page counter described above.

This is checkable rather than a promise. Open your browser’s network panel on any page here and every request will be to this domain, apart from the page counter from static.cloudflareinsights.com and, a few seconds in, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity at the addresses named above. In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland those three appear only after you press Accept.

Keeping and deleting what you send

An enquiry sits in an ordinary email inbox, with its copy on the server. If you want it deleted, reply to the thread and ask, or send a new enquiry through the form from the same address, with the word privacy in the message. The request covers the email and the stored copy. Nothing is deleted automatically.

Requests are handled within a reasonable time under the Philippine Data Privacy Act of 2012.