Privacy.

What is captured at an event

• Room audio → text. The capture device records the room in ~20-second chunks, sends each to a transcription model, stores the text, and discards the audio. No recording of anyone's voice is retained or can be played back.
• Call audio, when the organiser turns it on. For a web call or a hybrid event, the capture device can also take the audio its own computer is playing (a call in a browser tab, or the whole screen's sound), so people joining remotely are transcribed too. It is treated exactly like room audio: transcribed, then discarded. The screen picture that the browser shares alongside it is never recorded or sent. People on the call don't see the room's QR code, so the organiser is responsible for telling them they are being transcribed.
• Your display name — whatever you typed when you scanned the QR. It can appear on the big screen next to your contributions.
• What you did on your phone — comments, votes, topics you proposed, and the order you ranked things in.
• Dots and “I'll work on this”, if the host runs a dot round. The host can open a short round where each person places three dots on the topics they think matter most. Your dots are never shown with your name: the big screen and its live feed, the recap page, the recap email and the take-home document show only how many dots each topic got and how many people placed them, and the result is hidden until the host reveals it. The top topics can then become actions that people sign up to. As with any sign-up, the organiser always sees who signed up (the display name, and any email you gave) in their follow-up list. The box “Show my name in the write-up” only decides whether your name is also printed in the take-home document and shown on the organiser's view of the recap page. Whether you tick it or not, your name never appears on the big screen or its live feed, the public recap page, a share link or the recap email. Unticking it withdraws your name from the document and that view. The email field works as it does elsewhere on this page, and is never required.
• An anonymous device key, stored in your own browser, so the same phone is recognised for the length of the event. It is not linked to you and does not follow you to another event.
• An email address, only if you type one — to join a follow-up action, to receive the summary, or to subscribe to updates. Never required to take part. If you leave one to receive the summary, the organiser can add it to the event's guest list so the recap email reaches you (see below).

We do not identify who said what in the transcript. There is no speaker separation, so a transcript records that something was said in the room, not who said it.

If you registered yourself for an event

Some events have their own public page where you can put yourself on the guest list before the room opens. Only your name and email address are required — your organisation, role, LinkedIn profile URL, and short answers about what you're hoping to get out of the event or could offer it are all optional, and the page tells you so before you fill anything in.

When you register, we email you a confirmation with the event's date, time and place, links to add it to your calendar, and a calendar invite attached — and, for an online event, the joining link and instructions. It is sent once, through our email provider (Resend), and carries an unsubscribe link. Correcting your details on the same page later does not send it again.

If you share a LinkedIn URL, we use it to look up your public profile — headline, current role, location, your profile photo, and similar — with an automated lookup tool (Apify). We keep a copy of the photo with your registration, because the link LinkedIn serves it from stops working after a few weeks. It is never published on this site and never sent back to LinkedIn, and it reaches other guests only if you ask us to, below. Leaving the field blank costs you nothing: the rest of registration works exactly the same.

If you tick “introduce me to other guests”, we may show your name, organisation, role, your two answers, your public professional details and your profile photo to other people registered for the same event, in a short document suggesting who they might want to find, and we email that document to you before the event — it carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing stops every email Nexus would ever send you. The photo is there for one reason: so somebody holding the document can recognise you in the room. Your email address is never shared with the other guests. The box is unticked by default; leave it alone and nothing about you reaches another guest. It also works the other way round: if you do not tick it, you will not receive suggestions about anyone else either. Those introductions are written by an AI model too — the same one described below, through the same provider (OpenRouter), from the same details, again without your email address and without your photo: the model is told who you are and never shown your face. It writes a sentence or two about why you and another guest might want to talk, and something they could open with, for them to read and repeat.

How the photo reaches an email. Email cannot carry a picture the way a printed document can, so your photo is fetched by the reader's mail app from a long, unguessable link. Anyone who has that exact link can open it — it is unlisted rather than secret — and it shows a photograph and nothing else: no name, no email address, nothing that says who you are. It stops working the moment you untick the box, or the event is deleted.

The briefing is written by an AI model. To produce it, what you gave us — your name, organisation and role, both free-text answers, and anything the LinkedIn lookup found — is sent along with every other registrant's to a language model (through OpenRouter, the same provider described below), which writes a short private briefing for the organiser about who is coming. Your email address is deliberately not included, and neither is your profile photo. The briefing exists only as a document for the organiser preparing the event; it is stored with the event and dies with it.

It is deleted when the event is deleted — a registration lives in the same list as an organiser-uploaded guest, described opposite, and dies with the same event. The single exception is unsubscribing: if you ask not to be emailed, we keep your address on a separate list so that request outlives this event too.

If an organiser added you to a guest list

An event's organiser can give us a list of the people the event is for — an email address, and optionally a name and an employer. They can type it in or upload it, and they can mark who actually turned up. The list is used to prepare the organiser's own briefing about who is coming and, for anyone who opts in, the guest introductions described opposite.

This is the one thing on this page that may hold your details without you having given them to us. The organiser chose to add you and is responsible for being entitled to: we hold that list on their behalf, for their event, and it is used for nothing else. We do not add it to any mailing list, we do not use it to contact you about Nexus, and it is never combined with another event's list.

