Privacy policy

MET Architectural Design is the Personal Information Controller for the data described here.

Write to the Data Protection Officer about anything on this page. That mailbox is monitored by a person, not a form.

When you enquire

Your name, email address, telephone number, and whatever you tell us in the message — usually the site address and a sentence on what you want to build. You choose how much to put in that first message.

When you become a client

• Contact and identity details for you and anyone you authorise to speak for you — a spouse, a family member, a project manager.
• Brief information: how your household lives, who lives there, ages and mobility where they affect the plan, how you cook, how you receive guests, what you want a room to do. Some of this is unavoidably personal. A house cannot be designed without it.
• Property information: lot address, transfer certificate of title, tax declaration, lot plan, survey, easements, village or subdivision rules, existing structures, and photographs of the site.
• Financial information: the budget range you are comfortable with, payment records against our stage invoices, and the bank or transfer details used to pay us.
• Tax information: your Taxpayer Identification Number and, where you withhold tax on our fees, the certificates that go with it.
• Correspondence — email, messages, meeting notes, and the written answers we give to contractor queries during construction.

From the site and the building

Photographs, video, drone imagery, and measured surveys of your lot and of the house as it is built. These may incidentally include people. Section 12 explains what we may and may not publish.

When you use this website

• Your email address, if you subscribe to Field Notes.
• Technical data your browser sends — IP address, device and browser type, pages viewed, referring page, time on page. This is collected by our website host and analytics tools rather than typed in by you.
• Cookies and similar technologies. See section 05.

When you apply to work here

Your CV, portfolio, references, licence and PRC registration details, and the right-to-work information we need before making an offer.

Processing personal information is lawful under Section 12 of the Act only on one of the stated criteria. Ours are these.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights and freedoms and concluded they do not override yours. Ask the Data Protection Officer and we will explain the reasoning for any specific case.

Under Section 3(l) of the Act, some of what we hold is sensitive personal information and gets stricter treatment under Section 13. In our practice this is normally limited to:

• Government-issued identifiers — chiefly your Taxpayer Identification Number, and any government ID you give us to establish title to or authority over a property.
• Tax returns and related filings, where you provide them.
• Health or mobility information, but only where you volunteer it because it shapes the design — a stair someone cannot use, a bathroom that has to take a wheelchair, a family member who needs a ground-floor room.
• Age and marital status, where these appear in title documents or in the brief.

We process these only with your consent, or where processing is necessary to protect your lawful rights in a legal claim, or where required by law and regulations. We ask for them only when there is no way around it, and we do not put them in drawings, presentations, or anything that circulates.

This site uses cookies and similar technologies:

• Necessary — needed for the site to load, hold your session, and keep forms working. These cannot be switched off.
• Analytics — [TOOL, e.g. Google Analytics 4] tells us which pages get read and how people move through the site. Aggregated, and used to make the site better.
• Preference — remembers small choices, such as a dismissed banner.

We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and we do not run retargeting pixels. [Confirm before publishing — delete this sentence if a Meta or LinkedIn pixel is added.]

You can refuse or delete cookies in your browser settings. The site will still work; some conveniences will not.

We disclose personal data only to the following, and only what each one needs:

• Engineering and specialist consultants — structural, sanitary, electrical, mechanical, geotechnical, landscape. They receive the site and design information required for their scope and sign their own drawings.
• Your contractor and their subcontractors, for construction. They receive drawings, specifications, and written responses to queries.
• Permit agents and government offices — the local building official, the city or municipal engineering office, the assessor, the BIR, the PRC, and any agency with jurisdiction over the work.
• Homeowners associations and village administrations, where their rules require plan review before construction.
• Fabricators and suppliers, for the millwork, lighting and fixed furniture we detail.
• Our service providers — website host, email, cloud file storage, drawing and modelling software, accounting software, and the platform that sends Field Notes. They process data on our instructions under contract.
• Our professional advisers — accountant, lawyer, insurer — where needed.
• A buyer or successor, if the practice is ever sold or merged. You would be told before your data moved.

We disclose data to law enforcement, courts or regulators when we are legally required to. Where a request is not backed by a valid order, we refuse it. Every processor we engage is bound by a written agreement covering confidentiality, security, and the limits of what they may do with the data, as the Act requires.

We do not sell, rent or trade personal data, and we do not disclose your information to anyone for their own marketing.

Some of our tools are hosted abroad — this website and its forms, our email, cloud file storage, and the newsletter platform run on servers in the United States and elsewhere. So your data does cross borders.

Transferring it does not transfer our responsibility. Under the Act we remain accountable for personal data we transfer to a third party, at home or abroad. We contract with providers who commit to protection comparable to what the Act requires, and we hold them to it.

If you want the list of providers currently used and where each one processes data, ask the Data Protection Officer and we will send it.

