Privacy Policy

Section 1 Scope of This Privacy Policy

This policy applies whenever the website gathers, stores, changes, or passes on personal data about a natural person. It covers a visitor who simply browses the public pages, a client who submits a support enquiry through the contact form, a studio producer who books a pipeline review, and an artist who sends a resume or a portfolio in search of a role in the production line.

The scope extends to data collected by the developer HappyCastle, by the registered company named above, and by any operator that runs the technology for us under a formal instruction. The page does not cover the practices of unrelated websites that we link to as a courtesy, because each one carries its own separate notice. Where this policy and a specific contract with a client overlap, the written contract governs the relationship for the work it describes.

The web address in this policy is the primary channel. When we gather data through a paper form at an exhibition, or through a booth at a trade event, the same rules in this document apply to that offline collection as well.

Section 2 The Company That Operates This Site

The site is operated by and on behalf of the following legal entity:

HAPPY CASTLE ANIMATION TECHNOLOGY CO., LIMITED Rm 1101D 11/F Lippo Sun Plaza, 28 Canton Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong (HK)

The registered business sits within the professional, scientific and technical services sector, with a special focus on computer systems design and related services. Its daily work covers computer integrated systems design for animation, interactive media, and engineering tooling. The developer name HappyCastle is used as the friendly identity under which clients meet the studio.

We answer mail and telephone from Monday to Friday during working hours. Render farm supervision continues around the clock, but a human reply to a privacy request may arrive only on a working day. Full contact details, including the email address, appear near the end of this page so that you never have to search for them.

Section 3 Information That We Collect

We keep the volume of data we ask for small, because a light footprint is easier to protect. The categories below describe the kinds of detail that may come into our records under different circumstances.

• Identity and contact details. Your name, the name of your studio or employer, an email address, and a telephone number. We collect these mainly when you fill in the contact form, book a meeting, or phone the studio line.
• Professional information. Your role in a production, the size of your crew, the software your bench uses, and the names of shows you have worked on. This helps us tailor a pipeline review or a support plan to your real situation.
• Technical data. Internet protocol addresses, browser type, approximate region, pages visited, and the time of each visit. Anonymous analysis of this data helps us keep the site fast and useful, and we strip it down so that it no longer points to you as an individual where that is possible.
• Content you send us. The text of your messages, attached sketches, show reels, briefs, resumes and artwork samples that you choose to share. We treat such material carefully and only use it for the reason you gave it to us.

We do not intentionally gather special categories of data such as health, religious belief or political opinion. If you include that kind of detail inside a free text message, we will delete it wherever we are able to do so, because we have no need of it for a production project.

Section 4 How the Information Is Gathered

Your data reaches us through a handful of ordinary doors. The first door is the contact form on the website, where you type your name, email, subject and message and ask a question or request a review. The second door is a direct email or a telephone call to the numbers and addresses printed in the footer. The third door is the automatic logging done by the server that hosts the site.

When you choose to share a portfolio or a resume, the data arrives through the channel you selected, and we store it only for as long as the conversation about a possible role or commission stays alive. We record meetings only if everyone in the meeting agrees beforehand, and we never hide a recording from the people who join the call later.

Some data is generated without any effort from you, such as a count of visits made to a page. That type of information is usually kept in a form that cannot identify one visitor apart from another, and we keep the raw logs only long enough to defend the site against abuse and to improve its performance.

Section 5 Purposes of Processing

Every act of processing in our studio has a clear reason behind it. We use the data we hold for these very practical purposes.

• To answer your questions about services, prices, schedules and availability of review slots.
• To prepare a proposal or a pipeline review that matches the studio you described to us.
• To send you documents, invoices and confirmations that belong to work we are doing together.
• To operate and secure the website, detect faults, and prevent abuse such as automated spam.
• To understand which pages are useful so that we can keep the public site clear and current.
• To consider your portfolio or resume if you apply to join the studio as an artist or engineer.

We do not sell personal data to any third party and we do not rent mailing lists of visitors. We never attach a price tag to your private details. If a business partner ever wishes to reach the same audience you belong to, we would only pass on polished, aggregated numbers that give no clue to any one person.

