About this policy
This Privacy Policy explains how High Seek Limited handles personal information when you visit our website, contact our scouting desk, commission one of our services or otherwise interact with our team. It describes the kinds of information we collect, the reasons we collect it, the people and organisations we may share it with, the choices available to you and the measures we take to keep information safe.
The developer name HighSeek appears throughout our public materials as the working mark used by the engineering and research group that builds and maintains this website. That group operates under the legal entity High Seek Limited, and all commitments in this policy are made by High Seek Limited as the controller of personal information described here. Where this policy refers to the Company, it means High Seek Limited, Rm 2404 New Trend Centre, 704 Prince Edward Rd E, San Po Kong, Hong Kong - 999077, Hong Kong (HK).
We have written this policy in plain English so that a reader can understand what happens to information without needing a legal dictionary. If any sentence is unclear, please write to reach@highseek.mom and a member of the desk will explain it.
In short: we collect only what we need to run a scouting desk, we keep it for as long as a purpose requires, we do not sell it, and you can ask us about it at any time.
Who we are
High Seek Limited is a company registered in Hong Kong that provides computer systems design and related professional, scientific and technical services. Our scouting desk studies markets, compiles shortlist dossiers and keeps watch briefs for client teams. The Company sits at Rm 2404 New Trend Centre, 704 Prince Edward Rd E, San Po Kong, Hong Kong - 999077, Hong Kong (HK).
For the purposes of applicable data protection law, High Seek Limited is the data controller for personal information collected through this website and through the ordinary conduct of the scouting desk. When we act on documented instructions from a client and handle personal information on that client behalf, we act as a processor and the client remains the controller of that information.
The Company can be reached by email at reach@highseek.mom or by telephone at +12723482150 during desk hours. Postal correspondence should be addressed to the San Po Kong office named above.
Scope of this policy
This policy applies to personal information processed through the website at highseek.mom, through email and telephone contact with the desk, through enquiries submitted on the contact page and through the delivery of our scouting services. It does not apply to information held by third parties, even where a link from our website leads to their pages.
Some engagements involve a separate written agreement that sets additional terms for the handling of client data. Where such an agreement exists, it takes precedence over this policy for the specific information it covers. This policy continues to apply to everything else.
This policy does not cover information about companies or markets as such. It covers personal information, meaning information about an identified or identifiable individual, such as a name, an email address, a telephone number or a professional role attached to a named person.
Information we collect
We try to collect as little as we can while still running the desk properly. The categories below describe what we may hold in practice.
Contact details you give us
When you send a note through the contact form, write to reach@highseek.mom or call the desk, we receive your name, your email address, any telephone number you choose to give and the content of your message. If you name an organisation and a role, we record those as part of the enquiry so the right analyst can respond.
Engagement records
When a client commissions a run, we hold the correspondence, briefs, meeting notes and deliverable documents connected with that engagement. Some of those records may contain personal information about the client team or about third parties mentioned in the course of research.
Technical information
Our web server records standard request information such as the address from which a request arrives, the time of the request, the page requested, the browser type and the referring page. This information is used to keep the site available and secure and to understand which pages are useful. It is not used to build advertising profiles.
Information about suppliers and partners
We keep contact details for the people who represent our suppliers, professional advisers and research partners so that we can place orders, settle accounts and maintain working relationships.
Information in recruitment correspondence
If you apply to join the desk, we hold the application materials you send, the notes taken during interviews and any references you authorise us to request. We keep applicant materials only for as long as the recruitment process and any follow up require.
Where information comes from
Most personal information reaches us directly from the individual concerned, through a message, a call, a meeting or an engagement document. In some cases we receive information from a client team, for example when a client asks us to study a supplier and provides the name and role of a contact inside that supplier.
During research, the desk reads publicly available material such as corporate filings, tender notices, published organisational charts, professional profiles and press coverage. Where a person is named in such material and the name is relevant to a research question, we may record it alongside the source. We do not attempt to identify individuals who have deliberately kept their identity private.
We may also receive information from service providers who help us run the website and our email, such as a hosting provider that logs technical request details or a mail provider that filters spam.
