Privacy policy
What little data we handle when you visit the site or place an order.
Last updated: 27 October 2026
This site is deliberately thin on data. Nothing measures you unless you press Accept all in the cookie bar: then, and only then, three measurement tags load — Cloudflare Web Analytics, the Meta Pixel and the Google tag — so that we can count visits and see which of our ads bring people here. Press Necessary only and none of them loads; the site, signing in and buying all work the same. Section 7 says exactly what they do. What is described below is all of it.
What we never do, with anyone's data:
- We do not sell it or rent it. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to a partner. The processors listed in section 4 act on our instructions and hold nothing of their own. The one exception to "nobody else uses it" is the measurement you can switch on with Accept all — Meta and Google then also use what their tags collect for their own purposes, which sections 4 and 7 say plainly.
- We do not profile you or build a picture of you. No scoring, no automated decision that affects you within the meaning of Article 22. What the measurement tells us is counted in totals — how many came from which ad, how many of them signed up — not person by person.
- Nothing on this site reports back to anybody unless you say yes. Without Accept all, no page here makes a request to Meta, to Google's advertising or analytics services, or to Cloudflare's analytics.
- We do not collect anything we have no use for. There is no field on any form here that exists because the data might be handy one day.
- We do not knowingly hold data about anyone under 18 — see section 8, which says what happens if we find that we do.
What we do hold is in section 2, item by item, with the reason and the legal basis for each. That list is short on purpose, and it is the whole of it — a promise to collect nothing at all would be untrue, and an untrue privacy policy is worse than a frank one.
1. Who is responsible
The controller is DATUM — Ivo Ivanov, a natural person trading from Sofia, Bulgaria — support@datumbim.com. There is no company behind it, and the company details page says so openly rather than leaving a gap; for data protection what matters is that a named person decides these things and answers for them. Write to that address for anything in this policy, including to exercise any of the rights in section 6. We are not required to appoint a data protection officer and have not appointed one; the address above reaches the person who decides these things.
2. What we hold, why, and on what legal basis
Under Article 6 of the GDPR every use of personal data needs a lawful basis. Ours:
| Data | Why | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Name, billing country, VAT number, payment details | To issue the invoice and charge the right VAT. Collected and held by the payment provider named at checkout, acting as merchant of record; we see the order and the e-mail address, never your card. | Performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b); legal obligation for invoicing and tax, Art. 6(1)(c) |
| Your account: e-mail address, a password hash, whether the address is confirmed, and the dates you signed in; if you use “Continue with Google”, also the identifier Google gives your Google account | To run the account you need in order to buy — where your licence key stays readable, where you release a seat, and where you download again what you have paid for. The password is never stored; what is kept is a PBKDF2 hash from which it cannot be recovered. With Google sign-in we ask Google only for your e-mail address and that identifier — not your name, picture, contacts or anything else — and we never see your Google password. | Performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b) |
| Your purchases: what you bought, when, for how much, and whether a subscription is still running | To know what your licence unlocks, to let you download it again, and to keep the accounting records the law requires. Held by us, in a database on Cloudflare. | Performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b); legal obligation to keep accounting records, Art. 6(1)(c) |
| A gift: the e-mail address of the person you buy it for and the message you write to them, if any | To send them the gift code, your message and the way to redeem it, and to show you, in your account, where the gift went. The address is used for that one e-mail and for nothing else: it is not added to the notification list, and the person is not written to again unless they open an account of their own. Kept with the purchase, for as long as the accounting records are. | Performance of the contract with you, the buyer, Art. 6(1)(b); legitimate interest of the person receiving the gift in getting it, Art. 6(1)(f). If you are that person and do not want the gift, write to us and the address is removed. |
| Security records: sign-ins and failed sign-ins, password resets, activations, and the IP address each came from; for each signed-in session, the browser it was opened in (shortened); and the IP address of each download | To stop somebody guessing their way into your account, to show you which sessions and machines are live so you can end one, and to answer a dispute about whether a purchase was ever delivered. Kept for six months, then deleted automatically. | Legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) — keeping accounts and licences secure. You can object; see section 6. |
