Privacy policy

Who is responsible for your information

Hodworth is provided by Hodworth, 6 Buckswood Drive, Crawley, RH11 8HP, United Kingdom. Contact: support@hodworth.com.

Your account (your name, email address and password) is ours to look after, and this policy covers it.

Everything inside a workspace — its projects, invoices, customers, expenses, payroll, surveys, photos and files — belongs to the company that owns the workspace. We store and process it on that company’s behalf and only to provide the service to it. If you use Hodworth because your employer invited you, questions about the workspace’s content (for example, your payroll record) are for your employer, and we will help them answer.

Each workspace has one primary owner — at first, the person who created it. They act for the company in the decisions that cannot be undone: they are the only person who can delete the workspace, or hand primary ownership to someone else.

What we collect

Information you give us

• Account details: your name, email address and password. The password is stored only as a one-way hash; nobody at Hodworth can read it.
• Workspace content you or your colleagues enter: projects, tasks, comments, notes, documents, customers and suppliers and their contact details, invoices, estimates, bills, expenses and receipts, bank transactions you import, employee and payroll records, and site survey answers.
• Photos and files you choose to take or upload. The app only ever receives the photos you pick or take; it does not read the rest of your photo library.
• Two-step verification, if you turn it on: the secret your authenticator app uses and your backup codes, both stored encrypted.
• Messages to us, if you email support.

Records about workspaces

• Ownership: who is each workspace’s primary owner, and each member’s role.
• Deletion: when a workspace is deleted, who deleted it and when, when it is due to be erased, and when its files and records were erased — so we can answer a member or the company who asks what happened to it.

Information collected as you use Hodworth

• Precise location — mobile app, only with your permission. When you capture a site survey, add a survey photo, pin a site on a map or ask for the nearest sites, the app reads your phone’s location so it can record where the work was done and sort sites by distance. Location is read only while the app is open and you are using one of those features. It is never collected in the background, never used for advertising, and never sold. You can refuse or withdraw the permission in your phone’s settings and keep using everything else.
• Camera — mobile app, only with your permission, and only when you choose to take a photo of a site or a receipt.
• Notification token, if you turn notifications on: an identifier for your device that lets us deliver alerts such as “an invoice was paid” or “a task was assigned to you”.
• Sign-in records: for each device you sign in on, the time, the IP address and the browser or device type — for the mobile app, the phone’s model, operating system version, app version and the name you gave the phone in its settings — so you can see your signed-in devices in your profile and sign out ones you do not recognise.
• Service logs: technical records of requests and errors, used to keep the service running and secure.

We do not use advertising, analytics or tracking SDKs, we do not use your device’s advertising ID, and we do not build profiles of you.

How we use it

• To provide the service: sign you in, show your workspace, create invoices and reports, and sync the mobile app.
• To send the emails the service needs: sign-in and password reset, invitations, codes that confirm deleting an account, notices to every member when a workspace they belong to is deleted, and documents you choose to email.
• To send notifications you have turned on.
• To bill the workspace’s subscription.
• To keep the service secure, prevent abuse and fix problems.
• To answer you when you contact us.

We do not sell your information, and we do not use workspace content for anything other than providing the service to that workspace.

Who we share it with

Only the service providers below, and only what each needs to do its job for us:

• Stripe — subscription billing and payment processing. Card details go to Stripe directly; we never see full card numbers.
• Resend — delivering email.
• Expo, Google Firebase Cloud Messaging and Apple Push Notification service — delivering notifications to phones; and your browser’s push service for web notifications.
• Google Maps (Android app) and OpenStreetMap and Esri (web) — drawing maps. These receive your IP address and the area of the map being viewed.
• Our hosting and file storage providers — the servers and storage the service runs on.

Inside a workspace, information is visible to the people the workspace’s owners have invited, limited by the role each person has. No other company using Hodworth can see it.

We may disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect people’s safety or the security of the service.

How we protect it

• Everything travels over encrypted (HTTPS) connections.
• Passwords are stored as one-way hashes.
• You can turn on two-step verification with an authenticator app. Once on, signing in, changing your password and deleting your account all need a code from it.
• Deleting an account needs your password, your authenticator code if you use one, and a one-time code we email to you.
• Only a workspace’s primary owner can delete it or hand primary ownership on, and both need their password and, if they use one, their authenticator code. No other owner can demote or remove the primary owner.
• Each workspace is isolated from every other at the database level.
• On your phone, the sign-in token is kept in the device’s encrypted secure storage and is excluded from device backups.

How long we keep it

• Your account is kept until you delete it.
• Sign-in sessions expire after thirty days, or when you sign out.
• Workspace content is kept for as long as the workspace exists, because it is the company’s business record.
• A deleted workspace — its business records (accounts, invoices, estimates, payroll, projects, documents and the rest of its content) and every file uploaded to it — is kept for 30 days after it is deleted, locked away so that nobody but its primary owner, restoring it, can open it. On day 30 it is all permanently erased, automatically. If storage or the database cannot be reached that day, we try again each day until it is gone. See Deleting a workspace.
• The record of a deletion — the workspace’s name, who deleted it and when — is kept with our billing records.
• Our own billing records for a workspace — the invoices we issued it and its subscription history — are kept as tax law requires, even after the workspace is deleted.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time — in the app under More → Account and security → Delete your account, or on the web at Delete your account, which also explains how to ask us by email if you can no longer sign in. Deleting your account immediately and permanently removes your name, email address, password, signed-in devices, notification tokens and notifications. Records you created in a workspace that other people still use stay with that workspace, shown as “Deleted user”.

A workspace you were the only member of is deleted along with your account. If you are the primary owner of a workspace other people still use, you first hand primary ownership to one of them, or delete the workspace — we will not leave a company’s records with nobody able to decide about them.

Deleting a workspace

A workspace’s primary owner can delete it at any time — on the web under Settings → General → Delete workspace, or in the app under More → Settings → Delete workspace. Before anything happens they see what will be deleted, then tick a box saying they understand what deleting it does, type the workspace’s name, and enter their password — and their authenticator code, if they use one. The same page offers Export workspace data: a download of every record as a spreadsheet file and every uploaded file, to keep before deleting. Then, straight away:

• everyone loses access to the workspace, and pending invitations are cancelled;
• any paid subscription is cancelled, so it is not billed again;
• every member is told by email who deleted it and when.

For the next 30 days nothing is erased. The records, the files and the web address are all kept, and the primary owner can restore the workspace exactly as it was — from their list of workspaces, with their password — and everyone who was a member gets access back. A restored workspace whose paid plan was cancelled starts a trial, so they can choose a plan again.

On day 30, if it has not been restored, the workspace is permanently erased: every record and every uploaded file, and its web address is freed so someone else may use it. Nobody — including us — can restore it after that. A new workspace at the same address is a different workspace and can never see the old one’s data.

Members’ own accounts are not affected: they can still sign in and use any other workspace they belong to. To have a deleted workspace erased sooner than day 30, its former primary owner can email support@hodworth.com from the address their account used.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export or delete your information, or to object to how it is used. You can do most of this yourself — your name is editable in your profile, a workspace’s primary owner can export all of its data at any time from Settings → Delete workspace → Export workspace data, and deleting an account or a workspace is described above. Requests about a workspace’s content come from the company — its primary owner — because the content is theirs. For anything else, email support@hodworth.com. We will reply within 30 days. You can also complain to your local data protection authority.

Children

Hodworth is a business tool for adults. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will update the date at the top of this page, and for significant changes we will tell account holders by email or in the app before they take effect.

Contact

Questions about privacy: support@hodworth.com.