Privacy policy

Organisations use qScreen to screen candidates. For personal data about those candidates, the organisation running the screening — the consultancy or the employer — decides what is collected and why, and is the data controller. Codestack Consulting Limited operates the platform on their instructions and is the data processor.

For the accounts of recruiters and administrators who sign in to qScreen, and for our own billing and correspondence, Codestack Consulting Limited is the controller.

If you are a candidate and want to know why you were assessed or what will happen to your result, the organisation that invited you is the right first contact. You may also write to us at the address at the end of this page, and we will pass the request on and support it.

• Identity — the email address the organisation invited, and a name if they supplied one. Candidates do not create an account and never set a password.
• Their submitted work — the q code written during the assessment, kept in full so a reviewer can read it rather than trust a score.
• Results — the score for each question, which test cases passed, the output their code produced, and how long each question took.
• Process signals — when the assessment was opened, started and submitted; how long before the first keystroke; counts of keystrokes and characters in roughly five-second buckets; the length and line count of anything pasted; and how many times the window lost focus.
• Technical records — server logs of requests, which include an IP address and browser user agent, kept for security and diagnostics.

Process signals record counts and timings, never content. The text a candidate pastes is not captured — only how long it was. And qScreen does not compute a cheating likelihood, an integrity score, or any penalty from these signals. There are honest explanations for a large paste that no software can distinguish from the dishonest one, so the platform presents the evidence and a person interprets it.

qScreen does not use webcam or microphone monitoring, screen recording, keylogging of content, remote desktop access, or biometric or behavioural identity checks of any kind.

• Name, email address and role, and the client organisation the account belongs to.
• A password hash. Passwords are hashed with Argon2id and are not recoverable — nobody at Codestack Consulting Limited can read yours.
• An audit log of significant actions: who created an assessment run, who invited which candidates, who changed a question.

To provide the assessment service that the organisation asked for: to deliver an invitation, run the test, mark the answers, and produce a report the organisation can act on. For candidate data, the lawful basis is the controller’s — usually legitimate interests in assessing applicants, or steps taken at the candidate’s request before entering a contract of employment. For console accounts, it is our contract with the customer.

Your data is not sold, rented, or shared with advertisers, and it is not used to train any machine learning model — ours or anyone else’s.

Isolation between customers is enforced twice, in the application and again in the database, and both are keyed on the signed token the account holds — never on a URL, a header or a hostname. Two organisations screening through the same consultancy cannot see each other’s candidates, questions or results.

Within an organisation, recruiters and administrators for that organisation can see its candidates and reports. A small number of Codestack Consulting Limited staff can reach the production systems for operation and support; that access is limited to what the work requires.

• Hetzner Online GmbH — hosting. The application, database and assessment sandbox run on servers in Nuremberg, Germany. The database is not reachable from the public internet.
• Resend — transactional email (invitations, password resets, result notifications). Delivering an email means sending the recipient’s address and the message to this provider, which may process it outside the UK and EEA under the provider’s own safeguards.

There are no advertising networks, no third-party analytics and no tracking pixels anywhere in the product or on this website.

Customers who prefer it can run qScreen inside their own infrastructure, in which case candidate data never reaches ours.

qScreen sets no advertising or analytics cookies. Signing in stores a session token in your browser’s sessionStorage, which is cleared when you close the tab; it exists only to keep you signed in. A candidate’s assessment stores nothing beyond what is needed to keep their answers during the sitting.

Data is kept for as long as the customer’s account is active, so that a hiring team can revisit a report and so that a candidate is not served questions they have already seen if they are screened again later.

qScreen does not currently apply an automated retention schedule, and deletion is a manual operation rather than a feature in the product. We would rather say so than publish a retention period the software does not enforce. If you need a defined retention period written into a contract, or scheduled deletion, ask us — it is a change we are willing to make, and we will tell you honestly when it is in place rather than in advance.

Under UK and EU data protection law you may request access to your personal data, its correction or erasure, a copy in a portable form, or restriction of, or objection to, its processing.

If you are a candidate, address the request to the organisation that invited you — they are the controller and decide the outcome. If you send it to us we will acknowledge it, pass it to them, and act on their instruction. Requests are handled by a person rather than by an automated tool, so please allow us time to do it properly and confirm what was removed.

You may also complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, or to your local supervisory authority.

Submitted code is executed in a disposable container with no network access, a read-only filesystem, no privileged user, and capped memory, processes and run time, on a host isolated from the rest of the platform. Marking is split across two containers so that the one running a candidate’s code never holds the expected answers.

Passwords are hashed with Argon2id. Invitation and password-reset links are stored only as hashes, so a copy of the database yields no working links. Traffic is encrypted in transit. No system is perfect; if you believe you have found a vulnerability, please write to us before disclosing it and we will work with you.

If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top and, where the change affects how customer or candidate data is handled, tell customers directly.

Codestack Consulting Limited, registered in England and Wales.
Company number: [COMPANY NUMBER]
Registered address: [REGISTERED ADDRESS]

Privacy and data protection enquiries: pratik.garg@elginwhite.com