| Plugin downloads: your e-mail address, the date and time of each download, the version downloaded, and the IP address it came from | The DATUM BIM plugin is downloaded through a free account, so that we know who uses it — to answer questions about it, to tell users about important fixes, and to see how many people it reaches. The plugin itself sends nothing for this. The record of the download is kept while your account exists; the IP address is removed after six months. | Legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) — knowing who uses a product we give away and being able to reach them about it. You can object; see section 6. |
| Downloads through the Autodesk App Store: what Autodesk sends us when you download or buy the plugin there — your Autodesk account e-mail address, the app and the date, the type of download (free, trial or paid), and for a purchase your name and the amount | Autodesk tells the publisher of an app who has downloaded it. We keep that record to know who uses the plugin, to answer questions about a download or a purchase made in the store, and to see how many people it reaches. It does not create an account or a licence here. The record is kept for three years; the IP address of the sending server is removed after six months. | Legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) — knowing who uses our product and being able to answer about it. You can object; see section 6. |
| Licence key, the machine identifier of the computer you activate on, and the machine name you gave Windows | To run the licence: to check the key is yours, to hold you to the seat count you paid for, and to let you move a seat to another machine. The machine name is shown in your account so you can tell your computers apart. The machine identifier is a one-way hash — section 3 says exactly of what — and cannot be turned back into what went in. | Performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b) |
| Error reports from the plugin, if you agreed to send them: version, Revit release, tool, the error and where it happened, with paths and names removed (section 3) | To find and fix faults in the add-in. Mailed to us, not kept on the server. | Consent, Art. 6(1)(a). Withdraw it in the add-in's licence window at any time. |
| The notification list — joined with Notify me, or with the optional Email me news and offers tick when you create an account: your e-mail address, the wording of the consent you gave and the moment you gave it, the page you gave it from, and the IP address and browser the request came from | To write to you when there is a release worth knowing about, and for nothing else. The last three are not marketing data — they are the evidence that the consent was actually given, which Article 7(1) requires us to be able to produce. Your address is added as pending until you click the link in the confirmation e-mail — or, if you ticked the box when creating an account, until you confirm that account's address; an address that is never confirmed is never written to. Confirmed addresses are copied to Resend (section 4), which sends the news e-mails and handles the unsubscribe link in them. | Consent, Art. 6(1)(a). Withdraw it with the unsubscribe link in any message, or by writing to us; withdrawing is as easy as giving it and costs you nothing else. |
| The content of e-mails you send us | To answer you, and to keep a record of what was agreed about an order. | Performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b); legitimate interest in keeping our own records, Art. 6(1)(f) |
| A question sent from this site — the box at the side of every page, or the Write us form: the message, your e-mail address, the name and topic if you gave them, and which page you sent it from | To answer it. It goes straight to our inbox as an e-mail and nothing of it is kept on the server. Your address is not added to the notification list or to anything else, and you are not written to again unless you ask to be. The IP address the question came from is held for an hour as a counter, so the box cannot be used to flood us, and is removed by the nightly clean-up after that. | Steps you asked us to take before any contract, Art. 6(1)(b); legitimate interest in answering questions about what we sell and in keeping the box usable, Art. 6(1)(f) |
| Measurement, only after Accept all: the pages you open, where you came from (the ad or the site before), your browser, device and screen size, a random identifier in a cookie, and — when it happens — that you created an account, joined the notification list, downloaded the plugin, opened a product's checkout or paid, with the product and the amount. Never your password, never your card, and never your e-mail address | To count visits and to see which of our Instagram and Google ads bring people who sign up and buy, so that we stop paying for the ones that do not. Section 7 and the cookies page have the details, the cookies and how to change your mind. | Consent, Art. 6(1)(a), and Article 5(3) ePrivacy. Withdraw it at any time with Change your choice on the cookies page, or simply by closing the tab — the bar asks again on every visit. |
| Server logs at our host — IP address, time, page requested, user agent | To serve the page and to keep the site up and unabused. Not used to build a profile, not joined to anything else. | Legitimate interest in operating and securing the site, Art. 6(1)(f) |
We do not process special categories of data, we do not profile you, and there is no automated decision-making that produces a legal or similarly significant effect on you within the meaning of Article 22.
