Privacy Policy

Auris Acoustic Consultancy & Design

Last updated: 3 November 2026

At Auris, we design how spaces sound, and we treat the information people share with us with the same care we bring to our projects. This policy explains, in plain English, what personal information we collect, why we collect it, how we look after it and the choices you have.

It applies to anyone who visits www.auris-consultancy.com, gets in touch with us, works with us on a project, or whose details we receive in the course of our work, including architects, interior designers, management teams, end users and suppliers.

1. Who we are

Auris Acoustic Consultancy & Design is the trading name of Auris Acoustic Consultancy & Design Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17532595.

  • Registered office: Office One, 1 Coldbath Square, Farringdon, London EC1R 5HL

  • London studio: 3rd Floor, 45 Albemarle Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4JL

  • Email: hello@auris-consultancy.com

  • Telephone: 020 3949 1597 (+44 20 3949 1597 from outside the UK)

For the personal information described in this policy, we are the controller. This means we decide how and why your information is used and we are responsible for looking after it under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR).

We are a small practice, so we have not appointed a formal Data Protection Officer. If you have any questions about this policy or how we handle your information, please email hello@auris-consultancy.com and a director will pick it up personally.

2. The information we collect

We try to collect only what we genuinely need.

2.1 When you get in touch

When you use the enquiry form on our website, email us, call us or message us through social media, we collect:

  • your first and last name;

  • your email address, and your phone number if you give it to us;

  • your organisation and role, if you tell us;

  • the content of your message, such as details of the space, the project stage and what you would like it to sound like;

  • any files, drawings or images you send us.

Our website enquiry form asks for your name, email address and a message. It is protected by Google reCAPTCHA (see section 5) to keep spam out.

2.2 When we work together on a project

If you are a client, or you work for a client, design team, contractor or supplier on one of our projects, we may hold:

  • contact details: name, job title, organisation, business email, phone number and business address;

  • project correspondence, meeting notes, drawings, specifications, reports and design records that include your name or comments;

  • billing information, such as invoicing contacts, purchase order references and payment records (we do not keep card details);

  • information needed to arrange site visits, such as access arrangements, site contacts and induction or health and safety records.

2.3 Site visits, acoustic surveys and measurements

Much of our work involves visiting buildings and taking acoustic and vibration measurements. We are measuring the space, not the people in it, but some survey work can incidentally capture personal information, for example:

  • sound recordings: noise and acoustic surveys sometimes use short audio recordings so we can identify sources of noise. These may occasionally pick up voices or conversations nearby;

  • photographs and video of a site, which may unintentionally include people;

  • details of the people present at the site, such as occupiers or neighbours, where relevant to an environmental noise assessment or complaint.

Wherever we can, we record sound levels rather than audio content, we position equipment and frame photographs to avoid capturing people, and we agree arrangements with the client or site manager in advance so that occupiers can be told a survey is taking place. We do not use survey recordings to identify, monitor or profile anyone. Incidental audio is reviewed only to the extent needed for the technical analysis and is then deleted or reduced to measurement data (see section 7).

2.4 When you visit our website

When you browse our website, some information is collected automatically by our website platform, Squarespace, and the services it uses:

  • technical information such as your IP address, browser type, device type, operating system and approximate location (country or city level, derived from your IP address);

  • information about your visit, such as the pages you view, how you arrived at our site (for example, from a search engine or a link), and the date and time of your visit.

Some of this is collected using cookies. Analytics cookies are only placed if you agree to them. See section 10 for details.

2.5 Information from other sources

We may receive your details from:

  • an architect, interior designer, client or colleague who introduces you or includes you on a project team;

  • public sources such as your organisation’s website, LinkedIn or Companies House, when we are researching a project or potential collaborator;

  • reviews or messages you leave on our Google Business Profile or social media pages (LinkedIn, Instagram and X).

2.6 Information we do not ask for

We do not intentionally collect special category information (such as information about health, ethnicity, religion or political opinions) or information about criminal convictions. Please do not send us this kind of information unless it is genuinely necessary, for example an access requirement for a meeting or site visit, in which case we will use it only for that purpose.

