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Privacy Policy

Last updated 2 September 2026 · Version privacy-2026-09

Portava is a trading name of MemberAssistant Ltd, a company registered in Northern Ireland (company number NI733574) with its registered office at 102 Northland Road, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, BT48 0AS. In this policy, "Portava", "we" and "us" mean that company.

This policy explains what we do with personal data. It is written to be read, not to be survived, so it says what actually happens rather than reserving every right we could think of.

The most important thing to understand first

Portava is a platform that membership organisations — chambers of commerce, trade associations, professional bodies, networks, non-profits — use to run their own member portals. That means personal data on Portava falls into two groups, and your rights work differently depending on which group your data is in.

If you are a member of an organisation that uses Portava, that organisation decides what to collect about you and why. It is the data controller. We hold and process that data on its instructions and nothing more. We are its data processor.

In practice this means: if you want to correct your record, be removed from a directory, or be erased altogether, the organisation is who to ask — not us. We cannot make those decisions on your behalf, because they are not ours to make. Your portal's privacy settings page names who to contact. If you cannot reach them, write to us and we will help you get to the right person.

If you are a customer of ours — the person at an organisation who signed up, an administrator, someone who contacted us or asked for a demonstration — we decide what to collect about you and why. For that data we are the data controller, and everything below applies to us directly.

The rest of this policy is written in both roles, and says which is which as it goes.

What we hold, and why

Data we hold as a processor, for an organisation

When an organisation runs a portal on Portava, the portal may hold:

  • Membership records — name, email address, telephone number, job title, biography, photograph, the company or organisation someone belongs to, skills and interests, custom fields the organisation has defined
  • Sign-in accounts — email address, an encrypted password or a Google sign-in link, two-factor settings, sessions and sign-in history
  • Activity in the portal — events registered for, waiting lists joined, discussion posts and reactions, direct messages and their attachments, saved items, reading history, survey and feedback responses, answers to the organisation's own questions
  • Payments and billing — invoices, subscriptions, recorded payments, event orders and refunds
  • Assistant conversations — questions asked of the portal's AI assistant and the answers given
  • Notifications — email preferences, unsubscribes, and push-notification subscriptions where enabled
  • Staff notes — what officers of the organisation record about a member

We hold this because the organisation asked us to. The lawful basis for holding it is the organisation's to establish, not ours; for most membership bodies it is the contract with their member, or their legitimate interests in running the organisation.

We do not sell it. We do not use it to advertise. We do not use it to train AI models. We do not use one organisation's data to benefit another. Every portal's data is separated from every other portal's in the database itself, not merely by a filter in the software.

Data we hold as a controller, about our own customers

  • Your account — name, work email address, the organisation you represent, and your sign-in credentials
  • Billing — what your organisation subscribes to, what it has paid, and the invoices behind that
  • Support and correspondence — emails and messages you send us, and our replies
  • Technical records — error reports and diagnostic logs generated when something goes wrong, and basic, aggregated analytics about how the product is used
  • Website activity — if you agree to it on our marketing site, how you found us and which pages you read, including through advertising platforms. See Cookies below

Our lawful bases are:

  • Contract — everything needed to provide the service you are paying for.
  • Legal obligation — financial records we are required to keep.
  • Legitimate interests — keeping the product secure, working out what is broken, and understanding which parts of it are used. We have considered whether this is fair to you, and you can object; see Your rights.
  • Consent — analytics and advertising cookies on our marketing website, and marketing emails if you ask for them. You can withdraw consent at any time, as easily as you gave it, and doing so does not affect anything done before you withdrew it.

Who else is involved

Running Portava means using other companies. Each one is contractually bound to protect the data, to use it only for the service they provide us, and not for their own purposes. These are our sub-processors:

  • Vercel — Hosts the application; stores uploaded files; basic usage analytics
    What they can see: Data passing through the application; uploaded files
  • Neon — Hosts the database
    What they can see: All portal data at rest
  • Stripe — Takes payments
    What they can see: Payer name, email, and payment details. Card numbers go directly to Stripe and never touch our systems
  • Resend — Sends email — both our own and organisations' campaigns
    What they can see: Recipient addresses and message content
  • Sentry — Reports errors so we can fix them
    What they can see: Technical diagnostics, which can incidentally include a user identifier
  • OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — Power the AI assistant and its search
    What they can see: Only the portal content and question involved in answering one query
  • Google — Optional sign-in, and address look-up when typing an address
    What they can see: Sign-in identity; the partial address being typed
  • HubSpot — Customer-relationship sync — only where an organisation connects its own account
    What they can see: The member and company records that organisation chooses to sync
  • HubSpot — Website analytics and advertising, on our marketing site only, and only with your consent
    What they can see: Pages visited on portava.ai and an advertising identifier. No application or member data reaches them

We may also share personal data where the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim. If Portava is ever sold or merges with another business, personal data would transfer with it, and we would tell the organisations affected before it happened.

Sending an assistant question to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google does not give them the right to train on it. We use their business terms, under which submitted content is not used for model training.

Google sign-in

Signing in with Google is optional. You can always use an email address and password instead, and nothing in Portava requires a Google account.

If you do choose it, Google asks your permission and then tells us three things about you: your name, your email address, and your profile picture. That is the whole list. We do not request access to your Gmail, your Google Drive, your contacts, your calendar, or anything else in your Google account, and we could not read them if we wanted to.

We use those three things for one purpose: to create your Portava account and sign you in. Your name and picture appear on your profile in your portal, exactly as they would if you had typed them in yourself. Your email address identifies your account and is where we send things like password resets.