3. What the plugin sends
The Revit add-in talks to two addresses of ours and to nothing else:
api.datumbim.com— the licence server. Receives your licence key, the machine identifier described below, the machine name you gave Windows and the add-in's version, and returns a signed entitlement token. It is asked at activation, when Revit starts, when you open a model or press a DATUM tool (at most once every twenty seconds, and only to see whether the licence has changed), and when you open the licence window. A licence's tools work only on the computers it holds a seat on. If you own Tag All, the same server also sends the DATUM tag families to the add-in, against your licence key.- Error reports — only if you said yes. The first time the add-in starts it asks
whether it may send an error report when a DATUM tool fails. If you agree, and a tool fails,
it sends to
api.datumbim.com/report: the add-in's version, the Revit release, the tool's name, the error and the first lines of where it happened, with every file path, file name, e-mail address, your Windows user name and your computer's name removed before it leaves, plus the Windows and .NET version strings. No licence key, no machine identifier, nothing from your model. It is e-mailed to us (through Resend, section 4) and not stored on the server; the e-mail is kept as correspondence (section 5). You can stop it at any time with Stop sending under Error reports in the add-in's licence window; saying no costs you nothing. datumbim.com—update.json, a plain file listing the current version, and the installer itself when you choose to update. Fetching them sends nothing but the request itself.
Links in the add-in — the manual, a manufacturer's download page — open in your own browser, and only when you click them.
The machine identifier, exactly. It is a SHA-256 hash, truncated to sixteen bytes, of
two things joined together: the MachineGuid that Windows generated when it was
installed, and your Windows user name. Two consequences worth being straight about, because
this used to be described here as a hash of "hardware characteristics", which it is not:
- It identifies a Windows installation and a user account on it, not a piece of hardware. Reinstalling Windows produces a different one; changing a disk does not.
- Your user name goes into it, and a Windows user name is often a person's own name. It cannot be read back out — a hash does not work that way, and we never receive the name itself — but it is honest to say that it went in rather than to imply the input was anonymous.
What it is for is holding you to the seat count you paid for and letting you move a seat to another machine. It is not used to recognise you anywhere else, and it is never joined to anything outside the licence records.
The add-in does not read, upload or transmit your Revit models, your drawings or any project content. Nothing about what you draw leaves your machine.
4. Who else sees it
| Who | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| {{Provider:legal}} | Merchant of record for every purchase: they take the payment, charge and remit the VAT for your country and issue the invoice. Their card form is embedded in our checkout page, so your card details go to them directly and may be accompanied by their own fraud-prevention cookies on that page. The payment contract is with them, so for that transaction they are a controller in their own right and their own privacy notice applies alongside this one. The licence key is issued by us, and they do not hold your DATUM account — that is ours, and section 2 says what is in it. | EU and United States; transfers rest on the safeguards set out in their own terms, and we see the order and the e-mail address, never your card |
| Cloudflare | Hosting and delivery of this site, the licence server, the database holding accounts, purchases and licence keys, and the stored template downloads. Also the protection against automated abuse: its bot protection on every page, and the Turnstile check on the forms that send us something. After Accept all, also Web Analytics: page views, referrers and load times, without cookies | EU and global edge — standard contractual clauses |
| Only if you choose “Continue with Google”: Google confirms who you are and tells us your e-mail address. Google learns that you signed in to DATUM; for that sign-in it is a controller in its own right and its own privacy policy applies | United States — EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses | |
| Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd. | Only after Accept all: the Meta Pixel measures which of our Instagram ads bring visitors, sign-ups and sales. For collecting that data on this site and sending it to Meta we and Meta are joint controllers (Art. 26 GDPR; the terms are Meta's controller addendum); what Meta does with it afterwards, including improving its own ads, is Meta's own responsibility under its privacy policy | EU and United States — EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses |
| Google Ireland Ltd. | Only after Accept all: the Google tag (Google Analytics and Google Ads) counts visits and measures which of our Google ads bring visitors, sign-ups and sales. Google may also use the data for its own purposes under its partner-sites policy | EU and United States — EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses |
| Resend | Sending the e-mails this site and the licence server send, and delivering the questions asked in the box at the side of the page to our inbox. For the notification list it also keeps the confirmed addresses and whether each has unsubscribed, so that news e-mails reach only those who asked for them | United States — standard contractual clauses |
| Our e-mail provider | Receiving and answering your messages | EU |
Nobody else. We do not sell personal data, and nothing reaches Meta or Google for advertising unless you pressed Accept all. Where a recipient is outside the EEA, the transfer rests on the standard contractual clauses adopted by the European Commission under Article 46(2)(c) GDPR; write to us for a copy of the relevant clauses.
