How we protect your data

Short version: your business's records belong to you, they're kept separate from every other business on the system, we don't sell them, we don't share them for marketing, and we don't use them to train artificial intelligence. The detail is below.

1. Who is responsible for what

There are two different sets of information here, and under UK data protection law they have different owners. This matters, so it's worth being clear about it.

Your clients' care information — you are the controller

The names, addresses, care plans, next of kin and visit notes of the people you look after are your records. You decide what goes in them, how they're used and how long they're kept. In legal terms you are the data controller, and Carer Companion is your data processor — we hold and handle that information on your instructions and for no purpose of our own.

Your own account — we are the controller

Your name, your business name, your email address, the address you work from, your subscription and billing status and the technical logs of your use of the service are held by us as data controller, because we decide what's needed to run the service and keep it secure.

2. What we hold

About you and your business

• Your name, business name and email address.
• The address you work from, and the map coordinates worked out from it — this is what mileage between calls is measured from.
• Your invoice settings: your logo, your colours, your invoice numbering and your payment details as they appear on an invoice.
• Your professional and compliance documents, if you choose to upload them — DBS certificates, insurance, training records and policies.
• Your subscription status, and when your free trial ends.

About the people you look after

• Their name, address, phone number and the coordinates of their address.
• Their care plan, and anything you record about how they like to be looked after.
• Their next of kin or emergency contacts, and how to reach them.
• Their visits: when you're due, when you attended, what you ticked off and what you wrote.
• What they're charged, and the invoices raised against them.

Care and health information is special category data under UK GDPR — the law's highest-protection tier. Section 4 explains what that means in practice.

Location, if you use the companion app

• Your phone's position while you're working, recorded so your business mileage can be worked out from the round you actually drove instead of guessed at afterwards.
• The start and end of your working day, and the journeys derived from it.

Section 5 sets out the limits on this, because they're deliberate and they're strict.

Technical information

• The sign-in codes we email you, until they're used or they expire.
• A session for your browser, and a token for your phone if you use the app, so you stay signed in.
• Ordinary server logs needed to run and secure the service.

We don't use advertising cookies, we don't run third-party analytics or tracking pixels, and there's no cookie banner because there's nothing on this site that needs one.

3. Why we hold it, and our lawful basis

4. Health and care information gets extra protection

Because care records are special category data, the law requires a further condition on top of the ordinary lawful basis. As a carer, yours will usually be the provision of health or social care under Article 9(2)(h) of the UK GDPR. We handle it only as your processor and never for any purpose of our own.

In practice that means:

• Your business's data is separated from every other business on the system. Every record carries the business it belongs to, and every request is scoped to the business of the person making it. No carer can see another carer's clients.
• We don't read your notes. Nobody at MTC browses care records. Access to production data is limited to what's needed to fix a fault or answer a support request you've raised.
• We never use your data to train artificial intelligence — not ours, not anyone else's, not in anonymised form.
• We never sell it, rent it, or share it for marketing. There is no version of this service where that happens.

5. Location tracking — exactly what it does and doesn't do

The companion app can record where you drive so it can work out your real business mileage. It's the part of the product people ask most about, so here are the limits, all of which are built into how it works:

• It only records on a day you have calls booked. A day with nothing in the diary records nothing at all.
• It stops when you get home after your last booked call of the day, and it cannot start itself again that day.
• It records your location, not your clients'. It's your phone and your round.
• Recording everything is not the same as claiming everything. The trail is only ever turned into mileage for visits you confirm and trips you declare. Personal detours are captured by the phone and deliberately claimed as nothing.
• You can refuse it. Say no to the location permission, or turn it off in your phone's settings, and the app carries on doing everything else. You type your mileage in at the desk instead.
• It's yours, not a management tool. Nobody is watching a map of where you are. There is no screen anywhere in the product that shows your live position to anyone else.

6. Where your data is kept

Carer Companion runs on Cloudflare's network. Your records are held in Cloudflare's D1 database and your uploaded documents in Cloudflare R2 storage, in a database created in the Western Europe region and served from London. Everything travels over an encrypted connection (HTTPS/TLS), and is encrypted at rest by the storage platform.

Some of the suppliers listed below are based outside the UK. Where information reaches them, the transfer relies on the UK's approved safeguards — an adequacy decision, or standard contractual clauses with the UK Addendum.

7. Who else is involved

We keep this list as short as the job allows. These are the only third parties that touch your data, and each is used for one thing:

We don't send your data anywhere else, and we don't add suppliers quietly — if that list changes, this page changes with it.

8. How long we keep it

• While your account is open, we keep your records so they're there when you need them. Care records are not something to delete on a schedule — you may need to show what you did years after you did it.
• If your trial ends or you stop paying, nothing is deleted. Your account becomes read-only: you can still open every client, care plan and invoice, you just can't add anything new. We chose that deliberately — a billing problem is the wrong reason for a carer not to be able to read somebody's care plan.
• If you close your account, tell us and we'll delete your data. Ask first if you want a copy — see section 9.
• Sign-in codes expire in 10 minutes and are single-use.
• Invoices and financial records are kept as long as tax law requires, even after an account closes.

9. Your rights

Over the information we hold about you, you can ask us to:

• Give you a copy of it, or send it somewhere else in a portable format.
• Correct it if it's wrong.
• Delete it.
• Restrict or object to what we do with it.

Email [email protected]. We'll respond within one month, as the law requires, and there's no charge.

If you're someone a carer looks after

If a carer keeps records about you in Carer Companion and you want to see them, corrected or removed, ask the carer — they're the controller of those records and they hold the decision. If you can't reach them, contact us at [email protected] and we'll help you get to the right person. We won't hand over somebody's care records to a third party ourselves, because verifying who's entitled to them is the carer's call, not ours.

Complaining

If you think we've got this wrong, tell us first and we'll try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the UK's regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113. You don't have to come to us first.

MTC Technology Limited is registered with the ICO under reference ZC057135.

10. How we keep it secure

• No passwords to steal. Signing in sends a single-use 6-digit code to your email, which expires in 10 minutes. There's no password to guess, reuse or leak.
• Everything is encrypted in transit over HTTPS, and encrypted at rest by the storage platform.
• Separation is enforced on every request, not left to the screen you're on — the business you belong to is checked server-side each time, so there's no address you can type that shows you someone else's records.
• Uploaded documents are served only to the account that owns them, through an authenticated route rather than a public link, and file types that can carry scripts are refused.
• We keep the moving parts few. The short supplier list in section 7 is a security decision as much as a privacy one.

11. If something goes wrong

If there's a personal data breach that's likely to be a risk to people, we'll report it to the ICO within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, and we'll tell you promptly — including when the affected records are your clients', because you'll have your own obligations to meet and you can't meet them if we sit on it.

12. Children's data

Carer Companion is for care professionals and isn't intended for anyone under 18 to sign up to. A carer may record information about a person under 18 they look after; where that happens, that record is the carer's responsibility as controller and carries the same protections as every other care record here.

13. Changes to this page

If what we do with data changes, this page changes first, and the date at the top changes with it. If a change is significant we'll tell account holders by email rather than expecting anyone to notice.