This policy explains what personal information MPS & Associates, Company Secretaries collects through this website, why we collect it, who sees it, how long we keep it and what you can ask us to do about it.
We are a firm of Company Secretaries in practice. Confidentiality is not merely a preference for us but a professional obligation owed to every person who approaches the Firm, and it applies whether or not an engagement follows. This policy sits alongside that obligation; it does not dilute it.
Who we are
MPS & Associates, Company Secretaries is a peer-reviewed firm of Company Secretaries in practice, with its office in New Delhi. For the purposes of Indian data protection law, the Firm is the person that determines the purpose and means of processing the personal information described below.
This website is hosted on Blogger, a service operated by Google. Our booking and enquiry facilities run on Google Workspace and Google Apps Script within the Firm's own Google account. Nothing on this site is operated by a third-party marketing platform, and we do not sell, rent or trade personal information to anybody, in any circumstances.
What we collect
We collect only what a visitor chooses to give us, together with the ordinary technical information that any website receives. We do not build profiles of visitors and we do not attempt to identify people who simply read the site.
| Where | What we receive |
|---|---|
| Enquiry form | Your name, email address and the message you write. Nothing else is required. |
| Book a Consultation | Your name, email address, telephone number, and the time slot you select. Optionally your company or firm name, your country, a subject line, and the description of the matter you write. That description is what our team reads in order to decide whether the consultation is a free enquiry or a chargeable professional consultation. |
| Careers | Whatever you choose to send with your application by email — ordinarily a curriculum vitae and a covering message. |
| Direct contact | What you tell us when you telephone, write to us, or message us on WhatsApp. |
| Automatically | Standard server and platform logs kept by Blogger, which may include your IP address, browser type, the pages you opened and the time you opened them. We do not use these logs to identify individual visitors. |
Why we collect it
Each of the purposes below is limited to the reason you approached us. We do not repurpose what you give us for anything else.
- To answer you. To respond to an enquiry, to arrange or hold a consultation, and to send you the two emails described on the Book a Consultation page.
- To check for conflicts. Before accepting any matter we must satisfy ourselves that acting for you would not conflict with an existing client. This requires us to record who approached us and about what, even where no engagement follows.
- To carry out an engagement, where one is agreed, and to keep the records a professional firm is required to keep in relation to it.
- To consider an application for a role or an internship with the Firm.
- To meet our own legal and professional obligations, including those arising under the Company Secretaries Act, 1980 and the Guidelines of the Institute of Company Secretaries of India, and to establish or defend a legal claim.
We do not send marketing communications. If we ever begin to, it will be to people who have asked to receive them and who can stop receiving them at any time by replying and saying so.
Cookies and tracking
This site is deliberately light. It carries no advertising, no advertising network, no social media pixel and no cross-site tracker.
- Blogger's own cookies. Google sets cookies necessary to serve the site and to operate features such as commenting. These are set by Google, not by us, and are governed by Google's own privacy policy.
- One item of local storage of ours. When you accept the notice that appears on your first visit, your browser stores a single marker so that the notice does not reappear on every page. It contains no personal information, is readable only by this website, and can be cleared at any time by clearing your browser's site data.
- Google Fonts. Typefaces are requested from Google's servers when the page loads, which discloses your IP address to Google as any request for any resource does.
- Analytics. We may in future use a website analytics service, such as Google Analytics, to understand in aggregate which pages are read. Where we do, it is used to measure use of the site and not to identify you personally, and this policy will name the service.
You can refuse or delete cookies in your browser settings. The site will continue to work, although the first-visit notice will reappear each time.
Who sees it
Within the Firm, what you send is seen by the partners and by those members of our team who need to see it in order to deal with your matter. Booking requests reach the partners' mailboxes and are entered in the Firm's calendar.
Outside the Firm, we disclose personal information only in these situations:
- Service providers who operate our systems — principally Google, which provides our email, calendar and website hosting. They process the information on our instructions and for no purpose of their own.