3. How we use your information and our lawful bases

Data protection law requires us to have a lawful basis for each way we use personal information. The table below sets out what we do and why.

  • Replying to your enquiry, preparing a proposal or fee quote, and talking to you about a potential project: Contract (taking steps at your request before entering into a contract) where you are the prospective client; otherwise legitimate interests (responding to people who contact us and developing our business)

  • Delivering our services: design advice, site visits, surveys, measurements, modelling, testing and reports: Contract where you are our client; legitimate interests where you are a client’s employee, a member of the design team, a contractor or a site occupier (carrying out our work properly and safely)

  • Invoicing, collecting payment and keeping financial records: Contract and legal obligation (tax and company law)

  • Managing our relationships with architects, interior designers, clients and suppliers, including occasional updates about our work sent to business contacts: Legitimate interests (maintaining professional relationships). You can ask us to stop at any time

  • Keeping project records, and establishing, exercising or defending legal claims: Legitimate interests (protecting our business and meeting our professional obligations) and, where applicable, legal obligation

  • Keeping our website secure, preventing spam and fraud, and making sure the site works properly (essential cookies and reCAPTCHA): Legitimate interests (running a secure, functioning website)

  • Understanding how visitors use our website so we can improve it (Squarespace Analytics cookies): Consent, which you give or refuse through our cookie banner

  • Responding to reviews and messages on our Google Business Profile and social media: Legitimate interests (managing our online presence)

  • Complying with the law, regulators, insurers and professional bodies: Legal obligation and legitimate interests

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether our interests are outweighed by your rights and freedoms, and we are satisfied they are not. You can ask us for more information about this balancing exercise.

Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time, without affecting anything we did before you withdrew it.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it for automated decision-making or profiling that has legal or similarly significant effects on you.

We will not send you marketing emails unless you are a business contact we already work with, or you have asked to hear from us. Every such email will include an easy way to opt out.

4. Who we share your information with

We share personal information only where we need to, and only with organisations that are required to keep it secure and confidential. These include:

  • Squarespace, which hosts our website, receives website enquiry form submissions and provides our website analytics and cookie banner;

  • Google (Google Workspace), which provides our business email, calendar and document storage, and Google reCAPTCHA, which protects our enquiry form from spam and abuse;

  • our professional advisers, such as accountants, bookkeepers, lawyers and insurers, and the cloud accounting software we use to manage invoices and payments;

  • subcontractors and specialist partners, such as acoustic test laboratories, equipment hire companies, fellow consultants and fabricators, where they are needed to deliver part of a project. We share only the information they need for that task;

  • other members of a project team, such as the architect, interior designer, contractor or client, where sharing project correspondence and reports is a normal part of delivering the work;

  • colleagues and associates working from our studios outside the UK, where they are involved in your project (see section 6);

  • regulators, local authorities, courts, the police or other public bodies, where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend legal claims;

  • a buyer or successor business, if all or part of our business is ever sold or reorganised, in which case your information would continue to be protected in line with this policy.

5. Third-party services on our website

Our website is built on Squarespace. When you visit, your browser also connects to the following services:

  • Squarespace (hosting, content delivery, analytics and the cookie banner);

  • Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise on our enquiry form, which assesses whether a form is being submitted by a person or an automated program. To do this, Google processes technical information such as your IP address, browser and device details and how you interact with the page. Google’s use of this information is covered by the Google Privacy Policy and Google Terms of Service;

  • Spark Plugin, a design add-on that helps display parts of our site. Your browser loads a script from Spark’s servers, which means they receive standard technical information such as your IP address. We do not use it to track you.

Our website links to, but does not embed, some external services: LinkedIn, Instagram and X (our social profiles), Google Maps (our studio locations and Google Business Profile), an interactive locations map hosted by Atlist, and The Acoustic Vault, our resource library hosted on the Softr platform. If you follow these links, the other service’s own privacy policy and cookies will apply. If you create an account for The Acoustic Vault, we will use your name and email address to manage your access, on the basis of our legitimate interests in providing the resource to you.