Section 6 Legal Bases for Processing

The law in the regions where we serve clients asks for an honest reason behind each act of processing. We rely on a small set of fair grounds, described here in plain words.

• The contract ground. When you book services or begin a project, we process your data because it is needed to carry out that contract and to prepare for it before the ink dries.
• Consent. When we ask your permission to send a newsletter or to hold a recording, you can withdraw that permission at any time by writing to the email below, and we will stop.
• Legitimate interest. Keeping the site secure, answering an enquiry that you opened, and taking simple usage statistics all rest on our legitimate interest in running a sound business. You can object to some of this activity, as explained in the rights section.
• Legal obligation. Sometimes the law forces us to keep certain records, such as accounting papers or tax documents, and we obey that duty without treating it as a choice.

Where more than one ground could justify the same action, we choose the ground that places the least weight on your privacy while still letting us act lawfully and transparently.

Section 7 Cookies and Local Storage

A cookie is a small text file that a website asks your browser to remember. The public pages of our site use cookies sparingly, and most visitors will never notice them working. We use storage mainly to hold a preference you select, to remember that you completed a form, and to help anonymous statistics tell honest stories about how the site is used.

We do not use advertising trackers, and we do not allow an outside network to follow you across the whole internet from a visit to our pages. When your browser is set to refuse all cookies or to clear them on exit, the site still works correctly, because we have deliberately avoided making storage a condition of reading the public pages.

You can manage cookies in the settings of your own browser, delete the files at any time, or run the site in a private window. Each browser keeps these controls in a slightly different place, and your device helps you through the process, so we simply recommend using whatever switch feels comfortable to you.

Section 8 Sharing and Disclosure Of Personal Data

We keep your data close to home. The small circle of people who may see a piece of personal data are our own staff, our engineering partners who run hosting and email equipment under our instruction, and the booking and invoicing helpers that make a transaction run. Each helper works for us, not for itself, and each is bound by a contract that forbids it from selling or reusing your details.

We may disclose your data if the law requires it, such as in response to a valid court order or a lawful request from a regulator. We would check the validity of any such order carefully, object where the demand looks overbroad, and share no more than the minimum the law clearly needs. If the company ever merges with another studio or sells its animation division, your data may pass along as part of that deal, and we will tell you about the change promptly so you keep control.

Section 9 International Transfers

The internet does not stop at a border, and neither does our secure email or our hosting. Your message may travel through servers that sit outside the region where you live. That is a normal part of how cloud offices work, and we choose providers that apply safeguards recognised in the regions where our clients sit.

When data moves from the region to a country whose privacy law is considered weaker, we rely on approved clauses in our contracts with the receiving party, and we add technical controls such as stronger encryption of files at rest. We do not believe that crossing a border should lower the protection your details deserve, so we demand a similar standard from every stop along the road.

Section 10 Retention Periods

We hold personal data only for as long as the reason for holding it is still alive. A support enquiry stays on the desk until the case is closed and the follow up has run its course, which is usually no more than two years. Records that the law forces us to keep, such as accounts and tax files, stay for the number of years the local rule demands, and no longer.

When the time arrives, we delete the records or render them fully anonymous, and we run that clean up on a steady schedule rather than waiting for a special event. Clips of render data that belong to a finished film are returned to the client or erased according to the client own instructions in the project agreement. We are happy to tell you how long a particular category will be kept if you write to us and ask.

Section 11 Your Rights as a Data Subject

The law gives you a bundle of rights over your own data, and we honour every one of them without charging a heavy fee for an ordinary request.

• Access. Ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Correction. Tell us when a detail is wrong and we will fix it quickly.
• Erasure. Ask us to delete data when there is no longer a lawful reason to keep it.
• Restriction. Ask us to pause processing while a dispute about the data is being resolved.
• Portability. Receive the data you gave us in a machine readable shape, where the ground is consent or contract.
• Objection. Object to processing that rests on a legitimate interest, and we will weigh your point fairly.
• Withdrawal. Withdraw a consent you gave earlier, without affecting work already done under that consent.