- Where you ask us to, or where doing so is a necessary part of the work you have engaged us to carry out — for example a filing with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, or a submission to a tribunal or regulator.
- Where the law requires it, including under a court order, a summons, or a lawful demand from a government agency.
- Where it is necessary to establish or defend a legal claim, or to protect the rights or safety of any person.
Because our email and calendar run on Google's infrastructure, information may be stored on servers outside India. We do not otherwise transfer personal information abroad.
How long we keep it
We keep personal information only for as long as the purpose it was given for is still being served, or for as long as we are required to keep it.
- An enquiry that does not become an engagement is retained for a limited period so that we can answer a follow-up and so that our conflict-check records remain reliable, and is then deleted.
- Client and engagement records are retained for the period required by the professional and statutory obligations that apply to the work, which for corporate records is frequently eight years or longer.
- Job applications are retained while the vacancy is open and for a short period after, unless you ask us to keep your details on file.
- Platform logs are kept for the period set by Google for the Blogger service.
How we protect it
We maintain reasonable security practices and procedures appropriate to the information we hold. Our email, calendar and documents sit within a Google Workspace account controlled by the Firm, with access limited to those who need it, and protected by strong authentication. The booking service runs inside the Firm's own Google account rather than on a third-party platform, and takes no payment information at any stage.
No system is perfectly secure, and information sent over the internet is never entirely free of risk. If a breach affecting your personal information occurs, we will tell you and the appropriate authority as the law requires.
Your rights
You may ask us to do any of the following, and we will not charge you for it.
- A summary of what we hold about you and what we are doing with it, together with the identities of anybody we have shared it with.
- Correction, completion or updating of anything inaccurate, incomplete or out of date.
- Erasure of what we hold, which we will carry out unless we are required to keep it for the purpose it was given for or in order to comply with a legal or professional obligation. If we cannot erase something, we will tell you why.
- Withdrawal of your consent at any time, where our processing rests on it. Withdrawing consent does not make our earlier processing unlawful.
- To nominate another person to exercise these rights on your behalf in the event of your death or incapacity.
- Redressal of a grievance about how we have handled your personal information.
To exercise any of these, write to our Grievance Officer at the address below. Please tell us the email address or telephone number you used when you contacted us, so that we can find the right records and satisfy ourselves that the request is genuinely yours.
Grievance Officer
If you have a question or a complaint about how the Firm handles personal information, please write to the officer named below. We will acknowledge your communication and deal with it within the period the law allows, and in any event as promptly as we reasonably can.
CS Mohit Bhardwaj
Grievance Officer, MPS & Associates, Company Secretaries
Email — mohit@mpsadvisory.com
Telephone — +91 84477 29531
Post — the Firm's office address, which is set out on our
Contact page.
Please write “Data protection” in the subject line so that your message reaches the right person without delay.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you may take the matter to the authority having jurisdiction over data protection complaints in India.
Children
This website is directed at companies, professional intermediaries and adults seeking professional services. It is not intended for children, we do not knowingly collect personal information from anybody under eighteen, and we do not track children or direct advertising at them.
We do accept applications for internships from students, who may be under eighteen. Where that is so, we collect only what is necessary to consider the application, and we will act on a parent's or guardian's request to delete it.
Changes to this policy
India's data protection framework is in the middle of a transition. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 has been enacted and its Rules notified, but its substantive obligations take effect in phases, and until they do the earlier regime under the Information Technology Act, 2000 continues to apply. This policy is written to meet both.
We will update it as the framework changes, and whenever what we do with personal information changes. The date at the top of this page tells you when it was last revised. Material changes will be reflected here rather than notified individually, so please look at this page from time to time.
A question about your information?
Write to our Grievance Officer and we will deal with it directly. If your question is about a matter rather than about your data, our ordinary contact details will reach the whole team.
This policy describes the Firm's handling of personal information through this website. It is not legal advice, and it does not vary the terms of any engagement agreed in writing between you and the Firm. Where an engagement letter deals with confidentiality or data handling, that letter governs. Please read this policy together with our Terms & Conditions and our Disclaimer.