Your email address and telephone number appear nowhere on this site, in no export, and are given to nobody.
How we handle your details
This page exists because a founding member asked the right question before agreeing to anything: who holds this, and what happens to it. Everything below is what we already promise in writing to every person we invite. It is here so that it is a policy you can hold us to, rather than a sentence in an email.
The short version
Your email address and telephone number appear nowhere on this site, in no export, and are given to nobody.
You may have an entry that is recorded and never shown. Public listing is a decision you make, not a default you have to escape.
Anyone who wants to speak to you writes to us. We ask you first, with their identity withheld until you say yes. You decide, and no is a complete answer.
Your name is not passed to recruiters, not sold to anyone, and not used to advertise anything. There is no data-sharing arrangement of any kind, with anybody.
At any time, confirmed from your own inbox, without asking us and without explaining why. You may take your material with you.
Everything submitted before then is held privately. If you change your mind first, nothing of yours is ever published at all.
In detail
When you join a community you tell us your name, an email address, the period you were at the institution, the function you worked in, and something about the work you were part of. You may add a photograph, a link to a public profile, where you are based, what you do now, and how you are willing to take part. Everything except your name and email address is optional, and an entry with only those two is a perfectly good entry.
Nothing about you. This site counts visits to understand which pages are read: a daily total per page, per country and per language. The visitor identifier is a one-way hash of the day, the address and the browser, salted with a secret and scoped to a single day, so it cannot be reversed and cannot follow anyone from one day to the next. No IP address is stored. There are no advertising trackers, no analytics beacons, no third-party pixels and no cookies used to profile anybody.
Your entry is visible to the small team running the project. If you have chosen to be listed publicly, the parts you marked public are visible to anyone. Your contact details are in neither category — they are visible only to the team, and only so that we can reach you.
When someone asks to speak to you, we write to you with the substance of what they want and without their name, unless they have agreed we may share it. If you say yes, we introduce you. If you say no, or say nothing, that is the end of it and the person is told only that the introduction was not taken up.
If you sit for a recorded interview, the recording is yours as much as ours. You see the edit before anyone else does. Nothing is published without your sign-off, you may withdraw any part of it afterwards, and you may take a copy with you whenever you want one.
For as long as you want an entry, and no longer. If you remove your entry it is deleted, not hidden — including from our own working copies at the next routine clear-out, within thirty days. Records we are required to keep for legal or accounting reasons are kept, and nothing else is.
On Cloudflare's infrastructure, encrypted in transit and at rest. Email reaches you through Cloudflare's mail service. Those are the only two third parties involved in holding your details, and neither is permitted to use them for anything other than providing the service. There is no customer-relationship system, no mailing-list provider, and no marketing platform holding a copy.
You may ask what we hold about you and we will tell you. You may correct it, and there is a link in your own confirmation email that lets you do it yourself. You may have it deleted. You may have a copy in a form you can take elsewhere. You may object to something we are doing and we will stop doing it, or explain why we believe we may continue and let you decide from there.
Qatar's Personal Data Privacy Protection Law applies to this project. For members in the United Kingdom or the European Union, the UK GDPR and the GDPR apply as well, and we work to whichever standard is the higher rather than the more convenient.
Built By Icons is an independent project, currently run by its founding team while a legal entity is being established. When that entity exists this page will name it, and every member will be told. In the meantime the founding team is answerable for everything on this page, and the address below reaches it.
Built By Icons is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for any of the institutions named on this site. Those institutions have no access to your entry, are not told that you have joined, and receive nothing about you.
This is a network of people who built institutions over long careers. It is not for anyone under eighteen and we do not knowingly hold anything about a child.
The date at the foot of this page is the date it last changed. If anything material changes — anything that alters one of the six promises above — every member is told directly, by email, rather than left to notice.
Write to [email protected], or use the contact form. A person reads it, and you will have an answer within a few days. If you are unhappy with how we have handled something, say so plainly and it will be looked at properly.
Last updated 5 September 2026. Written to be read rather than to be defended, and reviewed before the directory opens.