Privacy.

Who is responsible for your details

The AI Builders Society is a student society forming at the University of Greenwich. It has not been ratified by the Students’ Union yet, so the person responsible for your details right now is Shahil Rahman, not the university. You can reach me at sr5138d@gre.ac.uk.

What the interest form collects

• Your name and email address.
• Your mobile number.
• Your school and year of study, if you chose to give them.
• Your answer to what you would want to build.
• Whether you ticked interest in a committee role.

Nothing else. There are no hidden fields beyond a spam trap that ignores people.

What it is used for

• To contact you about the society, for example with details of the first session.
• To check you made it into the group chat, and to send you the link again if you did not. I may do that by text or on WhatsApp.
• To show the Students’ Union that people want this society to exist. That is a count of how many people registered, not your individual details.

The legal basis

For the forms, consent. You gave it by ticking the box on the form you filled in. You can withdraw it whenever you like by emailing me, and I will delete what I hold.

For the ask bar, legitimate interests: answering a question you chose to ask, and stopping the bar from being abused. You can object to that by emailing me.

Who else sees it

For the forms, one company: Web3Forms. They receive each form and email it to me, so every submission passes through them. Their own privacy policy is on their website. Nobody else gets what you typed into either form, with one exception: if I text you or message you on WhatsApp to resend the group link, your number goes to your phone network or to WhatsApp, the same as any message.

Your details are not sold, not passed to advertisers, and not handed to the university or anyone else.

The ask bar works differently, and has its own section below.

If you applied for a committee role

Committee applications are now closed. The application form was separate from the interest form and asked for more. It collected:

• Your name and email address.
• Which roles you want, whether you are here all year, and how much time you have.
• Your answers to the questions about what you have done, how you would help a beginner, and the role you picked.
• What else you are committed to this year.

These answers were used for one thing: choosing the committee and replying to you about it. Only I read them. They go through Web3Forms in the same way as the interest form, and they are kept for the same length of time as everything else here, or deleted sooner if you ask.

The group chat, separately

This website sends nothing from either form to WhatsApp or Meta. The join link is shown on the page after you submit the interest form. The only way your number reaches WhatsApp is if I message you there myself, to resend that link.

One thing worth knowing before you join, though, because it is easy to miss: in a normal WhatsApp group every member can see every other member’s phone number. You would see theirs and they would see yours. That is how WhatsApp groups work rather than a choice the society made, and there is no setting that turns it off for an ordinary group.

If you would rather not be in a group like that, say so and I will keep you on email instead and delete your number. You will not miss anything.

The ask bar

The bar at the top of the home page answers questions about the society. If your question is one the page already answers, your browser answers it from the page and nothing is sent anywhere.

Otherwise, when you press send, the text you typed goes to the website’s server. Nothing else from your device goes with it: no name, no email, no cookies. Like any request on the internet it also carries your IP address, and what happens to that is explained below.

To answer your question, it goes to these companies:

• Vercel (United States) hosts this website and runs the code that answers.
• OVHcloud writes the answer. Its AI service runs in a data centre in France. Its terms say it doesn’t store or reuse your question or the answer, and it doesn’t use them to train its models; it keeps only the usage data it needs for billing.
• Groq (United States) writes the answer instead if OVHcloud is busy or down. Its terms do not allow it to train its models on your question, and I have set it not to keep your question at all.
• Mistral AI (France) writes the answer if both are busy. I have switched off Mistral’s use of our questions for training. It keeps questions and answers for 30 days to watch for abuse.

OVHcloud, Groq and Mistral get only the question, not your IP address. Because Vercel is in the United States, your question leaves the UK when you use the bar, and if Groq answers it, it is processed in the United States too. That is an international transfer, and it is worth knowing before you type.

What the bar keeps is stored with Upstash, a US company, in its London data centre:

• Your question, whether it was answered, and the date. I keep these for 30 days so I can see what the FAQ is missing, then they are deleted automatically. Nothing that identifies you is stored with them.
• A count of how many questions you have asked. This stops anyone using the bar to run up costs or knock it over. Your IP address is turned into a scrambled code, using a one-way calculation and a secret key, and only that code is counted. The IP address itself is never stored, and the counts disappear within a day.
• Answers to common questions. These are remembered for up to 7 days so the bar can reuse them. They are filed under a fingerprint of the question, not anything about you.

Please don’t type personal details into the bar. If you do by mistake, email me and I will delete that day’s entry from the log.

How long it is kept

What you give on the forms: until the end of the 2026/27 academic year, or until you ask me to delete it, whichever comes first.

The ask bar keeps things for much less time:

• Questions in the log: 30 days.
• The counts used to stop abuse: less than a day.
• Remembered answers: up to 7 days.

This website

It sets no cookies, runs no analytics and tracks nothing. It only contacts another company when you press submit on a form, or press send on the ask bar for a question the page doesn’t already answer.

Your rights

You can ask me to show you what I hold about you, correct it, delete it, or stop contacting you. Email sr5138d@gre.ac.uk and I will sort it.

If you are unhappy with how your details have been handled, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office atico.org.uk.