We do not sell this data. We do not use it for advertising. We do not use it to train AI models. We do not share it with anyone beyond the service providers listed above who help us run Portava, and they may only use it to provide those services to us.

Portava's use of information received from Google APIs follows the Google API Services User Data Policy (https://developers.google.com/terms/api-services-user-data-policy), including its Limited Use requirements.

You can disconnect Portava from your Google account at any time from your Google account's security settings. To have the data deleted, ask your portal administrator to erase your membership, or write to us at if you are our own customer.

Separately, when you type an address into Portava, we use Google's address look-up to suggest completions. That sends the partial address you are typing, and nothing about who you are.

How the AI assistant handles data

The assistant is the part of Portava people are most often uneasy about, so this section is more specific than it strictly needs to be.

The assistant can only answer from content a person is already allowed to see. That is enforced before anything reaches the AI model, by what gets indexed in the first place rather than by filtering afterwards. Content with restricted visibility — tier-limited events, hidden events, members' own answers, private notes — is never indexed at all, so there is nothing for the assistant to retrieve even in error. Content that is later unpublished, hidden or deleted is removed from the index.

There is no public assistant. Both assistant surfaces require a signed-in account with membership of that portal, and refuse everything else identically so that an outsider cannot use the refusals to work out what exists.

The assistant cannot reach across portals. It cannot answer questions about a person other than the one asking, because the identity of the asker is fixed by the system when the conversation starts and is not something the AI can change.

Cookies

Full detail, including the complete list of cookies and their durations, is in our cookie policy at portava.ai/cookies. The short version:

  • Our marketing website (portava.ai) uses essential, analytics and advertising cookies. The analytics and advertising ones are set only if you agree to them, and you can change your mind at any time through the cookie settings link in the site footer.
  • The Portava application uses essential cookies only — keeping you signed in, and two operational cookies used inside our own admin console. There are no advertising cookies, no retargeting cookies and no third-party trackers anywhere in the application, and no member is followed across other websites. The application holds organisations' records about their members, and that is not a place for advertising technology.

How long we keep things

  • Membership and portal data — for as long as the organisation keeps its portal with us, and as directed by the organisation. When an organisation leaves Portava, its data is deleted after a short wind-down window during which it can take an export.
  • Financial records — invoices, subscriptions and recorded payments are kept for as long as tax and company law requires, normally six years. This applies even after someone asks to be erased; see below for what happens then.
  • Support correspondence — kept while it is useful, then deleted.
  • Error diagnostics — kept for a short period and then discarded automatically.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to know what is held about you, to get a copy, to have mistakes corrected, to object to certain processing, to ask for erasure, and to complain.

If you are a member of an organisation's portal, exercise these rights with that organisation, because it is the controller of your data. Two things are already built in to help:

  • Take a copy of your data at any time. Your portal's privacy settings page has an export you can run yourself, without asking anyone. It covers every category of personal data the portal holds about you. Where a category exists but is not reproduced in the download — staff notes are the only one — it is still named and counted, so you know it exists and can ask for it. We consider an export that quietly omits something worse than no export at all.
  • Erasure is handled by your organisation, deliberately, and is not a button you can press by accident.

When an organisation does erase a member, what happens is this: identifying details are scrubbed rather than the record destroyed. That is not an evasion. Deleting the record outright would also delete every discussion the person started, taking other people's replies with it, and would destroy invoices the organisation is legally required to keep. So the identifying content is overwritten, the rows that must survive are kept but cut loose from the person, and things that describe only what one person did — saved items, reading history, notifications, assistant conversations — are deleted outright. The result is an organisation that can still balance its books and still has its discussions, and cannot tell you who any of it was. Where somebody is a member of more than one portal, erasing them from one does not touch the sign-in account they use for the others.

If you are our own customer, write to us at and we will action it. We will respond within one month.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office as a data controller, under registration reference ZC236980.

To complain, contact us first — we would rather fix it. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. If your complaint is about how an organisation runs its portal, the ICO will treat that organisation as the controller.

Where data goes

Our hosting and database providers store data in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area. Some of the services above — notably the AI providers, Stripe, Resend and Sentry — process data in the United States. Where that happens, transfers are covered by the UK's approved safeguards: the International Data Transfer Agreement, or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK Addendum, together with the additional measures those require.

Keeping data safe

Every portal's data is isolated at the database level, enforced by the database itself rather than by application code that somebody has to remember to write. Passwords are stored hashed, never in a readable form. Credentials for connected services are encrypted before storage. Data is encrypted in transit.

A small number of our operations staff can enter a portal to investigate a problem. That capability is restricted to our platform administrators, expires automatically after an hour, refuses administrative changes while it is in use, and is logged when it starts and ends. It does not currently require the organisation's prior approval, and we would rather tell you that than imply a control we have not built. If your organisation needs support access to be gated on its own authorisation, ask us — it is a change we can make.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not claim otherwise. If a breach occurs that puts people at risk, we will tell the ICO within 72 hours and tell the organisations affected without delay, so that they can tell their members.

Changes to this policy

We will update this page when what we do changes. Every version carries a date and a version marker at the top, so you can tell whether what you read before is what applies now. For changes that materially affect people, we will tell the organisations using Portava rather than relying on you to re-read the page.

Contact us

Write to , or to MemberAssistant Ltd, 102 Northland Road, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, BT48 0AS.

If you are a member of an organisation's portal and your question is about your own record, contact that organisation first — they hold the decisions. We will always help you find the right person if you are stuck.