Privacy Notice

Cohort is a software studio based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This notice covers cohort.ae and client.cohort.ae, the portal we give clients we are already working with.

For anything in this notice, write to us — the address is at the bottom of the page.

The contact form is the only thing that collects anything. If you fill it in we receive your name, email address, phone number (including the country code you select), your message, and your company name if you choose to give one.

One more value goes with it, and it is not a box you filled in. When you press send, the page works out where you arrived from and sends that along with the rest. If the link you followed carried campaign tags in its web address — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, the tags we put on our own links and listings — those are what is sent. If it did not, your browser tells the page which site linked you, and we keep the site’s name only: google.com, not the page or the search you typed. If there is neither, the value is the word “direct”.

It tells us which of our own links actually brings people here, which is the only thing we use it for. It is worked out once, at the moment you submit — not while you browse — and it is stored with your enquiry and kept for as long as the enquiry is.

We use all of it to reply to you and to work out whether we are a good fit for what you need. We do not sell it, we do not use it for marketing, and submitting the form does not sign you up to anything.

Nothing tracks you while you browse. No analytics, no advertising pixels, no session recording, no third-party scripts of any kind. Browsing cohort.ae sets no cookies at all, and nothing follows you from one page to the next.

The one exception is a map: if the contact page is showing an embedded map, that frame is loaded from Google, and Google will see your IP address and may set its own cookies. The rest of the page does not depend on it.

We say “while you browse” deliberately, because the flat claim would be easier to write than to keep. The referral value described above is the one thing here that a reasonable person would call tracking, and the honest description of it is narrow rather than absent: it is read once, when you submit the form, from the address of the page you are on and the referring site your browser volunteers, and it goes nowhere except into your enquiry.

We do not store your IP address alongside your enquiry. We use it for two narrow things, both about stopping abuse rather than about you:

The contact form allows five submissions per hour from one address. Doing that needs a counter, and the counter is keyed on your address. A nightly clean-up removes it once it is more than a day old, so it is gone within about forty-eight hours of your last submission. Repeated failed attempts against our sign-in pages record an address with a strike count; the same nightly job clears it once the last attempt is more than seven days old, so within about eight days.

If a submission is rate-limited or fails with an error, your address appears in our server logs, which our hosting provider keeps for a limited period.

This site does not accept job applications and has no way to receive a CV. There is no careers page, no application form and no upload — nothing here collects an employment history, an emirate, a salary expectation or a document about you.

If you write to us about a job through the contact form or by email, we hold what you chose to send us, on the same terms as any other enquiry described above: kept until we delete it, and removed if you ask.

The client portal holds what running a project needs: your name, email address, and phone number if you gave one; the projects, documents, invoices and payments belonging to your organisation; and any files we share with you or you send us.

Some actions are recorded as evidence, and this is worth knowing. When you sign an agreement, approve a preview or accept a delivery, we record the name you typed, the exact wording you were shown, the time, your IP address and your browser’s user-agent string. That is deliberate: it is what lets either of us prove later what was actually agreed. It is kept for that reason and not used for anything else.

We also keep a log of what happened on each project — documents shared, emails sent, invoices issued, sign-ins. Cohort itself cannot change or remove an entry once it is written: the database grants the application permission to add rows and read them, and no permission to alter or delete one. That is a real restriction rather than a habit, but it is not magic — someone with direct administrative access to the database could lift it, and we would rather say so than claim an impossibility. It exists so that a disagreement about what happened has an answer.

When we send you an email — an invitation, an invoice, a reminder — we keep a record of it: the address it went to, the subject, what kind of message it was, whether it was delivered, and when. We keep it so that “we never received that” is a question with an answer.

That record has no automatic expiry. Nothing deletes it on a schedule, so an address we have written to stays in it until we remove it by hand. Deleting a client unlinks their delivery records from them but does not remove the rows, and the recipient address is part of the row. Ask us and we will delete yours.

Email is sent through Resend, which keeps its own delivery log on its own schedule.

Cohort runs on DigitalOcean, in their Frankfurt, Germany region. The application, the database and the file storage are all there.

That means your data is processed outside the UAE. We say so plainly rather than leaving it to be inferred: DigitalOcean has no UAE region, and Frankfurt is the closest one that offers everything this system needs in a single place.

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for advertising. It reaches three companies, each for one job:

Google is a fourth, but only in one place: the embedded map on the contact page, if one is being shown.

Beyond that, we disclose personal data only where we are legally required to.

Different records are kept for different lengths of time. Two are kept deliberately and indefinitely — client and financial records, and the activity log, for the reasons given below. Two more are kept indefinitely because nothing deletes them: contact enquiries, and the record of emails we sent. That is a gap rather than a decision, and it is stated here rather than left to be discovered.

The times below are ceilings, not averages: the job that does the deleting runs once a night, so a record goes at the first nightly run after its window has passed rather than at the instant it passes.

Write to us and we will tell you what we hold about you, correct it if it is wrong, or delete it. There is no form to fill in.

Two honest limits on deletion, because a promise we cannot keep is worse than a clear one:

Some records we are not able to delete, and we will say which. Payments are held by Stripe under their own retention rules and our access to them does not include deleting them; email delivery logs are held by Resend the same way. When we delete a client or a project, we write down exactly what was left behind in those systems, so that this answer is a record rather than a recollection.

And some records we should not delete: an invoice, a signed agreement, or an entry in the activity log is evidence of a commercial relationship, and removing it would destroy something that protects both sides. We will tell you when that applies rather than quietly keeping it.

This site sets no cookies. The client portal and the staff panel set one when you sign in, so that you stay signed in; it holds a signed session token and nothing else, is marked HttpOnly and Secure so no script can read it, and it expires. Signing out clears it and revokes the session.

Questions about this notice, or a request about your data:

info@cohort.ae

Last updated 29 August 2026.