Privacy notice

Who we are

Portage helps people find and track jobs in other countries. This notice explains how Bytefount Limited, of The View, General Mathenge Road, Spring Valley, Westlands, Nairobi, Kenya (postal address: P.O. Box 48620-00100, Nairobi, Kenya), handles personal data when you use it. For the processing described here we are the data controller. Write to support@bytefount.com about privacy or anything else.

A career coach or family member can open a workspace and add candidate profiles to it. The workspace owner then decides what goes into that workspace, and we handle its data on their instructions.

What we collect

Account details: your name, email address and password. Passwords are held by our sign-in service and never stored by Portage itself.

Candidate profiles: what you choose to enter, such as your headline, citizenships, current country and work authorisation, education, employment history, skills, languages, career preferences, and the countries and roles you are aiming for.

Your job search: applications you track with their notes, interviews and outcomes, saved searches, employers you follow, and job postings you paste in.

Activity: a log of changes made in your workspace, which you can read on the Activity page, and a record of each AI action (which feature, when, and how many tokens) so we can apply monthly allowances.

Billing: if you subscribe, our payment provider, the merchant of record, tells us your plan, subscription status and customer reference. We never receive your card details.

Technical data: your sign-in session and the time and outcome of requests. Our request logs record the method, path, status and duration only, never request bodies, search terms or query strings.

How we use it

To run the service: storing your profiles, matching them against job postings and showing why each job fits or does not, and keeping your application tracker.

Job matching is automated, but it only informs you. Portage shows each fit dimension with its evidence and never decides anything on your behalf, so no decision with legal or similarly significant effect is made about you by automated means.

To bill you, answer support requests, send service notices, and keep the service secure. We do not sell personal data, show advertising, or use one workspace's data to build anything for another.

AI assistance

Some features use Claude, a model provided by Anthropic, as our sub-processor. What is sent depends on the feature:

• Employer suggestions send the profile's target role titles, target country names, skill names and domains. Never your name, contact details, history or documents. This needs the workspace owner's consent, which can be withdrawn at any time on the Plan & billing page.
• Pasting a job sends the text you pasted, to read it into a job.
• Finding an employer's job board sends the employer's name and website only.
• Reading requirements from public job postings sends the posting, never anything about you.

Legal bases

Where the GDPR, the UK GDPR, the Kenya Data Protection Act 2019 or a similar law requires one, we rely on:

• Contract, for everything needed to provide the service you signed up for.
• Consent, for sending profile details to our AI provider for employer suggestions.
• Legitimate interests, for securing and improving the service, where your rights do not override them.
• Legal obligation, for tax and accounting records.

Who we share it with

Sub-processors that run parts of Portage for us: ZITADEL, self-hosted by us, for sign-in; Anthropic for the AI features above; a payment provider as merchant of record for subscriptions; and the cloud provider that hosts our servers and backups. Each is bound by contract to protect the data and use it only to provide their service to us. Anthropic's commercial terms do not allow it to train models on data we send.

An employer receives something from Portage only when you approve an application: Portage then submits the answers you approved, and nothing else, to that employer's own form. Otherwise employers receive nothing.

We disclose data to authorities only where the law requires it, and tell you when we are allowed to.

International transfers

Some sub-processors are established outside your country, including in the United States. Where data leaves the EEA, the UK or Kenya for a country without an adequacy decision, we rely on the safeguards those laws require, such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

We keep a workspace's data for as long as the workspace exists, including after a paid plan ends: a downgrade never deletes anything. Deleting a profile in the app deletes it and everything it owns straight away. When an owner deletes a workspace in Plan & billing, it and the sign-in accounts it owns are deleted straight away, and they leave our backups within a further 35 days. The activity log keeps its entries under ids that no longer lead to anyone. Our payment provider keeps billing records as long as tax law requires.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have the right:

• To access your data. Owners and admins can download everything in a workspace at any time from Plan & billing, as JSON.
• To correct it, which you can do yourself in the app.
• To have it deleted. Delete a profile in the app, or delete your whole workspace and account in Plan & billing.
• To receive it in a portable, machine-readable format. The export is exactly that.
• To object to or restrict processing, and to withdraw consent at any time.
• To complain to a supervisory authority, such as the one where you live or work, or the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner in Kenya.

Exercising your rights

Write to support@bytefount.com for anything you cannot do in the app. We may ask you to confirm your identity first, and we answer within one month.

Security

Every workspace is sealed off from every other in the database itself, with row-level security that the application cannot bypass. Access is by role, secrets are held in a secrets vault, and traffic is encrypted in transit. If a breach affects your data we will tell you without undue delay.

Cookies

Portage sets one cookie, which keeps you signed in, and remembers your colour scheme in your browser. There are no advertising or analytics cookies, so there is nothing to consent to.

Children

Portage is not intended for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data.

Changes

We publish every change here with a new version and date, and email account owners before a material change takes effect.