Privacy Notice

What each feature collects, and for how long

Browsing the site

The site is hosted on Cloudflare. Cloudflare serves the pages, runs its bot-protection service and the Turnstile challenge used on the forms, and provides cookieless, aggregate Web Analytics (page views by page and country; no cookie and no visitor identifier). Cloudflare processes your IP address and browser characteristics to do that, under its own privacy policy; we see only the aggregates.

The contact form

The form asks for your first and last name, email address, company, the service of interest and your project details, and asks you to pass a Turnstile challenge. On submit the site turns the fields into one email to the engineer, sent and stored through Microsoft 365 (Microsoft is our mail processor). The website itself keeps no copy. The email is kept as ordinary business correspondence for as long as the enquiry, or any engagement that follows, needs it.

The planning-estimate wizard

The wizard asks where the project is (state and, optionally, city), what it is, and six to ten short questions. While you work, a draft outline is stored under a random reference code for 90 days so you can pull it back up; that stored draft holds the project description and your answers, and no name or contact details. If you accept the outline, your name, company, email, phone number and role, your answers, the outline itself, any appointment request, and the country your connection came from are emailed to the engineer through Microsoft 365, and an accepted-outline record with the contact block removed is kept for 90 days. Nothing is sent until you choose to accept.

Relay, the chat assistant

Relay is an automated assistant running on Cloudflare Workers AI. Your questions and its answers are recorded under a random session identifier for 30 days so the engineer can read what visitors ask and follow up; no IP address is stored with the transcript. The session identifier lives in your browser only until the tab closes. If you use the follow-up card, the email address or phone number you enter and the recorded transcript of that session are emailed to the engineer, and a marker with no personal data (time, page, language, whether a transcript existed) is kept for 90 days. Chat and estimate steps are also counted, without names or contact details, so the engineer can see how the site is used.

The client portal

The client portal at portal.machamerelectric.com is a separate, access-controlled service for clients of Machamer Electric Consultant, LLC, available by invitation. To run it we store, on Cloudflare: your name, email address and role as entered by the engineer; a record of each sign-in (a one-time code sent by email and kept only as a hash while it is valid; a session cookie that ends after 30 minutes without activity and after 12 hours regardless); the project information and design documents the engineer posts for your organization; and an audit log of each sign-in, download and posting with the time, the connection's IP address and browser identification. Sign-in codes and session records expire on their own. Project documents and the audit log are kept with the project file for at least five years after final issue. The emails the portal sends (sign-in codes, invitations, notices that a set was posted) go through Microsoft 365 like the rest of our mail. The portal can be used in English or Spanish: the language you choose is kept in a cookie for a year (it holds the language and nothing else) and, once you are signed in, on your account, so that the portal's emails to you follow it. Documents, proposals and agreements are in English.

The portal also receives documents. When one of your people sends files through it (reference documents, submittals, requests for information, review comments, signed agreements) we store the files, the title and message entered, who sent them and when, and we issue a transmittal number and email a receipt; a submittal or a request for information is logged with its due date, the engineer's action or answer, and the returned copy. When a contractor or vendor sends documents through a project drop link created by your organization or by the engineer, we store the files and the sender's name, email address and company as they entered them, email them a receipt, and copy your organization's people on it. Review comments you enter in the portal are kept with the engineer's responses as part of the project record. Files sent through the portal are checked on the engineer's computer with Windows Defender before they are opened, and the result is recorded beside the file. Every send, download, return and response is written to the same audit log, with the connection's IP address and browser identification. When a proposal is signed electronically in the portal we also store the signer's typed name and title, the acceptance statement they agreed to, the time, the connection's IP address and browser identification, the session that signed, and the engineer's countersignature; these make up the agreement record, which is kept with the project file and emailed to both parties.

Where the engineer has enabled it, a project page offers "Ask about this project": a question you type is answered by an automated search over the documents posted to that project only (Cloudflare AutoRAG and Workers AI, processed at Cloudflare), and the answer cites the documents it came from. The question is written to the project's audit log with the time, the connection's IP address and browser identification; the answer is not stored. The engineer is not notified of questions, and the answers are not engineering advice: the issued documents govern.

Retention at a glance