Signing in with Google, in detail
When you choose “Continue with Google”, we ask Google for two things only: your e-mail
address and the identifier Google gives your account (the openid and
email permissions). We do not ask for your name, your photo, your contacts, your
files or anything else in your Google account, and we never see your Google password.
We use those two things for one purpose: to sign you in to your DATUM account and keep it linked to the same Google account next time. They are stored with the rest of your account in our database on Cloudflare (section 4), are not used for advertising or profiling, are not sold, and are not passed to anyone. They are kept for as long as your account exists; ask us to delete your account (support@datumbim.com) and they are deleted with it. You can also remove DATUM's access at any time from your Google account's security settings.
DATUM's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Our own social media accounts
A small program of ours publishes DATUM's own posts — pictures and short films of our templates, families and plugins — to DATUM's own accounts on Instagram, Threads, YouTube and TikTok. To do that, each of those services has given us permission for our account only: YouTube to upload videos to the DATUM channel, TikTok to send videos to the DATUM account as drafts. Those permissions are stored privately on Cloudflare and used for nothing else.
This program does not sign in visitors and does not read anyone else's account. The one thing it does with data about you is the keyword answer on Instagram, described just below. If you watch DATUM on YouTube or TikTok, that is between you and that service: YouTube's Terms of Service, Google's Privacy Policy and TikTok's privacy policy apply there.
When you write a keyword to us on Instagram
Some of our Instagram posts invite you to write a word, such as STAIR, to get a link. When you comment that word under a DATUM post, or send it to @datum.bim as a direct message, the same program reads that comment or message (its text, and your Instagram username and user ID as Instagram gives them to us) and answers it: one short reply under the comment and one direct message with the link. It reads only comments on DATUM's own posts and messages sent to DATUM, and it acts only on the keyword; nothing else is read, analysed or passed to anyone. The answer is a fixed text, written in advance, not composed for you. Instagram's own privacy policy applies on Instagram.
5. How long
- Orders, invoices and tax records — as long as Bulgarian accounting and tax law requires us to keep them, which is longer than we would otherwise choose.
- Licence keys and activations — for as long as the licence lives, plus a short period afterwards to settle disputes and reissues.
- The notification list — until you unsubscribe, and then the record of the consent is kept a short while longer as proof that writing to you had been lawful. An address that never confirms is deleted rather than kept in case it changes its mind.
- Security records — six months, then deleted by a job that runs nightly. That is not a policy statement about an intention; it is a scheduled deletion in the licence server.
- Plugin and template downloads — kept while your account exists, and deleted with it. The IP address a download came from is removed after six months by the same nightly job.
- Downloads through the Autodesk App Store — three years from the download, then deleted by the same nightly job.
- E-mail correspondence, including questions asked in the box at the side of the page — up to three years from the last message in the thread.
- Instagram keyword answers — the ID of a comment we answered is kept up to 37 days, and your Instagram user ID until the offer you asked for ends, only so that nobody gets the same message twice. Write to support@datumbim.com and we delete it sooner.
- Server logs — short-lived, and kept by our host under its own retention.
