privacy & stewardship

I. Our Position on Data: Quiet Respect

We believe the modern web collects far too much trivial noise and mistakenly calls it "intelligence." At Teak, Amber & Oak Ltd, our practice revolves around clarity, civic stewardship, and seeing the angles others overlook. That philosophy extends directly to how we treat you and your data. We do not harvest personal details for secondary brokering, we do not track you across the internet, and we do not turn our visitors into advertising inventory. When you interact with our practice or inspect our platforms, we collect only what is strictly necessary to converse, collaborate, and maintain the absolute security of our systems.

II. Who We Are

For the purposes of the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the data controller is:

• Entity: Teak, Amber & Oak Ltd
• Registered Office: 80-90 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NE
• Company Registration: England & Wales (No. 17069387)
• Data Protection Contact: dpo@teakamberoak.com
• Registered Domain: teakamberoak.com

III. The Footprint We Maintain (And The Noise We Exclude)

We keep our data footprint deliberately lean. Our interactions typically fall into three distinct areas:

• A. Direct Inquiries & Professional Dialogue: If you contact us via email, telephone, or direct consultation regarding advisory, forensic auditing, or civic telemetry pilots, we hold your name, organisation, professional email address, and the substance of our correspondence.
  Lawful Basis: Legitimate interests (to respond to your query and conduct ordinary business correspondence) or contractual necessity (where preparing or executing a client engagement).
  Retention: We retain client correspondence for the duration of our professional relationship plus six years to satisfy standard UK statutory, accounting, and compliance requirements.
• B. Civic Telemetry & Spatial Systems (High Street Spaces / Almanac): When local authorities or partners view our spatial intelligence engines, our underlying sensor feeds operate on zero-PII transient telemetry.
  Lawful Basis & Integrity Guarantee: Processed under legitimate interests (operating civic telemetry and spatial metrics without individual identification). We do not collect names, phone numbers, MAC addresses, facial imagery, or identifiable pedestrian records. Spatial footfall, traversal vectors, and dwell durations are processed as anonymous, aggregated mathematical events at the edge. You cannot be identified, reverse-engineered, or individually tracked across our civic maps.
• C. Essential Infrastructure & Edge Security: When you visit our website, our edge network (hosted via Cloudflare) logs standard, ephemeral technical headers: your approximate IP address, browser type, and requested resource solely to route web traffic, enforce rate limits, mitigate malicious traffic, and secure gated environments.
  Cookies: We do not use third-party tracking, advertising pixels, or behavioural analytics cookies. If a session token is set, it acts as a quiet digital key, existing solely to keep you authenticated inside a private draughting room or portal.

IV. How We Share Your Information

We do not sell, rent, or lease your information to anyone under any circumstance. We share information only with:

• Essential Infrastructure Processors: Cloud infrastructure and communication providers bound by strict UK/EEA data processing terms (e.g. Cloudflare for edge security, Google Workspace for encrypted communications).
• Legal & Regulatory Obligations: If required by law, court order, or statutory compliance auditing under English law.

V. Data Security & Storage

We treat data security with the quiet rigour of a master archivist. All web traffic is strictly encrypted in transit via modern TLS/HTTPS. Client records and internal working documents are protected by hardware security keys (FIDO2/YubiKey) and encrypted storage at rest. We continually vet our digital perimeters to ensure client confidentiality remains absolute.

VI. Your Statutory Rights

Under UK data protection law, you hold clear rights regarding your personal information:

• The right to access: Ask us for copies of any personal data we hold about you.
• The right to rectification: Ask us to correct information you believe is inaccurate.
• The right to erasure: Ask us to erase your personal data in certain circumstances.
• The right to object or restrict: Ask us to limit or cease processing your data.

If you ever wish to exercise these rights, email us directly at dpo@teakamberoak.com. We do not make people navigate automated ticket queues; a director will read and address your message directly. If you believe we have not handled your information properly, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk. We would, of course, appreciate the chance to put things right with you first.

VII. Changes to This Notice

As our practice and civic spatial tooling evolve, we may update this text to reflect changes in our services or legal obligations. When we do, the revised date at the head of this page will be updated.