PRIVACY POLICY

FairBuild ("FairBuild", "we", "us") is the data controller for the personal information collected through the Community, Lab and Studio forms on this website. Our registered details are below in “Who to contact”.

What we collect depends on which form you complete — joining the Community, the Lab waitlist and registering interest in Studio ask different questions, since each is a different level of commitment. Across all three, we may collect:

• Contact details: your name, email address and, for Studio, phone number.
• Business details: company name, website or LinkedIn, country or region, industry or sector, and business stage.
• Business information you choose to share: things like revenue band, team size, funding raised, ownership percentage, and free-text answers about your business, its challenges and its goals.
• How you found FairBuild, if you tell us.
• Optional demographic information: gender identity and ethnic background, explained separately below.

We don't collect payment information, government ID, or any data through the site beyond what you enter into these forms.

• To respond to your enquiry and set up your participation in the Community, Lab or Studio.
• To assess fit — particularly for the Lab and Studio, which are more selective, we use what you tell us about the business to understand whether and how FairBuild can help.
• To keep one record for you as a founder, rather than a separate, disconnected record for each form you complete. If you join the Community and later apply to the Lab or Studio, we link that up under a single record using your email address, so you don't have to repeat yourself and we don't lose context you've already given us.
• To understand, in aggregate, who FairBuild is reaching — using the optional demographic fields, never on an individual basis.

We do not use your information for automated decision-making, and we do not sell it to anyone.

Every form on this site includes a consent checkbox, and submitting a form is how you give us consent (Article 6(1)(a) UK GDPR) to use your information to respond to your enquiry and manage your participation. Where relevant — for example, corresponding with you about the Lab or Studio, or maintaining a single founder record so we can serve you properly — we also rely on our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) in running FairBuild's programmes effectively, balanced against your rights.

Every form asks a couple of optional questions about gender identity and ethnic background, always with a “prefer not to say” choice. These are never required to join the Community, join the Lab waitlist or register interest in Studio.

This is “special category” data under UK GDPR, which needs an extra layer of protection and a clear legal basis to process. Ours is your explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a)): answering these optional questions is itself how you give that consent, and you're always free to leave them blank or choose “prefer not to say”.

We use this information only in aggregate, to understand who FairBuild's programmes are reaching — never to make a decision about you individually, and never shared outside FairBuild in a form that could identify you.

We don't sell your data, and we don't share it for marketing purposes with anyone outside FairBuild. We use a small number of service providers to run this website and store form submissions, who process data on our behalf under their own data processing terms:

• Google Cloud / Firebase — provides Cloud Firestore, the database that stores form submissions, hosted in Google's London (UK) region. See “Where your data is stored” below.
• Cloudflare — delivers this website itself (the pages, images and code you see in your browser). Form submissions are sent directly from your browser to Firestore and are not routed through, or stored by, Cloudflare.

We may also disclose information where we're required to by law, for example to a regulator or in response to a valid legal request.

Form submissions are stored in Google Cloud Firestore, configured to run in Google's europe-west2 (London) region. These form submissions stay on UK infrastructure — we have not configured any routine transfer of this data to servers outside the UK.

Every submission is sent from your browser to Firestore over an encrypted HTTPS/TLS connection, so it's encrypted in transit. Google Cloud also encrypts data at rest by default. Access to stored submissions is restricted: the public forms on this site can only add new records, they cannot read, list, change or delete existing ones, and day-to-day access to the underlying database is limited to those at FairBuild who need it to run our programmes.

No method of storage or transmission is completely without risk, but this is how we work to keep your information secure.

We keep your founder record for as long as you're engaged with, or being considered for, FairBuild's Community, Lab or Studio, and for a reasonable period afterwards in case you get back in touch. We periodically review what we hold and delete or anonymise records we no longer need. If you'd like your record deleted sooner, contact us using the details below.

Under UK data protection law, you have the right to:

• Ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Ask us to correct information that's inaccurate or incomplete.
• Ask us to delete your information, or restrict how we use it.
• Object to our use of your information, including where we rely on legitimate interests.
• Ask us to provide your information in a portable format.
• Withdraw your consent at any time — this won't affect anything we did before you withdrew it.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details in “Who to contact” below. You also have the right to complain to the UK's data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office, at ico.org.uk — though we'd appreciate the chance to put things right first.

We use simple website analytics to count visits to each page and understand which parts of the website are most useful. We do not save cookies, identifiers or any personal information in your browser for this purpose. We record an approximate country for each visit, derived from the connection’s IP address, but we do not store the IP address itself. We do not collect your name, email address, referral source, browsing activity, time on page or form answers. We keep only aggregated page-visit and country totals. Administrators use an essential, time-limited sign-in cookie to access the website admin area.

FairBuild's programmes are aimed at business founders, and these forms are not intended for use by children. We don't knowingly collect personal information from children.

We may update this policy from time to time — for example, as FairBuild's programmes evolve. We'll update the date at the top of this page whenever we do, so please check back occasionally.

For any question about this policy, or to exercise any of your rights, get in touch using the email address below.