Privacy Policy | The Technocrati

What this policy covers

The Technocrati is a technology consulting business based in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. This policy covers two things: our website at thetechnocrati.com, and HQ, the desktop application we build for small businesses.

HQ is still being built, and we add features to it regularly. Rather than write a vague policy that would cover anything we might ever do, we describe what actually exists today and update this page as HQ grows. If a feature is not described here, it is not collecting anything from you.

The short version

Your email passwords, supplier logins and camera passwords are encrypted and stay on your own computer. We never receive them and we cannot read them.
We do not use analytics, advertising trackers, or third-party scripts. There is nothing on our site or in HQ watching what you do in order to sell it.
We do not sell your information to anyone, ever.
Two outside companies ever receive anything about you. Auth0 handles signing in, so they hold your email address and your password — we never see the password ourselves. Ring receives a masked version of your email address, and only if you choose to connect your cameras.
You can delete your account and everything attached to it, and we will tell you when it is done. See Deleting your data.

Our website

The website carries no analytics, no advertising identifiers and no tracking cookies. If you fill in the contact form or email us, we receive what you chose to send — typically your name, your email address, and your message — and we keep it so we can reply to you and keep a record of the conversation.

Like nearly every website, our web server keeps an access log. It records the internet address (IP address) of each visitor, the pages requested, the time, the browser used, and the page you arrived from. We use it to keep the site running and to investigate problems. These logs are kept for roughly fourteen days and then deleted automatically.

HQ, our desktop application

Your passwords never leave your computer

HQ can hold the passwords for your email accounts and, in future, other services you connect. These are stored in an encrypted vault on your own machine, protected by Windows’ own encryption and tied to your Windows user account. They are never uploaded, never backed up to us, and never visible to us. If your computer is lost or wiped, those passwords are gone — we have no copy to restore.

HQ uses those stored passwords only to connect directly from your computer to the service they belong to, such as your email provider.

What HQ does send out

HQ contacts the internet for the following, and nothing else:

Problem reports. When HQ hits an error or crashes, it can send us a report describing what went wrong so we can fix it. These reports are about the software, not about you, and we do not put your passwords, your message contents or your customer data in them.
News. HQ’s news feature requests articles from our server. Your request tells our server which feed you asked for and, unavoidably, your internet address, in the same way visiting any website does.
Weather. HQ requests forecasts and live conditions for the location you set. That location is sent to the weather data services HQ uses in order to get an answer back.
Claude. HQ’s assistant features connect to Anthropic’s Claude service using your own sign-in. What you type to the assistant goes to Anthropic and is handled under Anthropic’s privacy terms, not ours.

Your Technocrati account, and connecting Ring cameras

Connecting Ring security cameras to HQ requires a Technocrati account. This is not our preference — Ring requires it. Ring will only hand over access to your cameras once you have signed in to us, so that it is certain the cameras are being connected to the right person. If you never connect Ring cameras, you do not need an account and nothing in this section applies to you.

We do not handle your password. At all.

Signing in is handled for us by Auth0, an identity service owned by Okta, Inc. When you create an account or sign in, you do so on Auth0’s own page, in your own browser. Your password goes to Auth0 and never passes through us. We do not receive it, we do not store it in any form — not even a scrambled one — and we could not tell you what it is if you asked.

This is deliberate. HQ already holds your email passwords and camera passwords on your own machine, and a business that also kept a database of account passwords would be a single break-in away from a very bad day. The safest password is the one we never have.

What Auth0 tells us about you is: a permanent reference number for your account, your email address, and your name if you gave one. Auth0 receives your email address and password in order to do this, which makes them the one company besides Ring that holds anything of yours. Their handling of it is governed by Auth0’s own privacy policy, not ours.

Staying signed in

So that you do not have to sign in every morning, HQ keeps a renewal key on your own computer. It is encrypted using Windows’ own protection, tied to your Windows account, so another person signing in to the same PC cannot read it — including an administrator. It never leaves your machine except to ask Auth0 for a fresh sign-in, and signing out of HQ deletes it.

When you sign in during camera linking, that step happens on Auth0’s page. Any cookie set at that moment is Auth0’s, on Auth0’s domain, and is governed by their policy. Our own server keeps a short-lived record of the in-progress sign-in — no more than ten minutes, deleted the moment it is used or expires — so that it can hand you back to the right page afterwards. It contains no personal information.

