Privacy policy.

BinaForm Limited, referred to here as BinaForm, we and us, is the controller of the personal information described on this page. This policy explains what we collect through the BinaForm website and the BinaForm app for members, why we collect it, who else sees it, where it is kept, how long we keep it, and the rights you have over it.

How do we obtain your information?

Almost all of it comes from you, when you join the waitlist, apply for membership, sign in, fill in your profile, hold a place at an event, write to another member, or ask the assistant something. A small amount is collected automatically as you use the website. We do not buy personal data, and we do not build profiles of you from other sources.

What information do we collect?

What you give us. Your name, your email address, your mobile number, your professional discipline, the city you work in, your biography, the services your practice offers, what you are looking for from the community, and the photograph you choose for your profile. We take no payment details today, because membership is free. If a fee is introduced, a payment made on our website would be handled by a payment processor and a purchase made inside the iOS app would be handled by Apple. Card numbers are never seen or stored by us either way.

What you create inside the app. Messages you send to another member, requests for an introduction, your replies to invitations, the events you are holding a place at, the things you save, any report you make about another member, and the questions you put to the assistant together with its answers. These are kept so the conversation is still there the next time you open the app.

Your voice, if you use it. You can speak a question instead of typing it. Your phone writes down what it hears on the device itself. When you stop speaking, and only if you have given Ask your permission as described below, the recording is sent once to our server and passed to OpenAI’s transcription service, which returns a more accurate version of the same words. The recording is not kept, by us or by that service, beyond the moments it takes to do this and a short abuse review period on their side. Only the text remains. The microphone is used for nothing else, and never without you pressing the button.

Your account. An account identifier, the email address you sign in with, and, if you set one, a password kept only as a one way hash that cannot be read back. A sign in link sent to your email can be used once, and expires after 24 hours.

Notifications, if you allow them. If you let BinaForm send notifications to your phone, Apple gives the app an identifier for that phone, and we keep it so that a notification can reach you when another member writes to you, when somebody asks to meet you, and when BinaForm has a question for you. It is used for nothing else, it is removed when you sign out or delete your membership, and you choose which notifications you get in Profile, under Notifications, or turn them all off in your phone’s settings.

Your photograph. If you add a picture to your profile, your phone crops it to a square and shrinks it before anything leaves the device, so we never receive the original, and any location or camera details a picture file carries are removed before it is stored. The picture is shown to other members according to the visibility setting you choose, and you can take it off again at any time, which deletes it.

What we collect automatically. On the website, the pages visited, the country and city a visit came from, how long a page was open, and the browser used. The address a connection came from is never stored as it is: when you join the waitlist we keep only a keyed hash of it, to recognise abuse. The website also uses Google Analytics and Google Ads measurement, described under Cookies below. The app itself carries no analytics, no advertising identifiers and no cross app tracking of any kind.

Ask, and the two AI companies behind it

Ask, the assistant inside BinaForm, uses two outside companies to answer you. Nothing of yours is sent to either of them until you agree, on the screen the app shows before you first use Ask, and you can withdraw that at any time in the app, under Profile, Ask and your data. Everything else in BinaForm works without it.

Anthropic provides the Claude model that writes Ask’s answers. When you ask something, we send Anthropic your question, your recent conversation with Ask, your profile (your name, discipline, city, biography, the services you offer, what you are looking for and the names of your projects), the notes BinaForm keeps from what you have told Ask, and the records of BinaForm that bear on your question, which can include another member’s name, discipline, city and short biography and the professional notes they have let BinaForm use. The same model reads each question to understand what it asks for, notes what you say about your work so the next answer can use it, recognises feedback about BinaForm, writes the message that tells another member you would like to meet them, and once a day reviews the day’s conversations so that we can see where Ask did not help. We never add anybody’s phone number or email address to what we send.

OpenAI provides the transcription service. It receives the recording only when you speak a question rather than type it, and returns your words.

What they may do with it. Both companies act on our instructions and use what we send only to provide these services to BinaForm. Their business terms keep it confidential, do not allow them to use it to train their models, and commit them to protecting it at least as well as this policy does. They may keep it for a limited period to detect misuse of their services, as those terms set out. Both process it in the United States, as described below.

Why do we use it, and on what lawful basis?

Where the General Data Protection Regulation applies, we rely on one of the following for everything we do with your information.

To provide the membership you asked for, which is our contract with you: your account, your profile, the directory, events, messages, introductions and the assistant.

To run BinaForm safely and understand how it is used, which is our legitimate interest: keeping the platform secure, preventing abuse, limiting how often things can be done, reviewing reports, and measuring visits to the website.

To write to you about BinaForm, on our legitimate interest, or on your consent where the law asks for it: the newsletter, which you can turn off in Settings or with the link at the foot of any newsletter.

Ask and your voice, on your consent: nothing of yours is sent to Anthropic or OpenAI until you agree, a recording is made only after you press the microphone button, and you can withdraw your consent at any time in Profile, Ask and your data.

Where the law requires it, to meet a legal obligation.

We do not sell your personal information, we do not use it to show you advertising, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.

Who do we share it with?

Other members see what you put on your profile, subject to the visibility setting you choose, and anything you send them. When another member asks the assistant for somebody with your experience, it may tell them in general terms why you could be the right person, drawing on what you have told it. It never gives them your contact details and never uses anything you have marked as private. Nobody outside the membership can see the directory.

Our service providers. We use third parties to host the platform, store the database, deliver our email, transcribe speech and run the language model behind the assistant (Anthropic) and transcribe speech (OpenAI), which are described in full under Ask, and the two AI companies behind it. Notifications to your phone are delivered by Apple. They receive only what they need to do that job, they act on our written instructions, and they are not permitted to use it for their own purposes. What you write is not used to train anyone else’s models.