To exercise any right, write to the contact email below and tell us who you are and which right you want to use. We may ask for proof of identity to keep your data out of the wrong hands. In most cases we will respond within a month of a complete request, and if a request is unusually complex we will tell you why more time is needed.

Section 12 Privacy for Children

The public pages are intended for studios, producers and professionals, and they are not aimed at young children. We do not deliberately collect the personal data of a child under the relevant minimum age, and we do not run games, contests or characters on this site that would invite a child to share private details.

If we learn that the information of a young child has reached our records without the consent of a parent or guardian, we will delete it as soon as we can and will never use it for any marketing purpose. A parent or guardian who believes a child supplied data to us should write to the contact email and we will remove every trace that we can honestly find.

Section 13 Security Safeguards

Protecting a studio work-in-progress is a permanent watch, and we bring the same honesty to the protection of personal data. We send and receive the site over encrypted connections, we restrict access to our systems to the smallest group that needs it, and we keep the software underneath the site patched and current.

Backups live in separate protected stores, and access to a client data store demands proof of identity before it is granted. We review who holds a key to the storage at least once a year and remove keys that are no longer needed. No measure makes a system perfectly safe, so our promise is measured and real: we protect data to a professional standard, we watch for signs of trouble, and we react calmly and fast when a risk appears.

Section 14 Automated Decisions and Analytics

We do not make consequential decisions about a person by machine alone, and we do not use profiling to price you out or to judge your credit. Any choice that clearly matters to you is always reviewed by a human member of the studio. Automated tooling in our office works behind the scenes to sort spam, catch suspicious logins and measure page performance, but it never takes the place of a careful person.

The figures that flow out of our analytics are small counters, not dossiers. We study them to smooth the path through the site and to choose which parts of our craft to show more openly, and we keep them in a form that fades away from any single visitor as quickly as the raw need for them passes.

Section 15 Third Party Services and External Links

Our pages may point to the website of a film, a conference, or a software vendor we admire. When you follow one of those links you leave our watch and enter the field of that other site, which carries its own privacy notice and its own standards. We advise you to glance at that notice before sharing anything there, because we cannot answer for choices another operator makes.

We also use a handful of embedded helpers, such as a host for a show reel or a tool for scheduling a call. Each helper receives the smallest slice of data needed to do its one job, and each is bound by contract to use it only for that job. We reread those arrangements when a helper changes owners, so that our promises to you stay honest through the years.

Section 16 Changes to This Policy

The web and the law both move, and this policy occasionally has to catch up. When the change is small and clear, we may simply update this page without a headline. When the change is material, such as a new way we intend to use your data, we will announce it on the site home and give you a sensible period to object or to move your business if you disagree.

The version printed above carries a date near the title bar, so you can always see which edition of the notice you are reading. We encourage you to reread the page from time to time, because a continuation of your use of the site after a change takes effect generally counts as acceptance of the updated terms. If a change ever calls for your separate permission, we will ask for it directly instead of relying on continued use.

Section 17 Governing Law and Disputes

This policy is read together with the terms of service for the website, and the pair of them together set the rules of the road. The law of the Chief Executive region of Hong Kong governs the reading of these pages, because that is the home of the registered company, and the parties agree to try a common court there should a disagreement ever need a judge to settle it.

Before any dispute reaches a court, we always try the gentler roads first: a calm conversation, a written exchange of points, and a reasonable attempt at mediation. Most of the small frictions of a studio collaboration vanish the moment both sides speak plainly, and we believe a good project is built faster on trust than on threat.

Section 18 How to Contact Us

Questions about this policy, requests about your own data, and notes about a link or a practice that troubled you are all welcome at the channels below. A member of the studio answers privacy mail, and every message is treated with the same respect we give a finished frame.

HAPPY CASTLE ANIMATION TECHNOLOGY CO., LIMITED Rm 1101D 11/F Lippo Sun Plaza, 28 Canton Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong (HK) Email: info@happycastle.lol Phone: +19832251964