Privacy notice

A housing provider that uses CertsVault decides what goes into its own records (properties, certificates, remedial actions, hazard cases) and why. For those records ThinkTribal acts on the provider’s behalf. For the account details and usage information described below, which let people sign in and let us run and improve the service, ThinkTribal decides how they are used.

• Account data: your email address, the organisation or organisations you belong to, your role, and your sign-in security details (including the second factor you enrol).
• What people did: who confirmed each certificate and when, and an audit trail of actions such as exports and assignments. This is what makes the records trustworthy.
• Records a provider keeps: certificates and reports may name the engineers and businesses who issued them, with licence or registration numbers; property addresses and UPRNs; and hazard cases and remedial actions, whose descriptions can mention the people living in a home and their circumstances. Providers should record only what they need.
• A resident’s contact and access details: a provider may record, for a home, the resident’s name, phone number, optionally an email address, the times that suit them, notes on how to get in, and whether they need support to let someone in (a yes or no, with no reason). It is used to arrange safety checks and to show that reasonable steps were taken when access was refused. Each change is kept as a dated entry with who made it and why.
• Contractor sign-ins: if a provider invites someone from a contractor to sign in, we hold their email address, the contractor they work for, who invited them and when, and when their access was ended.
• Messages you send us: feedback you submit through the feedback button.
• Demo requests: if you ask for a demonstration on the public request page, your name, work email address, organisation and the optional note you write. We use them only to reply to you, on the basis of our legitimate interest in answering an enquiry you have made.
• Technical data: error reports (with personal data removed) and, only if you accept analytics, usage figures.

A provider can invite people from a contractor it has approved to sign in to a separate, small part of CertsVault. They see only the visits assigned to their own team and nothing else of the provider’s records. For a visit that is still open they also see the resident’s name, phone number, suitable times and access notes, so they can arrange the visit; they never see the resident’s email address, the support flag or the history. Each time those details are shown to a contractor it is recorded in the audit trail. Contractors can upload the certificate for a visit, which is read automatically and checked by a person at the provider before it is recorded, and can report that they could not attend or that the resident gave no access. A provider can end a contractor’s access at any time, and it takes effect on their next page.

The main database and the stored certificate documents are held with Supabase in the UK (AWS London, eu-west-2). Other services we use, and why:

• Vercel hosts the website. It also provides page-view statistics that use no cookies and no personal identifiers, according to its documentation.
• Anthropic reads uploaded certificate documents so that a draft of their contents can be shown to a person for checking. The document is sent to Anthropic’s service for that purpose, and is processed in the United States. A person always confirms the result. Anthropic’s published terms say that, by default, it does not use the content sent through its business products, which include the service we use, to train its models; the exceptions are feedback a customer explicitly sends it and programmes a customer chooses to join. ThinkTribal has not joined any such data-sharing or development-partner programme.
• Brevo sends service emails such as sign-in links and replies to feedback, and tells ThinkTribal when someone requests a demo.
• Cloudflare runs a human check (Turnstile) on the sign-in, password-reset and demo-request pages.
• GlitchTip (EU) receives error reports, with personal data removed, so faults can be fixed.
• Ideal Postcodes looks up addresses and UPRNs from postcodes and address text typed in or imported.
• Google Analytics is used only if you accept analytics cookies (see below).

The first four cookies below are needed for the site to work or record your choices, and are always set. Analytics cookies are off unless you accept them in the banner that appears on your first visit. Until you accept, nothing is sent to Google. You can change your mind at any time with Cookie settings in the footer of every page; withdrawing removes the Google cookies and stops the tag loading.

When you accept analytics, Google Analytics receives which pages are viewed and technical details of the browser and device, and ThinkTribal uses the figures to see how CertsVault is used and to improve it. We have switched off Google’s advertising features and Google Signals for this use. We do not send your email address or any certificate or property record to Google.

A housing provider’s records (properties, certificates, remedial actions, hazard cases and the audit trail) are evidence, and are designed to be added to and never silently changed or deleted. They are kept for as long as the provider’s agreement with ThinkTribal is in force and for six years after it ends, and are then deleted. Deleted data can remain in the daily database backups for up to 7 days.

A resident’s contact and access details are kept while the person lives at the home. The provider removes them when the resident leaves, and a nightly job removes the record of any home that left the provider’s register more than 90 days ago.

Your account details are removed when your organisation’s agreement ends, or earlier if you ask us to. The confirmations you made stay in the records as evidence that a person checked them; that is the purpose of the audit trail.

A demo request is kept while we are in contact with you and is deleted within 12 months after our last contact, or sooner if you ask us to.

The other services keep data for their own periods:

• Anthropic says it deletes the documents and results it handles within 30 days.
• GlitchTip says it removes error reports after 90 days.
• Vercel’s page statistics identify a visit only by a short-lived code that is discarded after 24 hours.
• Google Analytics, if you accept it, keeps detailed event data for 2 months and data tied to cookies or identifiers for up to 14 months from a visitor’s last activity. Reports that only show totals are not affected by those periods.

You can ask to see the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted or restricted where the law allows, to receive a copy in a common format, and to object to how it is used. Where your data sits in a housing provider’s records, that provider is usually the right first contact, and we will help them respond. To ask us directly, email info@thinktribal.com or use the feedback button inside CertsVault.

If you are unhappy with how your data has been handled you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.