Privacy Policy | Optimal Beam

By accessing and using this website and related services, you agree to our Privacy Policy. You should review our Privacy Policy and our Terms and Conditions carefully and immediately discontinue using our website if you do not agree to these terms.

In this Privacy Policy, ‘us’ ‘we’ or ‘our’ which refers to Optimal Beam. We are committed to respecting your privacy. Our Privacy Policy sets outs out how we collect, use, store and disclose your personal information. By providing personal information to us, you consent to our collection, use and disclosure of your personal information in accordance with this Privacy. We may change our Privacy Policy intermittently by publishing changes to it on our website. We encourage you to periodically check our website to be aware of our most current Privacy Policy.

Personal information refers to any information that is unique to an individual such as name, address, email address, phone number, IP address and other information that can reasonably identify an individual. It may also include financial information, including your credit card information.

Optimal Beam plugin for ChatGPT and compatible clients

The plugin provides beam calculations and steel-catalog lookups without an Optimal Beam account. It receives the inputs included in tool requests, such as beam dimensions, supports, loads, material and section properties, brief section labels and input assumptions, catalog searches, and temporary result references. It does not request access to your saved account models, subscription or payment information, passwords, or complete conversation history. Avoid putting personal or confidential information in labels or catalog searches.

We use these inputs to perform the requested calculation or lookup and return results to the calling client. Our plugin runs on Railway. Catalog requests and calculation requests pass through our website hosting on HostGator; calculations are processed by our Microsoft Azure-hosted solver. These providers process data as part of delivering and protecting the service. OpenAI or another client provider separately handles the conversation and returned results under its own privacy terms and controls.

The plugin application keeps calculation and comparison snapshots in server memory for up to 30 minutes. They may be removed sooner when capacity is reached or the service restarts. The application does not write these snapshots to a database or disk, log tool request bodies, or use them for advertising. Each temporary result has an unguessable bearer reference: someone who receives that reference can retrieve the result until it expires, so do not share it with others unless you intend to share the result.

The 30-minute period applies to the plugin's temporary result cache, not to client conversation history, browser history, or hosting providers' operational records. Hosting providers may keep technical access and security records, including request times, network addresses, paths, status codes and catalog query strings. Beam calculations are sent in encrypted POST request bodies, rather than URL query strings. Provider log and backup retention varies by service; it is not covered by the cache expiry.

Choosing Open in Optimal Beam opens the displayed model on our website using an encoded URL fragment. That fragment is removed by the import page before website analytics starts; it may still appear in your browser history or a link you share. The plugin does not save the model to an account automatically. Once you use the website, its storage, account and analytics practices described in this policy apply.

For questions or requests to access or delete information processed by Optimal Beam, contact [email protected]. Include the approximate time and service used, but do not email confidential model details or bearer references. Temporary plugin snapshots expire automatically. Requests concerning your ChatGPT conversation or another client's records should also be made through that provider's controls.

What personal information do we collect?

We may collect the following types of personal information:

name;
mailing or street address;
email address;
employment details;
telephone number and other contact details;
credit card information;
your device ID, device type, geo-location information, computer and connection information, statistics on page views, traffic to and from the sites, ad data, IP address and standard web log information;
details of the products and services we have provided to you or that you have enquired about, including any additional information necessary to deliver those products and services and respond to your enquiries;
any additional information relating to you that you provide to us directly through our website or app or indirectly through your use of our website or through other websites or accounts from which you permit us to collect information;
information you provide to us through customer surveys; and/or
any other personal information that may be required in order to facilitate your dealings with us.

We may collect these types of personal information either directly from you, or from third parties (such as your company if they set you up with a user account). We may collect this information when you:

register on our website;
communicate with us through correspondence or when you share information with us from other social applications, services or websites;
interact with our sites, services, content and advertising; and/or
invest in our business or enquire as to a potential purchase in our business.

Why do we collect, use, and disclose personal information?

Your privacy is extremely important to us and we spend a lot of time and thought ensuring your data is kept safe and secure.

In order to provide, improve, and protect the Optimal Beam service, we may collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information for the following purposes:

to enable you to access and use our website and services;
to operate, protect, improve and optimise our website and services, business and our users experience, such as to perform analytics, conduct research and for advertising and marketing;
to send you service, support and administrative messages, reminders, technical notices, updates, security alerts, and information requested by you;
to administer rewards, surveys, contests, or other promotional activities or events sponsored or managed by us or our business partners; and/or
to comply with our legal obligations, resolve any disputes that we may have with any of our users, and enforce our agreements with third parties;

In addition to the information you directly provide, we may also collect information about how users interact with our service. For example, we might collect information about how far you scroll on a page, or when you click certain buttons. This information is collected expressly to improve the user experience, as well as calculate interesting information for users, such as the average time taken to complete a calculation.

When you start a paid subscription, we record the selected plan, billing term, signup progress, checkout outcome, and Team seat quantity when applicable. After you log in, create an account, submit signup or Team billing details, or verify an email through Google, we can associate this progress with your provided email to help you complete setup. These contact details are available to authorized administrators and are not included in Google Analytics events. You can ask us to stop setup follow-up by contacting [email protected].

Do we use your personal information for marketing?

Occasionally we may send you important email updates about our services. We’ll try to only provide information you need in these emails and you’ll be able to unsubscribe at any time from product update emails. All communication will be sent in accordance with the Spam Act and Privacy Act.

