Privacy notice

WorksSignal is a trading name of N Financial Consulting Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company no. 06745390. We are the data controller for the personal data described on this page.

Registered office

Apollo House, Hallam Way, Whitehills Business Park, Blackpool, FY4 5FS

Privacy and data protection enquiries

privacy@workssignal.com

We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer; we are not required to. Enquiries go to the address above and are answered by a person.

WorksSignal reads UK public records — Find a Tender procurement notices and the Planning London Datahub — and publishes an interpretation of each one: what changed, why it may matter, commercial timing and what to watch for next. Every published record links to its source.

These records name organisations: buyers, suppliers, planning applicants and agents. We record a company only in the role the source itself states, and we never infer a role. Where a planning applicant appears to be a private individual rather than a business, we withhold the name — from the site and from the licensed feed.

If you believe a published record names you personally rather than a business, write to us and we will review it. See your rights.

There are two ways to give us your address: signing up for a desk, and following a named project. Both ask for your email address and, optionally, the desk and region you care about. They differ in when the first email is sent, which is set out below.

What we hold

Your email address, the desk and region preference you chose, which page you signed up from, the project reference you followed, and the dates you signed up, confirmed and unsubscribed. Those records are also our evidence that you asked us to email you.

Our lawful basis

Your consent, given when you submit the form. A desk signup takes effect on that submission, so the first email goes to the address as entered. A project follow takes effect only when you click the link in a confirmation email, so an address entered by mistake never receives project updates.

What we send

Updates about the projects and desks you asked about. We do not send anything else, and we do not email you on anyone else's behalf.

If you did not sign up

If someone entered your address on the desk form, the one email it receives carries an unsubscribe link. One click stops it for good and we keep no more than the address and the fact that it unsubscribed.

How to stop it

Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link. It takes effect immediately and we keep the record of your unsubscribe so that the address is not contacted again. A desk unsubscribe and a project unsubscribe are separate: each email stops the thing it came from, and says so.

We contact people at construction businesses — contractors, suppliers, consultants and recruiters — about activity we have published that is relevant to their trade and area.

What we hold

Your name, job title, employer and a business contact route, with a record of where each of those facts came from. We also hold which signal we thought was relevant to you and why.

Where it came from

Public sources only: your company's own website, the Companies House register, your public professional profile, and the public records we already publish. We do not buy contact lists and we do not guess email addresses.

Our lawful basis

Legitimate interests — informing a business about commercial activity in its own market, using business contact details that business has published. We have assessed this against your interests and you can ask us for that assessment. We do not cold-email sole traders or partnerships.

How to stop it

Reply and say so, or write to privacy@workssignal.com. We will stop contacting you, and we keep the minimum record needed to make sure we do not start again by accident.

We measure two things separately, and they behave very differently.

Our own measurement — only for people we invited

When we send someone a link, it carries an opaque code. If you arrive on one of those links we set two first-party cookies — ws_vid, a random browser identifier, and ws_src, the code itself. Both are inaccessible to scripts, expire after 30 days, and let us see whether the link we sent was useful: which pages were opened, and whether someone chose to follow a project.

If you did not arrive on one of our links, we set no cookies of our own and record nothing about your visit. We do not store your IP address or your browser's user-agent string. Your user-agent is read once, in memory, to discard automated link-preview traffic, and is never written down.

Google Analytics

The live site also loads Google Analytics, which sets its own cookies and sends information about your visit — including your approximate location and the pages you view — to Google, who act as our processor and may process it outside the UK. This is the one part of the site that places cookies on every visitor's device.

You can prevent it by blocking cookies for this site in your browser, or with Google's own opt-out add-on.

When something on the site fails, we record what failed and where, so that we can fix it. That log is deliberately built to hold no personal data: anything email-shaped is removed from the message before it is written, query strings are stripped from paths, and no address, IP address or form content is stored. Where a signup was rejected, the only thing recorded about the address is how many characters it had.

Only suppliers who process it on our instructions, under contract, and for no purpose of their own:

• Our hosting and database provider, which runs the site and stores its data.
• Our email provider, which delivers desk emails, follow confirmations and project updates.
• Google Analytics, as described above.

We license the signals feed to other businesses. That feed carries published records only — no email addresses, no contact details and no measurement data. Nothing you give us is in it.

We do not sell personal data, and we never pass it to another company for that company's own marketing.

Transfers outside the UK

Some of these suppliers process data outside the UK, including in the United States. Where they do, the transfer relies on the UK government's adequacy regulations or on the International Data Transfer Agreement, as applicable to that supplier.

Follows and update signups

Until you unsubscribe. After that we keep only the address and the fact that it unsubscribed, so that it is not contacted again.

Outreach records

While you are a live prospect, and after you object we keep the minimum needed to honour that objection.

Measurement events

365 days, then deleted automatically.

Attribution cookies

30 days, then they expire in your browser.

Error log

90 days, then purged automatically.

Under UK data protection law you can ask us to give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict what we do with it, or give it to you in a portable form. You can object to processing we base on legitimate interests — which includes all of our outreach — and you can withdraw consent to our emails at any time.

You have an absolute right to object to direct marketing. If you tell us to stop, we stop; there is nothing for us to weigh.

Write to privacy@workssignal.com and we will respond within one month. We do not charge for this, and we will not ask you to explain why.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, please tell us first — it is usually quicker. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK regulator, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or on 0303 123 1113. Complaining to us first does not affect that right.

We update this notice when the product changes, and the date at the top tells you which version you are reading. If a change materially affects people who have given us their email address, we will tell them by email rather than quietly editing this page.