We do not use Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, the Meta (Facebook) Pixel, LinkedIn Insight Tag or any other advertising or cross-site tracking tools on our website. If that ever changes, we will update this policy and ask for your consent first.

6. International transfers

We are based in the UK, but some of the services we use, and some of our work, involve other countries:

  • Squarespace and Google are headquartered in the United States and may process information there and in other countries where they operate;

  • we work on projects internationally, including in the United Arab Emirates (Dubai), Europe, the United States and Asia, and we have studios in Milan, New York, Dubai and Hong Kong. When you are involved in one of those projects, your information may be accessed by our team in, or shared with project partners located in, those places.

Whenever personal information is transferred outside the UK, we make sure it is protected by one of the safeguards recognised under UK data protection law, for example:

  • the destination has been found by the UK Government to provide an adequate level of protection (this includes the European Economic Area, which covers our work in Italy and the rest of the EU);

  • for transfers to the United States, the recipient is certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (the “UK-US data bridge”);

  • the recipient has signed the UK International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA), or the UK Addendum to the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, together with any additional measures that are needed;

  • in limited cases, the transfer is necessary to perform a contract with you or at your request, for example, sending your contact details to a project partner in Dubai so that they can arrange your site visit.

You can contact us for more information about the safeguards that apply to a particular transfer.

7. How long we keep your information

We keep personal information only for as long as we need it for the purposes described in this policy. Our standard retention periods are:

  • Enquiries that do not lead to a project (form submissions, emails, call notes): 2 years from our last contact

  • Client and project records (contracts, correspondence, drawings, reports, survey data): 7 years from the end of the project, in line with limitation periods for contractual and negligence claims. Where a contract is executed as a deed, or a longer period is required by contract or by our professional indemnity insurers, we keep records for up to 12 years

  • Accounting, invoicing and tax records: 6 years from the end of the financial year they relate to, as required by UK company and tax law

  • Incidental audio recordings from surveys: Deleted, or reduced to non-identifying measurement data, once the technical analysis is complete, and in any event within 3 months unless it is genuinely needed as evidence for the project report

  • Business contact details for ongoing relationships: For as long as the relationship is active, and reviewed at least every 2 years

  • Website analytics data: As set by Squarespace. The longest-lasting analytics cookies expire after 2 years

When information is no longer needed, we securely delete it or anonymise it so that it can no longer identify you.

8. How we keep your information safe

We take appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your information against loss, misuse and unauthorised access. These include:

  • using reputable, security-certified providers for our website (Squarespace) and our email and document storage (Google Workspace);

  • encrypting data in transit (our website is served over HTTPS) and at rest with our cloud providers;

  • multi-factor authentication and strong passwords on our business accounts;

  • limiting access to personal information to the people who need it for their work;

  • keeping project files in controlled, access-restricted folders, and protecting laptops and measurement equipment with passwords or encryption where possible.

No system is completely secure, but if a data breach ever affects your information in a way that is likely to put you at high risk, we will tell you and, where required, the ICO, without undue delay.

9. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

  • be informed about how we use your personal information, which is what this policy is for;

  • access the personal information we hold about you and receive a copy of it;

  • rectification, meaning we correct anything that is inaccurate or incomplete;

  • erasure, meaning we delete your information where there is no good reason for us to keep it;

  • restrict how we use your information in certain circumstances;

  • object to our use of your information where we rely on legitimate interests, and to direct marketing at any time;

  • data portability, meaning you receive information you gave us in a structured, commonly used format, or have it sent to another organisation, where we process it by automated means on the basis of consent or contract;

  • withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent (for example, for analytics cookies).

To exercise any of these rights, please email hello@auris-consultancy.com or write to us at our registered office. You do not normally have to pay a fee. We may need to ask you to confirm your identity before we act on your request. We will respond within one month, or let you know within that month if we need longer (up to two further months for complex requests).

Some rights have exceptions, for example where we need to keep records to meet a legal obligation or to defend a claim. If that applies, we will explain why.