To whom do we disclose your personal information?

We may share information for the purposes described in this privacy policy, but we won’t sell it to advertisers or other third parties.

our employees and related bodies corporate;
third party suppliers and service providers (including providers for the operation of our websites and/or our business or in connection with providing our products and services to you – for example: our customer relationship management software, email marketing software, and help desk software);
professional advisers, dealers and agents;
account administrators from your company may have access and control of your account if it is associated to the organisation’s account. Please review your company’s internal policies if you have questions about this;
payment systems operators (eg merchants receiving card payments);
our existing or potential agents, business partners or partners;
anyone to whom our assets or businesses (or any part of them) are transferred;
specific third parties authorised by you to receive information held by us; and/or
other persons, including government agencies, regulatory bodies and law enforcement agencies, or as required, authorised or permitted by law – we will not provide your information to these agencies unless a court order requires us to do so, and will inform you should such a request be made unless we’re legally prevented from doing so.

Using our website and cookies

We may collect personal information about you when you use and access our website. While we do not use browsing information to identify you personally, we may record certain information about your use of our website, such as which pages you visit, the time and date of your visit and the IP address assigned to your computer.

We may use ‘cookies’ or other similar tracking technologies on our website that help us track your website usage and remember your preferences. Cookies are small files that store information on your computer, mobile phone or other device. They enable the entity that put the cookie on your device to recognise you across different websites, services, devices and/or browsing sessions. You can disable cookies through your internet browser but our websites may not work as intended for you if you do so.

We may also use cookies to enable us to collect data that may include personal information. For example, where a cookie is linked to your account, it will be considered personal information under the Privacy Act. We will handle any personal information collected by cookies in the same way that we handle all other personal information as described in this Privacy Policy.

You have the right to ask us not to process your information for marketing purposes. You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by checking or unchecking certain boxes on the forms we use to collect your data. You can also exercise the right at any time by contacting us at [email protected]

Security and data storage

Optimal Beam is securely hosted using Hostgator’s infrastructure. This facility is physically secure, designed to be resilient to failure, and employs security best practice and secure encryption for data storage.

Information (including personal information) may also be stored locally on your device using mechanisms such as browser web storage (including HTML5) and application data caches.

We may hold your personal information in either electronic or hard copy form. We take reasonable steps to protect your personal information from misuse, interference and loss, as well as unauthorised access, modification or disclosure and we use a number of physical, administrative, personnel and technical measures to protect your personal information. For example:

Only specific staff members of Optimal Beam may access the data we store on your behalf;
Sensitive information such as passwords are only stored in encrypted form.

Data subject rights

As Optimal Beam services visitors globally, we strive to ensure that data compliance is met in accordance with GDPR regulations for EU residents, and endeavour to extend these rights to users in other locales where practical. (Chapter 3 of the GDPR) each Data Subject has eight rights. These are:

The right to be informed; This means anyone processing your personal data must make clear what they are processing, why, and who else the data may be passed to. We endeavour to make these purposes clear in this Privacy Policy.
The right of access; this is your right to see what data is held about you by a Data Controller. If you would like a full copy of the data associated with your account, please write to [email protected] and we will provide it to you as soon as possible.
The right to rectification; the right to have your data corrected or amended if what is held is incorrect in some way. We endavour to provide self-service for these purposes, for example, by allowing users to edit their profile information in the Optimal Beam settings, however if you feel information about you is incorrect and are unable to correct it yourself, please contact us at [email protected] with details of the data you would like changed. We may also need to verify your identity when you request your personal information. If you think that any personal information we hold about you is inaccurate, please contact us and we will take reasonable steps to ensure that it is corrected.
The right to erase; under certain circumstances you can ask for your personal data to be deleted. This is also called ‘the Right to be Forgotten’. This would apply if the personal data is no longer require for the purpose it was collected for, or your consent for processing of that data has been withdrawn, or the personal data has been unlawfully processed. Upon account closure, you may request complete deletion of all associated data. Data will be deleted from our live system as soon as is practical, however this may persist for a reasonable period of time in backups. Please note that this data removal includes all data created and uploaded by you but does not include our financial account-keeping records on you which we will maintain for future reference.
The right to restrict processing; this gives the Data Subject the right to ask for a temporary halt to processing of personal data, such as in the case where a dispute or legal case has to be concluded, or the data is being corrected. You can exercise this right at any time by contacting us at [email protected]
The right to data portability; a Data Subject has the right to ask for any data supplied directly to the Data Controller by him or her, to be provided in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format. If you choose to exercise this right, we will endeavour to provide your data in these formats in a reasonable time frame. Please note that if your data is part of a shared organisation account (for example, project data), we may seek organisational approval for that part of the data to be extracted.
The right to object; the Data Subject has the right to object to further processing of their data which is inconsistent with the primary purpose for which it was collected, including profiling, automation, and direct marketing.
Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling; Data Subjects have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing.

Making a complaint

If you believe we have breached the Privacy Act, or you wish to make a complaint about the way we have handled your personal information, you can contact us using the details set out below. Please include your name, email address and/or telephone number and clearly describe your complaint. We will acknowledge your complaint and respond to you regarding your complaint within a reasonable period of time. If you think that we have failed to resolve the complaint satisfactorily, we will provide you with information about the further steps you can take.

Contact us

For further information about our Privacy Policy or practices, or to access or correct your personal information, or make a complaint, please contact us at [email protected].