Your Ring connection

When you connect Ring, our server keeps a record so that HQ can show you your cameras. It holds:

Ring’s access keys for your account, encrypted using AES-256-GCM. The key that unlocks them is stored in a separate file, not in the database, so a copy of the database alone is not enough to read them. They are kept until you disconnect Ring or Ring revokes them.
Ring’s own reference for your account.
A masked version of your email address, in the form d***l@example.com. This is what we show you so you can confirm you linked the right account, and it is the form Ring requires us to display. We do not send Ring your full address.
Whether the connection is working, and when we last checked. If it stops working — because you changed your Ring password, say — we keep the reason so HQ can tell you what to do about it.

The same record is used for any other service you connect to HQ later. We built it to know nothing about what Ring is, so that adding a supplier or an accounting service does not mean writing a new place to keep your keys.

Camera events

When one of your Ring cameras detects motion, Ring notifies our server so that HQ can show you the event even if HQ was closed at the time. That notification includes which device it came from and when it happened.

We want to be direct about this one: a record of when motion happened at your premises is sensitive information. It says something about when your business is busy and when it is empty. We keep these events for thirty days and then delete them automatically. We do not analyse them, profile them, or share them.

Ring’s own handling of your cameras, footage and account is governed by Ring’s privacy policy, not ours.

Deleting your data

You can have everything we hold about you deleted, and you do not have to give a reason.

Disconnecting one service

Disconnecting Ring in HQ removes Ring’s access keys from our server immediately. It cuts access everywhere at once, not just on the computer you did it from — the keys live on our server rather than on your PC precisely so that revoking them actually revokes them. A stolen laptop does not become a stolen Ring account.

Signing out

Signing out of HQ deletes the renewal key from that computer. It does not touch your account or any other machine you use.

Deleting your account entirely

Email support@thetechnocrati.com from the address on the account and ask us to delete it. We will:

Delete your connections and every access key attached to them.
Delete your stored camera events.
Delete the account itself at Auth0, so the sign-in stops existing.
Remove the same data from our backups, rather than leaving a copy behind where you cannot see it.
Email you to confirm when it is done, and keep a dated record that the request was made and completed.

We aim to complete deletion within thirty days, and usually much sooner. We keep the record of the request itself — the date and the fact of it — because being able to show that a deletion actually happened is part of doing it properly.

Two things we cannot delete, and we would rather say so than let you find out later. Footage and recordings held by Ring belong to your Ring account, not ours — delete those in the Ring app or by asking Ring. And web server access logs are overwritten on a fourteen-day cycle rather than searched through for individual lines; they contain internet addresses, not account details.

What we do with an account that goes quiet

Nothing automatic. We do not delete accounts for inactivity, and we do not want the job of guessing whether a business has closed or has simply had a slow quarter. If you want it gone, tell us and it is gone.

How long we keep things

Your account — until you ask us to delete it.
Ring access keys — until you disconnect Ring, or Ring revokes them.
Camera motion events — thirty days.
An in-progress sign-in — ten minutes at most, then deleted automatically.
The renewal key that keeps you signed in — on your own computer, until you sign out of HQ.
Web server access logs — fourteen days, then overwritten automatically. These record the internet address of anyone who reaches our server, which is ordinary for any website.
Emails and contact form messages — kept as business correspondence until they are no longer needed.

What we do not do

We do not sell, rent or trade your information.
We do not run analytics, advertising trackers, or third-party scripts.
We do not build profiles of you or your business.
We do not use your data to train artificial intelligence models.
We do not record your passwords, your full email address or your access tokens in any log file.
We do not share anything with any company other than Ring, and only what Ring’s own system requires.

Your choices

Email support@thetechnocrati.com and we will:

Tell you what we hold about you.
Correct anything that is wrong.
Delete your account and everything attached to it.
Disconnect Ring and remove the stored access keys.

You can disconnect your Ring cameras from the Ring app at any time without contacting us at all. Depending on where you live, you may have additional legal rights over your information; we will honour those requests regardless of where you live.

Children

HQ is a business tool. It is not designed for or directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes to this policy

HQ is actively being developed, so this page will change as features are added. When something material changes, we will update the date at the top of this page. We will not quietly broaden what we collect without saying so here.

Contact

The Technocrati
Lee’s Summit, Missouri, United States
support@thetechnocrati.com