Why we use information
We use personal information for a small number of connected purposes, each of which has a clear reason attached to it.
- To respond to enquiries, schedule intro call windows and answer questions about the six desk runs.
- To prepare, deliver and support the engagements a client has commissioned, including sweeps, dossiers, watch briefs, signal checks, competitor maps and sittings.
- To keep accurate business records, issue invoices and meet accounting and tax obligations.
- To maintain the security of the website, investigate misuse and prevent fraud.
- To improve the scouting desk by understanding which pages, briefs and formats are most useful.
- To send occasional desk updates to people who have asked to receive them.
- To consider applications from people who wish to work with the Company.
- To comply with legal requirements, respond to lawful requests and enforce our agreements.
We do not use personal information for automated advertising, we do not sell it and we do not rent it to any other organisation.
Legal bases for processing
Where the law requires us to identify a legal basis for processing, we rely on the following grounds, chosen according to the purpose involved.
Contract and steps before contract
We process information where it is necessary to take steps at your request before entering into an agreement, or to perform an agreement we have already entered into with you or the organisation you represent.
Legitimate interests
We process information where there is a legitimate interest in running and improving the scouting desk, provided that interest is not overridden by your rights. Typical examples are replying to a professional enquiry, keeping business records and securing the website.
Consent
Where we rely on consent, for example for an optional newsletter, we will ask clearly and you can withdraw that consent at any time by writing to reach@highseek.mom. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing that happened before the withdrawal.
Legal obligation
We process information where it is necessary to comply with a legal obligation, such as retaining accounting records for a statutory period or responding to a competent authority acting within the law.
International transfers
High Seek Limited is based in Hong Kong and the scouting desk is run from the tower room in San Po Kong. Some of our service providers operate infrastructure outside Hong Kong, and client teams may be located in other regions. As a result, personal information may be transferred to and stored in countries other than your own.
Where we transfer information across borders, we take reasonable steps to ensure that comparable protection travels with it. Those steps may include contractual clauses approved by a competent authority, a review of the provider security posture and a data protection assessment for the particular arrangement.
If you would like more detail about the transfer mechanisms relevant to your information, write to reach@highseek.mom and we will explain the position for your particular case.
How long we keep information
We keep personal information only for as long as a purpose requires, and then we remove it or make it anonymous.
- Enquiries that do not lead to an engagement are usually removed within twenty four months of the last contact.
- Engagement records are kept for the term of the engagement and for a reasonable period afterward to support follow up questions and to defend against claims.
- Accounting and invoice records are kept for the period required by Hong Kong tax and company law.
- Recruitment materials are kept for twelve months unless a candidate asks us to keep them longer for future openings.
- Server logs are kept for a short operational period and then rotated out.
When the retention period ends we delete the information from active systems and from backups on the normal backup cycle. Where deletion is not immediately possible, we isolate the information and restrict access until deletion completes.
How we protect information
The desk handles modest volumes of personal information, and it is protected in proportion to that modest volume and to the sensitivity of the work. We use encrypted connections for the website and email, access controls that limit each person to the records a role requires, and devices with disk encryption and automatic updates.
Access to client files is restricted to the analysts working on the engagement. When an engagement ends, access lists are reviewed and removed. We keep an internal register of the service providers who touch personal information and review their security statements before onboarding and periodically afterward.
No system is perfectly secure. If a security incident occurs that is likely to affect personal information, we will investigate promptly, contain it, notify affected parties where the law requires and explain what happened in plain language. We will not hide an incident behind vague language.
Your privacy rights
Subject to applicable law, you have a set of rights over the personal information we hold about you. They are summarised below, and none of them requires a lawyer to exercise.
Right to be informed
You have the right to know what we collect and why. This policy is the main way we meet that right, and we will answer follow up questions on request.
Right of access
You can ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you and for an explanation of how it is used.
Right to correction
You can ask us to correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete.
Right to erasure
You can ask us to delete information where there is no good reason for us to continue holding it. We will explain any legal reason that prevents deletion.