10. Cookies

Cookies are small text files that a website stores on your device. Similar technologies, such as a browser’s local storage, work in a similar way. We use as few as we can.

10.1 Your choices

When you first visit our website, a cookie banner asks whether you are happy for us to use non-essential cookies. We do not place analytics cookies unless you choose “Accept all” or turn them on under “Manage cookies”. You can change your mind at any time by clicking “Cookie Preferences” at the bottom of any page.

You can also block or delete cookies through your browser settings. Guidance is available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Microsoft Edge. Blocking strictly necessary cookies may stop parts of the site, such as the enquiry form, from working properly.

10.2 Strictly necessary cookies

These are needed for the website to work securely and to remember your cookie choices. They do not require consent.

  • crumb: provider: Squarespace; purpose: Protects the website and enquiry form against cross-site request forgery (a type of security attack); duration: Session

  • ss_performancecookiesAllowed: provider: Squarespace; purpose: Remembers whether you have accepted analytics and performance cookies; duration: 30 days

  • ss_marketingcookiesAllowed: provider: Squarespace; purpose: Remembers your choice about marketing cookies (we do not currently use any); duration: 30 days

  • RecentRedirect: provider: Squarespace; purpose: Prevents redirect loops when a page address has changed; duration: 30 minutes

  • Test: provider: Squarespace; purpose: Checks whether your browser supports cookies; duration: Session

  • SS_HAS_LANDED: provider: Squarespace (local storage); purpose: Distinguishes a first visit from a later one so the site displays correctly; duration: Persistent

  • reCAPTCHA cookies and local storage (for example _grecaptcha): provider: Google; purpose: Distinguishes people from automated programs to protect our enquiry form from spam; duration: Up to 6 months, or persistent (local storage)

10.3 Analytics and performance cookies (only with your consent)

We use Squarespace’s built-in analytics to understand, in aggregate, how many people visit our website, which pages they view and how they found us. This helps us improve the site. These cookies are only set if you accept them.

  • ss_cvr: provider: Squarespace; purpose: Identifies unique visitors and tracks visits to the site; duration: 2 years

  • ss_cid: provider: Squarespace; purpose: Identifies unique visitors and tracks visits to the site; duration: 2 years

  • ss_cpvisit: provider: Squarespace; purpose: Identifies unique visitors and tracks visits to the site; duration: 2 years

  • ss_cvisit: provider: Squarespace; purpose: Tracks a visitor’s current session; duration: 30 minutes

  • ss_cvt: provider: Squarespace; purpose: Tracks a visitor’s current session; duration: 30 minutes

10.4 Marketing and advertising cookies

We do not use any marketing, advertising or social media tracking cookies.

More information about the cookies Squarespace uses is available in Squarespace’s cookie guide.

11. Children

Our website and services are intended for businesses and adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 16. If you believe a child has sent us their information, please contact us and we will delete it.

12. Other websites

Our website contains links to other websites and platforms, including social media, Google Maps, Atlist and Softr. We are not responsible for how those organisations handle personal information, so please read their privacy policies before sharing information with them.

13. Changes to this policy

We review this policy regularly and will update it if the way we handle personal information changes, for example, if we add a new service to our website. The “Last updated” date at the top shows when it was last changed. If we make significant changes that affect you, we will let you know directly where we can.

14. Complaints

If you have a concern about how we have handled your personal information, please contact us first at hello@auris-consultancy.com. We would welcome the chance to put things right. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days, look into it properly and let you know the outcome without undue delay.

You also have the right to complain to the UK’s data protection regulator, the Information Commission (which continues to operate as the ICO):

  • Website: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint

  • Telephone: 0303 123 1113

  • Post: ICO Head Office, 4th Floor, No.3 Circle Square, 5 Hawkshaw Street, Manchester M1 7BL

15. Contact us

If you have any questions about this policy or your personal information, we are always happy to help.

Auris Acoustic Consultancy & Design Limited Office One, 1 Coldbath Square, Farringdon, London EC1R 5HL Email: hello@auris-consultancy.com Telephone: 020 3949 1597