- Measurement — the cookies last as long as the cookies page says (up to two years for Google Analytics, 90 days for the Meta Pixel), unless you delete them sooner. In our Google Analytics account, data is kept for 14 months; Meta and Google keep their copies under their own policies.
6. Your rights
Under Articles 15 to 22 GDPR you may ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, to erase it, to restrict or object to its use, and to receive it in a portable form. Where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time, and withdrawing does not affect what was lawful before. Where we rely on legitimate interest, you may object and we will stop unless we have compelling grounds that override yours.
Write to support@datumbim.com. We answer within one month, free of charge.
Some of it we cannot delete on request: an invoice we are legally required to keep stays until that requirement ends. We will say so plainly rather than quietly ignoring the part we cannot do.
You may complain to a supervisory authority. In Bulgaria that is the Commission for Personal Data Protection (Комисия за защита на личните данни, cpdp.bg). If you live elsewhere in the EU, you may complain to your own country's authority instead.
7. Cookies and what the browser stores
A bar at the bottom of the page asks you to choose: Necessary only, or Accept all. Either one opens signing in. Until you press one, signing in stays off and nothing measures.
Necessary only keeps the site to the cookies it needs to work, and reading it makes no request to any other domain. Three outside services load only when you use them — Cloudflare's Turnstile check when you send a form, Google when you choose Continue with Google, and Stripe's card form when you pay — and all three are strictly necessary for the thing you asked for.
Accept all adds three measurement tags: Cloudflare Web Analytics (counts visits, sets no cookie), the Meta Pixel and the Google tag (both set cookies, listed on the cookies page). They tell us which ads brought people here and whether those people signed up or bought. Your choice is kept only for the visit; the bar asks again next time, and Change your choice on the cookies page withdraws it at once and deletes the measurement cookies.
The full list — the sign-in cookie, Cloudflare's bot-protection cookies, the editor's preview cookie and about a dozen local-storage keys, each with what it holds and why — is on the cookies page, kept separately because it is the part that changes most often and it is easier to keep honest on its own.
Every cookie set with Necessary only falls within the strictly-necessary exemption in Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive: keeping you signed in, and keeping the site safe from automated abuse. The measurement cookies do not, which is why they wait for Accept all.
The other correction: the typefaces used to load from
fonts.googleapis.com, which handed every visitor's IP address to Google before a
word appeared. A German court held that unlawful without consent (LG München I, 20 January 2022,
3 O 17493/20). They are now served from this domain, and the Content-Security-Policy no longer
permits Google as a source at all, so it cannot quietly come back.
8. Children and young people
These are professional tools sold to practising architects and studios. The site and the products are not directed at anyone under 18, they are not advertised to children or in places aimed at them, and there is nothing here designed to interest a child.
You must be 18 or over to open an account. You are asked to confirm this at sign-up, with its own tick, next to the one for accepting the terms. We do not knowingly create an account for, take payment from, or hold data about anyone under 18.
If we learn that we hold a minor's data, we delete it. Not on request and not after a review — the account is closed and the personal data removed, promptly and without asking for a reason. Records the law obliges us to keep, such as an invoice already issued, are kept only for as long as that obligation lasts and are used for nothing else.
If you are a parent, guardian or teacher and believe a child has given us data, write to support@datumbim.com from any address and say so. You do not need to prove anything or fill in a form; we would rather delete something we did not have to than keep something we should not.
Under Article 8 of the GDPR, a child's consent to an online service is valid only above an age each country sets between 13 and 16 — in Bulgaria, 14. That threshold is not what we rely on. The account is limited to 18 because the products are professional tools bought under a contract, and a contract is not something a 15-year-old should be signing with us.
9. Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change matters to people who have already bought, we will say so by e-mail rather than quietly editing the page.
10. The rules this policy follows
- Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR)
- Directive 2002/58/EC (ePrivacy), as amended by Directive 2009/136/EC
- Закон за защита на личните данни (Bulgaria)
Who the controller is, in the legal sense, is set out on the company details page. See also the cookies page and the refunds page.