We keep project records for a decade because a building is a long-lived thing. Defects surface late, disputes surface later, and as a licensed practice we may be called on to account for what we drew and why. When a retention period ends, records are securely deleted or disposed of in a way that prevents further processing.

We maintain organisational, physical and technical measures proportionate to the risk, as Section 20 requires:

• Access on a need-to-know basis. Not everyone in the studio can open every file.
• Named accounts, unique credentials, and multi-factor authentication on email and cloud storage.
• Encryption in transit, and at rest on studio devices and cloud storage.
• Confidentiality obligations in every staff contract and consultant agreement.
• Locked storage for physical drawings, title documents and signed papers.
• Backups, tested for restoration.
• Annual review of these measures, and a privacy and security briefing for everyone who joins.

No system is perfect and we will not claim otherwise. What we can commit to is that failures get handled properly — see section 14.

Under Sections 16 and 18 of the Data Privacy Act you have the right to:

• Be informed — to know that your personal data is being or will be processed, and why, before we do it. This page is part of how we meet that.
• Object — to refuse processing, including for direct marketing, automated processing or profiling. Where you object, we stop, unless the processing is required by law.
• Access — to be told, on demand, what we hold about you, where it came from, who we have disclosed it to, how it is being processed, and the reasons for any disclosure.
• Rectify — to correct anything inaccurate or incomplete. On your request we will also inform any recipient of the corrected data, where that is practicable.
• Erase or block — to require us to suspend, withdraw, or order the blocking, removal or destruction of your data where it is incomplete, outdated, false, unlawfully obtained, no longer necessary for the purpose it was collected for, or where you have withdrawn consent or objected and no overriding basis remains.
• Data portability — where your data is processed by electronic means and in a structured, commonly used format, to obtain a copy in an electronic or structured format that lets you move it elsewhere.
• Damages — to be indemnified for damage sustained through inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, false, unlawfully obtained or unauthorised use of your personal data.
• Lodge a complaint with the National Privacy Commission. See section 16.

Where we rely on your consent, you may withdraw it at any time. Withdrawal does not undo processing already carried out lawfully.

How to exercise a right. Email the Data Protection Officer at [dpo@metdesign.com.ph] and say what you want. We may ask you to verify your identity — we are not going to hand your project file to someone who claims to be you. We respond within fifteen (15) working days. If a request is complex and needs longer, we tell you inside that window, with the reason and a date.

Exercising these rights is free. If a request is manifestly excessive or repetitive, we may charge a reasonable cost, and we will tell you the amount before doing any work.

Limits. Some rights do not apply where the data is processed for purposes the Act excludes, or where erasure would stop us meeting a legal obligation — we cannot delete an invoice the BIR requires us to keep, and we will not delete the record of a drawing we sealed and signed. Where we cannot act on a request, we tell you why in writing.

If you send us information about another person — a spouse, a family member, a tenant, a contractor’s staff — make sure they know, and that you are entitled to give it to us. We will treat their data under this notice. If they contact us, we deal with them directly.

Architecture is shown through photographs, and a photograph of a house is a photograph of how someone lives. So:

• We photograph, film and survey a project during design and construction as a professional record. That record is internal.
• We publish nothing from your project — no photograph, plan, address or case study — without your separate written consent. Signing our appointment does not give us that consent. It is asked for on its own, and you can say no without it affecting the work.
• Where you consent, you set the terms: no exterior that identifies the street, no address, no names, no interiors of certain rooms, credit or no credit.
• You can withdraw publication consent at any time. We take the material down from our own site and channels within a reasonable period. We cannot pull back what a magazine, an awards body or a search index has already carried, and we will say so plainly rather than promise otherwise.
• Site visits by prospective clients happen only where you have agreed.

This site is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect data from them through it. Children’s information reaches us only through a parent or guardian, as part of a brief — a bedroom for a nine-year-old, a stair a toddler should not be able to climb. We keep that to the minimum the design needs, and we do not publish it.

If a personal data breach occurs that is likely to give rise to a real risk of serious harm, we notify the National Privacy Commission and every affected data subject within seventy-two (72) hours of knowing, or of having reasonable belief, that it has happened — as the Commission’s breach notification rules require.

The notice will say what happened, what data was involved, what we are doing about it, and what you can do to protect yourself. We maintain a breach response procedure and a record of incidents, and we do not wait to be asked.

We do not make decisions about you by automated means, and we do not profile you. Every decision about your project is made by a person in this studio.

Raise it with our Data Protection Officer first — [dpo@metdesign.com.ph]. Most things turn out to be a misunderstanding and get fixed in a week.

If you are not satisfied, you have the right to complain to the:

Coming to us first is not a precondition to going to the Commission. It is simply faster.

We update this page when what we do changes. The date at the top tells you which version you are reading. If a change materially affects how we handle your data, we tell existing clients and Field Notes subscribers directly rather than quietly reposting the page.

We reply within two working days.