Who we are
Side Founder is a service operated by KORTRON GROUP LTD (“we”, “us”, “our”), registered in England and Wales (company number 17240580). Our registered office is 167–169 Great Portland Street, 5th Floor, London, England, W1W 5PF.
KORTRON GROUP LTD is the data controller responsible for your personal information when you use Side Founder. This policy explains what we collect, why we use it, and your rights under UK data protection law (including the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018).
What we collect
When you register and use Side Founder, we may collect:
- Your email address and contact number
- Your account password (stored in hashed form—we cannot read it)
- Optional profile information, such as your industry or sector, skillset tags, and whether you would like to offer support to other founders
- Profile photo, if you choose to upload one
- Ideas you submit, including names, descriptions, and related preferences
- Consultation bookings you submit, including business context and operational questionnaire answers
- Messages you send through our contact forms
- Technical and usage data such as IP address, browser type, and audit records of activity on the platform (for security and service operation)
How and why we use your information
We use your information to:
- Create and manage your account and authenticate you
- Store, review, and respond to ideas and consultations you book
- Contact you about your submissions, account, or privacy requests
- Operate, secure, and improve the platform
- Maintain internal records, including an audit log of significant actions
- Connect founders who have opted in to offering support with others in the community, where relevant
We rely on the following legal bases:
- Contract — to provide the service you sign up for (account, submissions, support)
- Legitimate interests — to secure the platform, prevent misuse, and improve our services (balanced against your rights)
- Consent — for optional profile fields and any optional features where we ask for your agreement
- Legal obligation — where we must retain or disclose information to comply with law
We do not sell your personal information. We do not use your data for third-party advertising.
Who we share information with
We share personal data only where necessary to run the service, including:
- Our own infrastructure — Side Founder is operated on hardware controlled by KORTRON GROUP LTD in the United Kingdom
- Cloudflare, which **proxies** public HTTPS traffic from our domain to our in-house servers (and processes IP addresses and technical request data at the network edge)
- Google Workspace, which sends email notifications when you submit contact forms (via our in-house automated workflow; we do not publish team email addresses on the site)
- Professional advisers or regulators where required by law
We require processors to handle data securely and only on our instructions. We do not allow them to use your data for their own marketing.
International transfers
Your account data and submissions are stored on systems operated by KORTRON GROUP LTD in the United Kingdom. Public access to the site is **proxied through Cloudflare’s global network** before reaching our servers. Contact-form notifications are sent using **Google Workspace** on our korTRON domain. Where a supplier processes data outside the UK, we rely on appropriate safeguards (such as UK adequacy regulations, the supplier’s UK GDPR Data Processing Addendum, or standard contractual clauses) as required by law.
How long we keep it
We keep your account information and submissions for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the service. You can delete your account at any time from your profile settings, which removes your account, ideas, and consultations from our active systems. Contact form submissions and audit records are retained for as long as necessary for customer support, security, and legal compliance, with personal details anonymised where possible when you delete your account. If you ask us to delete data in other ways, we will remove or anonymise personal data within a reasonable period, except where we must retain information for legal, regulatory, or legitimate business purposes.
How we protect your data
We take appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your information, including hashed password storage, access controls, and secure session handling. No method of transmission over the internet is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law, you have rights including:
- Access — to request a copy of personal data we hold about you
- Rectification — to correct inaccurate data (much of this can be updated in your profile)
- Erasure — to request deletion in certain circumstances
- Restriction — to ask us to limit processing in certain cases
- Portability — to receive certain data in a structured, machine-readable format
- Objection — to object to processing based on legitimate interests
- Withdraw consent — where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time
To exercise these rights, update your profile where possible, delete your account from your profile, or use our privacy contact form. We will respond within one month in most cases, as required by law.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if you are unhappy with how we handle your data: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.
Children
Side Founder is not intended for children under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, please contact us and we will take steps to delete it.
Automated decision-making
We do not make decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects based solely on automated processing.
Cookies
We use essential session cookies to keep you signed in and to maintain your session securely. These are strictly necessary for the service to work and are not used for advertising or analytics. You can control cookies through your browser settings, but disabling session cookies will prevent you from staying signed in.
Terms of use
Your use of Side Founder is also governed by our terms of use, including rules on acceptable use and submissions.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. We will post the revised version on this page and update the “Last updated” date above. For significant changes, we may also notify registered users by email or through the platform where appropriate.
Contact
We do not publish email addresses on this site. For general enquiries, use our contact form. For privacy and data rights requests, use the privacy contact form.
Data controller: KORTRON GROUP LTD, 167–169 Great Portland Street, 5th Floor, London, England, W1W 5PF (company number 17240580).