Privacy policy

Who is responsible for your data

The controller of your personal data is Marka Intellectual Property and Business Services, an establishment registered in the State of Qatar under commercial registration no. 216226 and commercial licence no. 293562.

For anything concerning your data, contact us at info@marka.qa, on +974 7400 0060, or at Velero Mall, Lusail, State of Qatar.

What we collect

We collect nothing from visitors except what you send us yourself. Specifically, when you use the contact form we collect:

• Your full name.
• Your email address.
• Your company or organisation, if you enter it (optional).
• The service you selected, if you selected one (optional).
• The text of your message.
• Which language version of the site you wrote from, so we reply in it.

Separately, the services that host the site and deliver our mail record technical data as a function of operating — IP address, request time, browser type — for operations, security and abuse prevention. We do not use that data to track you or build a profile of you.

Why we collect it, and on what basis

We use what you send for one purpose: to answer your enquiry, provide the service you asked about, and conduct the correspondence that goes with it.

The basis for processing is your explicit consent, given by ticking the consent box before you submit the form. You may withdraw it at any time by writing to us; withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out beforehand.

We do not use your data for direct marketing and do not send promotional messages without separate consent to do so. We do not sell your data and do not disclose it for advertising purposes.

Who processes data for us, and transfers outside Qatar

We rely on technical service providers to run the site and deliver form submissions. That means your data may be processed or stored on servers outside the State of Qatar:

• Website hosting, content delivery and protection — Cloudflare.
• Receiving and processing contact-form submissions — a serverless function hosted on Supabase.
• Delivering and storing messages in our mailbox — Google Workspace.
• Measuring site visits — Google Analytics, and only with your consent (see the cookies section below).

These providers process data only as far as needed to provide their services to us, under their own terms and privacy policies, and are not authorised to use it for their own purposes. We take the measures available to us to protect data in transfer, including encryption in transit.

We do not disclose your data to anyone else except where it is necessary to provide the service you asked for with your consent, in response to a lawful request from a competent authority in the State of Qatar, or to defend a legal claim.

Cookies and measurement

We use Google Analytics 4 to see how many people visit the site and which pages they read, so we can improve what we write. We do not use it for advertising, and Google’s advertising features, Google signals and ad personalisation are switched off in its configuration.

It is not loaded, and no cookie is written, before you agree. On your first visit we ask you one question — will you allow measurement? — with "Accept" and "Decline" given equal weight and nothing pre-ticked. If you decline, the script is never requested and nothing is sent to Google at all.

• If you accept, cookies named _ga and _ga_* are stored to tell visits apart, and data is collected about the pages you viewed, where you arrived from, your device and browser, and an approximate location at city or country level.
• The processor of that data is Google, and it may be processed or stored on servers outside the State of Qatar. Google retains it for no more than fourteen months.
• This data is not joined to anything you send through the contact form. What you write in the form is never passed to our analytics.
• Nothing else is used: no tag manager, no advertising pixels, no tracking social buttons. Every font is served from our own domain, so browsing the site issues no request to an external font service.

You can withdraw or give consent at any time through the "Cookie settings" link at the foot of every page. When you withdraw it, we delete the service’s cookies and stop collection immediately.

You can also block the service in your browser using Google’s official opt-out add-on, or by blocking cookies in your browser settings. Nothing about how the site works depends on it.

How long we keep it

Contact-form correspondence is kept in our mailbox for as long as it is needed to answer your enquiry and manage our relationship with you, and as long as required to meet the statutory and professional obligations that apply to keeping records.

If your enquiry does not become an engagement, you may ask us to delete it and we will, unless a statutory obligation prevents us.

Data of a special nature — please do not send it through the form

Law No. 13 of 2016 gives certain data heightened protection — data relating to health, ethnic origin, religious belief, marital relations or criminal records — and sets narrower conditions for processing it.

We do not ask for that data and do not need it to answer your enquiry. Please do not send copies of ID cards, passports or other sensitive documents through the form. If your matter needs a document of that kind, we will tell you the appropriate channel for it.

Please also avoid sending details of an invention or a product that has not yet been disclosed. Early disclosure can destroy the novelty a patent or industrial design requires — write to us first and we will arrange the right channel.

Children’s data

This site and its services are directed at businesses, business owners and adults. They are not intended for children and we do not knowingly collect children’s data. If we learn that a child’s data has been sent to us without a proper basis, we delete it.

Your rights

Under Law No. 13 of 2016 you have the following rights over your personal data:

• To know that your data is being processed, to access it and to obtain a copy.
• To ask us to correct or complete data that is inaccurate or incomplete.
• To ask us to erase your data, to the extent no statutory obligation requires us to keep it.
• To object to processing or ask us to stop it.
• To withdraw your consent at any time.
• To complain to the competent personal-data protection authority in the State of Qatar.

To exercise any of these, write to info@marka.qa. We respond within a reasonable period, and we may ask you to verify your identity first — to stop somebody else claiming your data.

If our response does not satisfy you, you may complain to the competent authority for personal data privacy protection at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

Security

The site is served over an encrypted connection (HTTPS) with strict transport security enforced, and form data is encrypted in transit. Access to the enquiries mailbox is limited to those who need it to do their work.

No system is without risk. If a breach occurs that is likely to cause serious harm to your data, we notify the competent authority and notify you, as Law No. 13 of 2016 requires.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy if the way we work or the tools we use change. The date of the last update is shown at the top of this page, and the version published here is the one that applies.