MassHouse, the studio that runs BinaForm. When you join the waitlist, your name, your email address, where on the site you joined and a keyed hash of your connection are recorded in Chekmecha, the client records system MassHouse uses to run BinaForm, so that we can follow up on your application. A record of each email we send you, and whether it was delivered, is kept there too, with any sign in or application link removed. Nothing you write inside the app goes to it.

The people who run BinaForm. Your conversations with the assistant are stored, and a small number of BinaForm staff can read them, to deal with a report, to improve the assistant, or to answer a question you have asked us about them.

Where the law requires it. We may disclose information if we are obliged to by law, or where it is necessary to protect the safety of a member or of the public. We would tell you unless we were prohibited from doing so.

Where is your information kept?

The platform and its database run on servers in the European Union, and our email is sent from the European Union. Speech transcription (OpenAI) and the assistant (Anthropic) are provided from the United States, so what is sent to them, described under Ask, and the two AI companies behind it, is processed there. Where the personal information of someone in the European Economic Area is transferred outside it, that transfer is covered by the standard contractual clauses approved for the purpose.

How long do we keep it?

For as long as your membership is active, within these limits: the notes the assistant keeps about your work until you delete them, your conversations with the assistant for 24 months, page views on the website for 13 months, and a sign in link for a day after it expires. If your application is unsuccessful, we keep it only long enough to answer you and to recognise a later application, and after 12 months it is reduced to your email address alone. When you delete your membership, or ask us to delete it, it goes immediately from our database, and copies survive in routine backups only until those expire. We keep for longer only what the law requires us to keep.

How do we protect it?

Everything travels over an encrypted connection. Passwords are stored only as a hash. The database is not reachable from the public internet by the app, which talks to it through our own server. Access to member data is limited to the few people who need it to run BinaForm. No system is perfectly secure, so we cannot promise absolute security, but if an incident affected your information we would act as the law requires, including telling you and the relevant authority where we are obliged to.

Does anything decide about you automatically?

No. The assistant suggests people and events using your profile and what you have told it, and you choose whether to act on a suggestion. Decisions that matter, whether an application is accepted, or what happens after a report, are made by a person. There is no automated decision making that produces a legal effect for you.

What can you control?

In the app, under You and then Settings, you can edit your profile, change who can see it, turn the newsletter off, choose which notifications you get, change your password, and block or report another member. You can also tell BinaForm itself what you do not want to hear about, and it keeps to that.

Ask’s permission. Whether Ask may send what it needs to Anthropic and OpenAI is yours to decide, under Profile, Ask and your data. Withdraw it and nothing more is sent; Ask then cannot answer you until you agree again.

What BinaForm knows about you. The assistant keeps short notes from what you tell it about your work, who you have worked with and what you need, so that it can answer you properly and find the right people for you. Every note is listed in the app under Profile, What BinaForm knows, where you can mark any of them private or delete them, one at a time or all together. You can also add your own notes there as text: they are read by the same AI service as your questions, BinaForm keeps short notes from them and not the text itself, and those notes stay private to your own conversations until you choose to let them help introductions.

The Journal. BinaForm may ask whether it can write about something you shared, such as an award or a finished project, in its Journal on binaform.com. It is written only if you say yes, only from what you let BinaForm use and the photographs on your projects, and the team reads it before it is published. The piece names you and your practice and is public once it appears. If you want a published piece taken down, write to us and we will remove it.

Work and hiring. If you tell BinaForm you are looking for work, or hiring, it keeps what you say about the role, how and where you want to work, and the pay you expect or can offer, so that it can match you. Members who are hiring are told about you only once you say yes to it, and a role you are hiring for is shown to members looking for work only once you say yes to that. The pay you expect or offer, if you mention it, is never shown to another member and plays no part in who you are matched with. If you apply to work with BinaForm itself, the BinaForm team reads what you told it, the pay included, as your application, apart from anything you keep private. It is all listed under Profile, What BinaForm knows, where you can switch either off or delete it.

Deleting your membership is in the same place. It is a real deletion and not a flag: your profile, your photographs, your messages, your places at events, your saved items and your conversations with the assistant are removed from our database, and any session you still had open stops working. You can also write to us and we will do it for you.

One thing survives, and it is worth being exact about what it is. As people use BinaForm we keep a count of the subjects the community raises, so we can see what architects are asking about and write about it. Those notes are made as a conversation happens and they are written to be true of many people rather than one: a theme, a subject in a few words, the month. They carry no name, no email, no account, no practice and no sentence anybody wrote. They are not about you, so there is nothing in them for a deletion to remove.

What are your rights?

You may ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict or stop a particular use of it, object to a use we base on our legitimate interests, ask for it in a portable form, and withdraw a consent you have given at any time. Withdrawing a consent does not undo what was done before you withdrew it. To exercise any of these, write to us at the address below, and we answer within the time the law allows. If you are in the European Economic Area and you are not satisfied with our answer, you may complain to your local supervisory authority.

Cookies

The website uses one cookie of its own, to keep you signed in. On its public pages it also uses Google Analytics, to understand in aggregate how the site is used, Google Ads measurement, to see whether our advertising brings people to it, and a page view counter run by MassHouse in Chekmecha. Google sets cookies of its own, which you can block or clear in your browser settings. None of these load on the sign in page, the member area, the admin, or the pages that set a password or open an application. The app uses no cookies at all.

Children

BinaForm is for architects and designers in practice, and is not intended for anyone under eighteen. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has given us information, write to us and we will remove it.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as BinaForm changes. The version on this page is always the one that applies. If a change matters to you, because it affects what we collect or what we do with it, we tell you inside the app or by email before it takes effect.

How to contact us

For anything on this page, including a request about your own information, write to privacy@binaform.com.