Legal
How we got your details
You were invited to a conversation by a council. This is where we found the address we wrote to, and what you can do about it.
Draft. This page is a placeholder while the final wording is settled. It is not yet the agreement between us. For anything that matters today, write to support@astario.co.uk.
What we hold
For a company: its name and Companies House number, where it is based, its size band and what it supplies, taken from the public register and from public notices. For a contact at that company: a business email address, and a name, job title or department only where one was published. We do not guess a person's name from their address, and we do not hold a home address or a personal mailbox.
Where the address came from
Each address was loaded from one of these, and the email you received says which. Your company's own website: we read the contact, about and legal pages and kept a business address published there. A public contract award or supplier profile: a notice or profile that your company, or someone writing for it, published. Business research: a list of company contacts we were given; for these we cannot point to a page it was published on, and you can ask us to remove it at any time. The council's own supplier records: where the council that invited you gave us its list.
Who is responsible
The council that invited you decides who to invite and what to ask, and Soundings sends the invitation on its behalf. Astario Ltd runs Soundings and keeps the list of company contacts that invitations are drawn from. Which of the two is the controller of which data is being settled with counsel. Draft wording to be confirmed.
Why we may write to you
We rely on legitimate interests: a public body is asking the companies that would bid for its work how it should buy, and a short conversation is a small and expected way to do that. We have written down why we think that is fair to you, and it is available on request. The invitation is a request for your view on a procurement, not an advertisement, and we do not use the address for anything else. Draft wording to be confirmed.
What we do with it
We send you the invitation, and a reminder or two if you have not replied. If you decline or unsubscribe we stop, and we keep your address on a list of people not to write to, so that we do not write again by mistake. The list is used for invitations and for nothing else, and a council does not receive the addresses on it.
Your rights
You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to remove it, and object to us using it. Every invitation has an unsubscribe link that stops all invitations from public bodies on Soundings. To ask about anything else, write to support@astario.co.uk; we answer within a month. If you are not happy with the answer you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.
How long we keep it
A contact address is kept while it is the right way to reach the company, and removed when it bounces, when you ask, or when it has not been confirmed by a source for a long time. Draft wording to be confirmed.
Last updated 4 October 2026.