Confidentiality, and how we talk about our work

Current at 18 August 2026

What we may say about you, what a case study is allowed to contain, and how we keep the work we do for one company from being recognisable to anybody else.

The privacy policy, the terms, the data processing agreement and the subprocessor list answer what happens to your data inside the product. This page answers a different question, and usually the first one asked: what will you say about us, and what will you show other people.

1. The short version

We never name you. We never show your numbers. We never show a document of yours, redacted or otherwise. What we may show is the shape of a problem and the workflow we built to solve it, with the name removed, the figures invented, and the industry described rather than the company. If that is still more than you want, tell us and we show nothing at all. There is no penalty for saying no and we do not ask twice.

2. What we do, so the rest of this page has a context

We are a small engineering firm. We look at where a business is losing its best people to manual work, and we build and run software that takes that work over. The work is specific to each client: their mail, their documents, their process, their systems. That is why this page exists. Building something for one company necessarily teaches us something, and the line between what we learned and what is yours has to be drawn explicitly rather than assumed.

What we learn belongs to us. What we are shown belongs to you. We keep the technique. You keep the content, the figures, the names, the relationships and the documents. We do not need any of the second category to reuse the first.

3. Who inside our side can see your work

Only people who need it, and only after they have signed. Every engineer and contractor signs a mutual non-disclosure agreement before they are given access to anything of a client’s.

Our own code repository refers to you by a codename. Not as a courtesy: the people who write software for us can read that repository, and if your name were in it they would learn who you are, what you sell and what shape your data takes as a free extra. So it is not there. Documents about your project use the codename, the folders use the codename, and the version history was rewritten so that older versions do not contain the real name either. The mapping between the codename and you lives outside the repository, with us.

Engineers work against invented sample data that has the same shape as yours and none of its content. Your real documents are not on their machines and your live account is not something they can reach.

4. What a case study may contain

We may write about the work in general terms, and we may show a diagram of a workflow we built. Both are subject to all of the following, together.

Permitted

The industry, described broadly, such as “an out-of-home advertising business”. The shape of the problem. A diagram of the automation, its steps and its decisions. The kind of documents involved, such as “a supplier invoice”. The outcome in relative terms, such as “three days of work became a review”.

Never

Your company name. Your trading names. Your logo. The names of your staff, your clients, your suppliers or your agencies. Your real figures, rates, or revenue. Any screenshot, extract or reproduction of a document of yours. Anything that identifies you by elimination, such as a description narrow enough that there is only one company it could be.

Numbers in anything we publish are invented. Not rounded, not scaled, not obscured: replaced with figures that are realistic and untrue. A rounded real number is still your number.

5. Marketing is not the point, and it is not a condition

We are not a marketing business and we do not treat clients as material. Nothing in our agreement with you depends on your agreeing to any of this, and nothing you decide here changes the price or the priority of your work. If you would rather we never referred to the work at all, in any form, say so once and that is the standing position.

6. Your name, only with written permission

If we ever want to name you, use your logo, or say something specific enough to identify you, we ask first and in writing, for that specific use. Permission for one thing is not permission for the next one. Permission can be withdrawn, and when it is we take the material down rather than argue about it.

The one exception, and it only exists because it is public already: a page on this site prepared for a named company, sent privately to that company, at an unlisted address that search engines are told to ignore. That is a document for you, not about you, and it is never linked from anywhere public.

7. What we do with what we learn

We reuse technique. Having built a document-reading step for one company makes the next one faster, and you benefit from every one that came before you in exactly the same way. What we never reuse is content: your figures, your rates, your supplier list, your templates or your documents are not training material, not examples, and not a starting point for somebody else’s build.

No model provider is used on your data without a written position that it does not train on what passes through it. Where a provider’s default is otherwise, we exercise the opt-out in writing and send nothing of yours until it is confirmed. Where that stands per provider is in the subprocessor list.

8. Talking to other people about you

We do not discuss one client with another, name clients to prospective clients, or list you as a reference without asking. If somebody asks us who we work with, the answer is the kind of businesses, not the businesses.

9. When it ends

Confidentiality does not end when the work does. It continues indefinitely, and it survives the end of any agreement between us. Deletion of your data is covered in the data processing agreement; this obligation is separate and does not expire with it.

10. If we get it wrong

Tell us and we take it down the same day, without asking you to justify it. If something has been published that should not have been, we would rather remove it first and discuss it afterwards.