Privacy

The short version

The website sets no cookies and carries no advertising or third party tracking, and nothing on it follows you anywhere. It counts visits with an analytics tool, which tells us which pages are read and not who read them. When you ring or write, we keep what you send for as long as it takes to answer you, and longer where the work goes ahead, because an engineer has to be able to stand behind a design years after signing it.

Who is responsible

PETRUF Consulting Engineers, 51 Baroda Court, Newbridge, Co. Kildare W12 HR58, registered in Ireland under number 473929 with VAT number IE 9721943 H, is the data controller for everything described here. Write to info@petruf.ie or ring +353 45 498 201 with anything about this page, including a request to see or delete what we hold.

What this website collects

Nothing that tells us who you are. The site sets no cookies and uses no advertising pixels and no third party tracking. The typefaces are served from this site's own domain rather than from a font service, so reading a page does not tell anybody else that you were here.

The server the site is hosted on keeps request logs, as every web server does. Those logs record the address a request came from, the page asked for and the time, and they exist so that faults can be found and abuse can be stopped. They are not used to build any picture of a reader and they are not combined with anything else.

Some links leave the site: a map, the social profiles in the footer, the membership we belong to. Following one of them takes you to somebody else's site, which has its own policy and its own cookies. We have no control over what those sites do and no way of knowing that you went there.

Visitor statistics

To see which pages are read and which are not, the site runs an analytics tool. It sets no cookies.

For each page you open it records the page, the page you came from, your browser, operating system and screen size, and roughly where the visit came from, to the nearest town, worked out from your IP address. The IP address itself is not kept. To tell one visitor from another, your IP address and browser details are turned into a one way code that stands in for them in the statistics.

It also keeps a random number in your browser's local storage, a small store on your device much like a cookie, so that a return visit is counted as a return rather than as somebody new. The number says nothing about you and nothing else reads it. Clearing this site's data in your browser removes it, and a browser set to block trackers will usually stop the script from running at all, in which case the site works exactly as before.

The figures are used to make this site better and for nothing else. They are not sold, not shared and not combined with anything we hold about you.

What we collect when you get in touch

Only what you send. That is normally your name, your email address or phone number, the address of the building you are asking about, and whatever you tell us about the job, along with any photographs or drawings you attach. If the work goes ahead it also includes the correspondence, the site notes and the records that belong to the job itself.

There is no form on this site, so nothing is submitted to us in the background: an enquiry is an email you wrote, a WhatsApp message you sent or a phone call you made. A WhatsApp message travels through WhatsApp's own service, which Meta runs under its own privacy policy; if you would rather it did not, email or ring instead.

Why we are allowed to hold it

For an enquiry, because you asked us a question and answering it is what you came for. In the language of the General Data Protection Regulation that is our legitimate interest in responding to you, and where the enquiry turns into an appointment it is the steps taken at your request before entering a contract.

For the visitor statistics, because we have a legitimate interest in knowing how the site is used, and the tool is set up so that the figures cannot tell us who you are.

For a job that goes ahead, because the contract needs it, and because certain records have to be kept: a design certificate, the calculations behind it and the correspondence that explains a decision are what a professional indemnity insurer, a building control authority or a court would expect to see.

What we do with it

We answer you, quote the work, design it and sign for it. That is the whole of it. We do not sell personal data, we do not share it for anybody else's marketing, there is no mailing list, and nothing here is fed into automated decision making or profiling.

Some of it necessarily reaches other people while a job runs: the architect, the contractor, the precast manufacturer, the other consultants on the design team, and the building control authority where a certificate is lodged. Those are the people your project is being built with, and what reaches them is what the work requires.

Behind the scenes, the office runs on ordinary business software: an email provider, a file store, accounting software, and a hosting provider for this website. Those suppliers process data on our instructions and under contract, and they are chosen so that the data stays inside the European Economic Area wherever that is possible. Where a supplier moves data outside it, that transfer rests on the safeguards the Regulation provides for.

How long we keep it

An enquiry that goes nowhere is deleted within twelve months. We would rather still have the thread if you come back to it next spring, and beyond that it is of no use to anybody.

The records of a job we carried out are kept for at least six years after it finishes, which is how long a claim can be brought in contract here, and longer where a certificate we signed is still doing its work or where an insurer requires it. Drawings and calculations are part of that record.

What you can ask for

You can ask what we hold about you and get a copy of it. You can have a mistake corrected. You can ask for it to be deleted, and we will unless a record has to be kept for one of the reasons above, in which case we will tell you which. You can ask us to restrict what we do with it, object to us holding it on the grounds of legitimate interest, or ask for what you gave us in a portable form.

Write to info@petruf.ie and we will answer inside one month. There is no charge.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled it, you can complain to the Data Protection Commission, 6 Pembroke Row, Dublin 2, D02 X963. Their complaint form is at forms.dataprotection.ie and their helpdesk is 01 765 0100. You do not have to come to us first, though it is usually quicker.

Changes to this page

If what we do changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top is when it last did.