After the event, if the organiser marks you as having attended and confirms that you did, we email you the event's write-up — a short summary with the full document attached — once, on the organiser's behalf.The organiser may choose to attach the event's transcript as well: the unedited text of what the room's microphone picked up, which does not say who was speaking. Replies go to the organiser, and the email carries an unsubscribe link. Nobody on the list who was not marked as attended is sent it. The email never names an attendee. The write-up document names a person only if they ticked the box to be named when signing up to an action, as described above.

It is deleted when the event is deleted, with the same single exception as opposite: an address that has unsubscribed stays on a separate suppression list so that request can be honoured. The organiser can also remove any single person from the list at any time, and so can we — ask either of us. Write to hello@fordcastle.com.

Unsubscribing

Every email Nexus sends carries an unsubscribe link. It is not scoped to the event that prompted the email — it applies to everything Nexus sends you, from any event, present or future. What we keep against your address is when the request happened and why — today that is always because you asked to be unsubscribed, though the same list can also record a bounce or a complaint we noticed. We keep it so the request can be honoured, including after the event it came from is deleted.

Who else sees it

Nexus is built on a small number of services, and this is all of them:

• OpenRouter — transcription, topic extraction, moderation, the written recap, the organiser's pre-event briefing about who registered, and the introductions sent to guests who asked for them (see above: the registration details and anything the LinkedIn lookup found, but never an email address and never a photo). Text is sent for processing; it is not used to train models.
• Apify — looks up the public LinkedIn profile behind a URL you or an organiser shared, only when one was given. Nothing else about you is sent to it.
• Resend — transmits every email Nexus sends: registration confirmations, the guest introductions we send to people who asked for them, the event write-up sent to guests an organiser marked as attended (with its document attached, and the transcript if the organiser chose to include it), and account emails such as a password reset or the link back to a free session. For each one it sees the recipient address and the content of that email, and — for the introductions and write-ups — the organiser's own address, which we set as the reply-to so that replying reaches them rather than us. The suppression list above is checked in our own systems before anything is ever handed to Resend; the unsubscribe link in the email points back to our own site, not to Resend.
• Supabase — the database everything is stored in.
• Google Cloud / Firebase App Hosting — where the site itself runs.
• Stripe — payments, when they are switched on. Card details never reach us.

An event's recap page. The organiser chooses who can open it: anyone with the event's code, or only their own organisation. Either way it shows the topics, numbers and written summary, never who said what in the transcript or the names behind comments. The public page and any share link name no one. The organiser's own view of the page also shows the name of anyone who ticked “Show my name in the write-up” when signing up to an action. Nobody but the organiser can open the page while the write-up is still being reviewed. The organiser can also send a private link to the recap page to people of their choosing; anyone holding that link can open it without an account. When creating the link the organiser may choose to include the event's transcript: the unedited text of what the room's microphone picked up, which does not say who was speaking. The organiser can turn a link off at any time.

We do not sell anything to anyone, and there is no advertising or third-party analytics on this site.

How long it is kept

Indefinitely, until the organisation deletes it. There is no automatic expiry. An event's organiser can delete it outright from their portal, which removes the transcript, the topics, the comments, the participants and any published recap — permanently, with no backup and no undo.

We would rather say this plainly than imply a retention policy we do not yet operate. If you attended an event and want your contributions removed, the organiser can do it, and so can we.

An uploaded guest list — including a self-registration, which lives in the same table — is the one exception, and it is deliberately narrower: it lives and dies with its event, and deleting the event deletes the list.

Attendees, and the room's own rules

A published recap follows whatever the room agreed. Where an event is run under the Chatham House Rule, our recaps name convenors and sponsors only — no attendee name and no employer appears, and contributions are attributed by role. The one exception is a person who ticked “Show my name in the write-up” when signing up to an action in a dot round: their name can appear in the take-home document and on the organiser's view of the recap page. That is our default unless an event says otherwise.

The organiser is responsible for telling the room it is being captured. The join screen says so too, before you enter a name.

A person here reads the AI's write-up

While Nexus is in testing, someone at Fordcastle reads what the AI made of an event before it can be handed to anyone — the take-home document and the guest introductions, usually within 24 hours. It is a quality check on a machine-written summary of a real room, and it means a human here sees that summary. It is temporary, and it does not extend to listening: there is no audio to listen to.

Four things we keep after an event is gone

The rest of this page says data dies with its event. These four deliberately do not, and it would be misleading to leave them out:

• The email address behind a free first session. Anyone can run one event without an account. We keep the address you gave specifically to enforce “one per person” — so it has to outlive the event, and it survives even if that event is deleted. We also send it one email when the session is created — a link back to your event, so closing the browser does not lose it. Beyond that it is used for nothing else: no mailing list, no marketing.
• An address you gave us on purpose, on a recap page. If you asked to be kept posted, or enquired about running Nexus at your own event, that is Fordcastle's own list rather than the event's, and it stays until you ask us to remove it. The two are kept separate from each other and from any guest list, and neither is ever merged into the other.
• Your address, if you asked for product updates when you signed up. That is a tick box on the sign-up form. It starts unticked, it is not required to sign up, and saying no changes nothing about your account. It is Fordcastle's own list, kept apart from the two above and from every guest list, and every email it sends carries a one-click way out.
• An address that has unsubscribed. We keep the address and when and why the request happened, so it is honoured for every event, not just the one it came from — including one that has since been deleted.

To be removed from either, write to hello@fordcastle.com.

Your rights

You can ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. If you have a Nexus login you can change your own name and password from your profile at any time.

Write to hello@fordcastle.com.