Right to restriction
You can ask us to pause the use of your information while a question about its accuracy or our use of it is resolved.
Right to object
You can object to processing based on legitimate interests, and we will stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your objection.
Right to portability
Where processing is based on consent or contract and is carried out by automated means, you can ask for the information in a structured, commonly used format.
Right to withdraw consent
Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time by writing to reach@highseek.mom.
To exercise any right, send a note to reach@highseek.mom or write to High Seek Limited at Rm 2404 New Trend Centre, 704 Prince Edward Rd E, San Po Kong, Hong Kong - 999077, Hong Kong (HK). We will respond within the period allowed by law and will not charge a fee unless a request is clearly unfounded or repetitive. We may ask for enough information to confirm your identity before acting, so that we do not disclose information to the wrong person.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you may raise the matter with the data protection authority in your jurisdiction. In Hong Kong, the relevant authority is the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data. We would appreciate the chance to address the concern directly first.
Marketing and communications
The desk sends occasional updates about new runs, published research and changes to the way the scouting desk works. We send those updates only to people who have asked for them, and every message includes a plain way to stop receiving them.
We do not buy contact lists, we do not add people to a list because they sent a single question and we do not pass subscriber details to any advertising platform. If you stop a subscription, we keep a minimal record of the request so that we do not accidentally contact you again.
Where we send a service message that is necessary for an active engagement, for example a note about a scheduled sitting, that message is not marketing and will continue even if you have opted out of updates.
Privacy for children
The scouting desk serves professional and business audiences. Our website and services are not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of sixteen.
If you believe that a child has provided personal information to us, please write to reach@highseek.mom and we will take reasonable steps to remove it. If we discover such information in the course of ordinary operations, we will delete it without waiting for a request.
Where an engagement could involve information about minors, for example in a research setting connected to a client programme, we require the client to confirm that appropriate consent and safeguards are in place before any such information is shared with the desk.
Automated decisions and profiling
We do not make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about individuals through automated processing. The scouting desk studies markets and organisations, and its conclusions are written by people who can explain their reasoning.
We may use simple software to sort enquiries, deduplicate contact records or filter spam. Those tools assist the desk but do not decide whether a person receives a response or whether an engagement is offered. Every substantive decision about a client relationship is made by a member of our team.
If that changes in the future, we will update this policy, explain the logic behind any automated decision and provide a way to ask for human review.
Third party sites and links
Our website may link to the sites of clients, suppliers, standards bodies or research sources. Those sites are run by other organisations and have their own privacy policies. We do not control what they collect, and a link from our pages is not an endorsement of their practices.
When you follow a link away from highseek.mom, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of the destination before sharing personal information. If a link on our site appears to point somewhere misleading, please tell us at reach@highseek.mom so that we can correct it.
We may occasionally embed a document or a form hosted by a provider. In those cases the provider name is visible on the page, and the provider handles the information under its own terms while we handle the resulting engagement records under this policy.
Changes to this policy
We review this policy from time to time and update it when the way we work changes, when a new service is introduced or when the law requires. The date at the top of the page shows when the current version became effective.
For material changes that affect how we use information already held, we will take reasonable steps to bring the change to the attention of people who have an active relationship with the desk, for example by a note in a service message or a short notice on the website.
Earlier versions are retained internally so that we can explain what applied at a given time. If you would like to know which version applied when you sent information to us, write to reach@highseek.mom with the date in question.
How to contact us
Questions about this policy, requests to exercise a right or concerns about the way information has been handled should be sent to the contact desk. We prefer email because it leaves a clear record for both sides, but we are happy to speak by telephone where that is easier.
High Seek Limited
Rm 2404 New Trend Centre, 704 Prince Edward Rd E, San Po Kong, Hong Kong - 999077, Hong Kong (HK)
Email: reach@highseek.mom
Telephone: +12723482150
We aim to acknowledge every privacy request within five working days and to resolve it within the period allowed by the applicable law. If a request needs more time, we will explain why and give an expected date.
Thank you for taking the time to read this policy. A well informed visitor is a better client, and the desk would rather answer a question before it becomes a worry.