How Orbion Connect Handles Personal Information

Who We Are

Orbion Connect is a trading name of Orbion Connect Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales with company number 17405473. Its registered office is 26 Myrtle Road, Hounslow, England, TW3 1QD.

Orbion Connect Ltd is the controller of the personal data described in this notice unless we tell you otherwise for a specific service or workflow. For privacy enquiries, rights requests, or complaints in the first instance, you can contact us at support@orbion.uk.

If you remain unhappy after contacting us, you may also raise a concern with the UK Information Commissioner's Office.

Information We Collect

• Identity and contact details, such as name, email address, phone number, LinkedIn profile, and company details.
• Expert profile information, such as professional background, CV content, qualifications, registration numbers, work preferences, availability, rates, uploaded documents, and profile content.
• Identity verification documents, where an expert chooses to upload them so we can verify who they are.
• Company and project information, such as the problem a company wants help with, the expert searches it runs, the invitations it sends, and the answers it receives.
• Account information, such as login credentials and onboarding progress.
• Payment information relating to the unlock fee, such as the amount, date, and a payment reference. Card details are entered directly with Stripe and are never stored by us.
• Scheduling information, such as the call times proposed and confirmed between a company and an expert, and the video call link.
• Communications data, including messages sent through contact forms, support requests, and platform interactions.
• Technical and usage data, including browser, device, IP address, pages visited, timestamps, and security logs needed to operate and protect the service.

How We Use Personal Information

• To provide and operate the Orbion Connect website and platform.
• To create and manage accounts, verify users, and maintain secure login sessions.
• To match companies with relevant experts and support introductions, payments, scheduling, and calls.
• To send service emails, such as invitations, reminders, receipts, and call confirmations.
• To respond to enquiries and provide support.
• To improve product performance, reliability, security, and user experience, including by reviewing the searches companies run so we can improve results.
• To send marketing emails where you have asked for them or where the law allows. You can unsubscribe at any time.
• To comply with legal obligations, enforce our terms, and protect our business, users, and systems.

Sharing Contact Details When an Introduction Is Unlocked

Orbion Connect works as follows. A company invites an expert to talk. Before any payment, the company sees an anonymised expert profile and the expert sees a description of the project. If the expert accepts the invitation, the company can pay a one-off unlock fee. Once the fee is paid, we send the expert's name, email address, phone number where provided, and LinkedIn profile to the company, and we send the company's name and contact details to the expert.

An expert who accepts an invitation does so knowing that their contact details will be released to that company if the company pays. We tell experts this in the invitation. Experts who do not accept an invitation do not have their contact details released.

Both sides are expected to use the other's contact details only to discuss the project they were introduced for. Our Terms and Conditions set out the rules.

AI and Automated Processing

We use artificial intelligence tools, including third-party AI providers, to support platform features such as expert-company matching, search, expert profile summarisation, and CV parsing. This means relevant profile and professional background information may be processed by AI systems operated by providers including Anthropic and OpenAI.

These providers act as our processors. They process data on our instructions, under contractual terms, and under their standard commercial API terms they do not use the data we send them to train their models. We do not use AI to make solely automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you without human involvement.

Where AI processing involves transferring data outside the UK, we apply the safeguards described under International Transfers below.

Lawful Bases

Depending on the context, we process personal data because it is necessary to perform a contract with you, because it is in our legitimate interests to operate, secure, and improve the platform, because we must comply with legal obligations, or because you have given consent where consent is required.

Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time, although this will not affect processing already carried out lawfully before withdrawal.

Who We Share Information With

• Companies and experts, as described above, where an introduction is unlocked.
• Stripe, which processes card payments for the unlock fee.
• Google, which provides our email and calendar tools and creates the Google Meet links used for introductory calls.
• Anthropic and OpenAI, which provide AI features, as described above.
• Cloud hosting and infrastructure providers who host, secure, and support the platform.
• Email delivery and marketing providers, including Sender.net, who send our messages.
• Analytics providers, including PostHog, who help us understand how the product is used.
• Professional advisers, regulators, courts, or law enforcement where disclosure is necessary to comply with the law or protect legal rights.
• Prospective buyers or investors in connection with a business transaction, subject to appropriate confidentiality controls.

Retention

We keep personal data only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this notice, including account administration, dispute handling, record-keeping, fraud prevention, and legal or regulatory compliance.

We keep payment and invoicing records for six years, because UK tax law requires it. Where data is no longer needed, we delete it, anonymise it, or securely archive it where lawful retention is still required. You can ask us to delete your account and profile at any time by emailing support@orbion.uk.

Your Rights

• You may have the right to request access to your personal data.
• You may have the right to request correction of inaccurate or incomplete information.
• You may have the right to request erasure, restriction, or objection in certain circumstances.
• You may have the right to data portability where the law applies.
• You may have the right to withdraw consent, and to object to direct marketing, at any time.
• You may have the right to complain to the ICO if you believe your data has been handled unlawfully.

International Transfers

Some of our providers, including Stripe, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and PostHog, may process data outside the UK. Where they do, we take appropriate steps to protect it, such as relying on UK adequacy regulations, the UK extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, or the UK International Data Transfer Addendum and similar contractual safeguards.

Changes to This Notice

We may update this notice from time to time. The latest version is always published on this website, with the date it was last updated shown at the top.