Legal
Privacy Policy
1. Who we are
BeirutFlow is a freelance team of developers and designers based in Beirut, Lebanon. We are not a registered company.
We decide what this website collects and what happens to it. If you want to reach the people responsible for that, write to [email protected] or call +961 76 315 012.
2. What this policy covers
This policy covers beirutflow.com, including the private quote links we send at /quote/….
It does not cover systems we build for clients. If you reached a website or an app that we built for someone else, that organisation decides what happens to your data and publishes its own policy.
3. What we collect
When you send us a brief
The contact form asks for your name, your email address and a description of what you want built. It also offers company name, the service you are after, a budget range and a timeline — those four are optional and the form works without them.
What you send is emailed to us. It is not written into a customer database: the only copy we keep is the message itself, in our inbox and in the log of sent mail on our server.
When you approve a quote
If we have sent you a quote link and you accept it, we record your name, email address and the lines you ticked, along with the role, company, phone number and note if you filled those in.
We also record the IP address, the browser you used, and the date and time at the moment you accepted. That exists as the record that the approval happened and who made it — the electronic equivalent of a signature and a date on a page. It is not used for tracking or marketing.
Automatically, while you browse
- Your IP address, when you submit the contact form. It goes to Google's reCAPTCHA service to check you are not a bot, and we hold it briefly in memory to stop the same connection sending dozens of messages.
- Analytics, only if you accept cookies — which pages you looked at, where you arrived from, roughly which city you are in, and what browser and device you used. If you decline, none of this is collected.
- Whether an ad brought you here. We advertise BeirutFlow inside ChatGPT, and a small script from OpenAI runs on every page. It tells them which pages you opened. When you send us a message it also tells them an enquiry happened, together with the budget range you picked from the list — that is how we see which ads bring real projects instead of only counting clicks. It never sends your name, your email address, your company, or anything you wrote in your own words. Unlike analytics, this script runs whether or not you accept cookies, and section 7 explains why.
4. Why we hold it, and on what basis
- To reply to you. You asked us to, and answering is a step towards a possible contract.
- To keep the contact form usable. Spam and abuse checks are our legitimate interest: without them the form fills with bots and real enquiries get lost.
- To hold you and us to what was agreed. An approval record is needed to perform the contract and to settle any later disagreement about what was in scope.
- To see whether the site works. Analytics, and only with your consent — which you can withdraw at any time, in section 7.
- To know which ads are worth paying for. Measuring whether an ad led to a real enquiry is our legitimate interest. Without it we would go on paying for ads that bring nobody, and we would have no way to tell.
We do not sell your data, and we do not use it to make automated decisions about you. One advertising platform does receive a signal from this site, and it is named in section 5. What it receives is that a visit turned into an enquiry, never who you are or what you wrote.
5. Who else sees it
- Our email provider — it carries your enquiry to our inbox.
- Google — Analytics (only with your consent), reCAPTCHA on the contact form, and Google Fonts, which serves the typeface on every page.
- OpenAI — the advertising pixel described in section 3. It reports the pages you open, and the fact and budget range of an enquiry when you send one, so we can see which of our ads in ChatGPT actually work.
- Content delivery networks — Cloudflare's cdnjs, unpkg and jsDelivr serve the animation libraries this site uses. Loading a file from any of them tells that service your IP address and which browser you are on.
These providers are based outside Lebanon, mostly in the United States and the European Union, so using this site means your data crosses borders. We choose established providers who publish their own data protection terms, but we cannot control what their infrastructure does beyond what those terms say.
6. How long we keep it
- Enquiries from the contact form — 24 months from the last time we spoke, then deleted.
- Quotes and approvals — for as long as we are working together, and for 7 years afterwards, because the approval is the record of what was agreed and what was charged.
- Analytics — 12 months, after which Google deletes it automatically.
- Advertising measurement — held by OpenAI, for as long as their own terms allow. It reaches us as counts in a reporting screen, never as a list of people.
7. Cookies
A cookie is a small file a site stores in your browser. The table below lists the ones this site sets. Only the analytics cookie needs your permission.
| Cookie | Set by | What it does | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
_ga, _ga_* |
Google Analytics | Tells a returning visitor apart from a new one, so visit counts mean something. Only set if you accept. | Up to 2 years |
_GRECAPTCHA |
Google reCAPTCHA | Tells a person from a bot on the contact form. Set only on the contact page, and necessary — without it the form cannot defend itself. | About 6 months |
.AspNetCore.Antiforgery.* |
This site | Stops another website submitting the contact form in your name. Necessary, and it disappears when you close the browser. | Session |
Until you accept, Google Analytics is loaded but blocked from storing anything or identifying you. Accepting turns that storage on; declining leaves it off.
The advertising pixel
The OpenAI script in section 3 also keeps an identifier in your browser. That is how an ad you saw in ChatGPT and a message you send here days later can be recognised as the same visit.
It runs on every page, and the cookie choice above does not switch it off. We would rather say that here in plain words than bury it. The script has no reduced mode to fall back on, so turning it off for the people who ignore the banner would leave us with almost no idea which ads work. If you would rather it did not run at all, a tracker blocker or your browser's "block third-party cookies" setting will stop it, and the site will work exactly as before.
You can change your mind about analytics at any time:
You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Blocking the two necessary cookies will stop the contact form working.
8. Your rights
You can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or stop using it — and you can withdraw your consent to analytics whenever you like, without giving a reason. Ask at [email protected] and we will answer within 30 days.
There is one limit worth stating plainly: we cannot delete an approval record while the work it approved is still running or still within the period we may need it to settle a dispute. Everything else, we can.
If you are in the EU or the UK, you also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.
9. How we protect it
The site runs over HTTPS. The admin area behind it requires a login and is closed to search engines. We never ask for card or banking details on this website — if a page claiming to be us does, it is not us.
No system is perfectly secure, and we would rather say so than promise otherwise.
10. Children
This site sells software development services to businesses. It is not aimed at children, and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has sent us something, email us and we will delete it.
11. Changes to this policy
If we change how any of this works, we change this page and update the date at the top. If a change matters to you — a new provider seeing your data, a longer retention period — we will say so on the site rather than quietly editing the text.
12. Contact
Questions about anything on this page: [email protected] or +961 76 315 012.