Client Care
The Discretion Policy.
A plain statement of how we protect your identity, your data, your photographs, and the engagements you entrust to us. Written so it can be read, not scanned.
A plain statement of how we protect your identity, your data, your photographs, and the engagements you entrust to us. Written so it can be read, not scanned.
Discretion is not a feature of our service; it is our service. Everything else — the companions, the cities, the craft — sits on top of this one commitment. This policy describes, in specific detail, what that commitment means in practice. It is the document we would want to read if we were in your position.
Noble & Hours ("the House") treats every element of a client or companion engagement as strictly confidential information, protected from the first exchange through in perpetuity. This includes, without limitation: your identity, the fact that you have engaged us, the nature of the engagement, any persons referenced or encountered during it, and every communication between us.
Our discretion practice is built on three principles: minimum collection, named-access only, and automatic destruction. We gather only what we need, only the people directly responsible for your engagement ever see it, and we permanently delete it on a strict timetable once it is no longer operationally relevant.
Every engagement — without exception, regardless of length or fee — is governed by a mutual non-disclosure agreement executed before the engagement begins. The NDA is mutual by design: it binds both parties equally, with parallel remedies available to each side in the event of breach.
The standard NDA covers all information exchanged during the booking process, the engagement itself, and the period of up to two years following it. Where a longer or broader NDA is required — particularly for family-office clients, high-public-profile individuals, or multi-engagement retainers — we will execute a bespoke agreement drafted by our in-house counsel in consultation with yours.
The NDA is enforceable under the laws of the State of New York by default, or under the client's country of residence by mutual election, whichever offers the stronger available remedy.
Our discretion extends to, and specifically protects:
This protection applies regardless of whether a specific item was explicitly named in our correspondence. The threshold is functional, not formal: if it relates to you and came to us through our engagement, it is confidential.
We collect the minimum information required to deliver your engagement to our standard — typically: a preferred name, a secure contact method, the city and occasion, dietary and wardrobe preferences, and, for new clients, a single professional or social reference. We do not ask for government identification, financial account numbers, or personal documents of any kind.
Client and companion data is held on encrypted servers physically located within the European Union, under full GDPR compliance and audited annually by an independent information-security firm. Data in transit is protected by TLS 1.3 with perfect forward secrecy; data at rest is encrypted with AES-256 keys rotated quarterly.
Access is named-access only. At any given time, no more than four individuals within the House can access any given client record: the founder, the director of clients, the director of vetting, and the specific client director assigned to your engagement. Every access event is logged and reviewed monthly.
We hold as little about you as we can possibly hold and still do the work well. Information we do not need, we do not ask for. Information we hold, we protect as if our house depended on it — because it does.
Neither the House, nor any companion, nor any staff member will photograph, film, or record you at any point — whether openly or incidentally — except with your explicit, documented consent obtained in advance of the specific occasion.
Where event photography is conducted by third parties (gala photographers, press photographers at openings, hotel staff, and the like), our companion will quietly follow your lead on whether to appear in the frame. If you prefer to be photographed alone or not at all, the companion will step aside without comment. If you are comfortable, they will remain — the call is always yours.
Any imagery we hold for operational reasons — your preferred-companion profile photo, for example, or visual reference for wardrobe matching — is stored under the same protections as all other data, and is destroyed immediately upon request.
When an engagement requires coordination with third-party vendors — restaurants, hotels, car services, photographers, stylists, language coaches, travel agents — we engage only vendors with whom we have a standing confidentiality arrangement, and we share with them only the minimum information required to deliver their element.
A restaurant hosting your dinner receives a reservation name and a dietary note. A driver receives a pickup location and a destination. A hotel receives a room booking under the name you specify. No vendor is ever told the purpose of the engagement, the identity of both parties, or the larger arrangement of which their service is a part.
Our vetting partner, the accountancy firm that handles our invoicing, and our legal counsel are each bound by professional privilege and separate confidentiality agreements beyond our own. Your information is never shared with marketing platforms, data brokers, analytics providers, or any commercial third party.
Our NDAs and data-handling practices are designed to be enforceable in the jurisdictions in which we most commonly operate — the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore. For clients based outside these jurisdictions, we will on request prepare a country-specific supplementary agreement before the engagement begins.
Remedies available to the injured party under our standard NDA include, without limitation: injunctive relief, specific performance, reasonable legal costs, and liquidated damages calibrated to the severity of the breach. We retain counsel on three continents for exactly this purpose.
In the six years of the House's operation, we have had no material breach of discretion, and we intend to keep it that way. Our approach has four components:
Our default retention schedule, applied to every record unless you request otherwise in writing:
At any time, you may request complete deletion of all records relating to you — "the right to be forgotten" as formalised in the GDPR — and we will action it within 14 days, retaining only the minimum records we are legally required to retain for tax or regulatory compliance. A written confirmation of deletion is issued upon completion.
Discretion is mutual. Our companions are entitled to the same protections we extend to our clients: their legal identities are never shared with clients; their photographs are shared only with clients actively considering an engagement, and deleted from that client's file upon completion; their personal data is never used for any purpose other than the delivery of their engagements with the House.
Clients are expressly prohibited from photographing, filming, recording, tagging on social media, writing about, or in any way publicly referencing a companion, beyond any consent given in the specific context of the engagement itself. This is mirrored in the client's NDA and enforced with the same rigor as the client-side protections.
This policy is reviewed by our counsel and director twice yearly — on 1 February and 1 August. When substantive changes are made, the new version is published at this URL, and all active clients and companions are notified by email at least thirty days before the revised policy takes effect.
The version number at the top of this page indicates the current iteration. A full history of previous versions, with the changes made at each revision, is available on request from our director of operations.
For any question about this policy, or any exercise of your rights under it (access, correction, deletion, portability), please contact our director of operations:
For regulatory complaints unresolved by the above, the relevant supervisory authority in your jurisdiction (for EU residents, your national data-protection authority) may be contacted directly. We do not ask that you come to us first — only that you give us the chance to make it right.
This policy is written to be read, not skimmed. If a paragraph raises a question, please bring it — we would rather spend an hour explaining our practice than leave any part of it ambiguous.
Social Media & Public Mention.
No companion, staff member, partner, or contractor of the House may reference any client, engagement, city, or occasion on social media, in private messaging groups, in public writing, in conversation at professional functions, or in any other channel — public or private. This applies in perpetuity. It is the most strictly enforced clause in our companion contracts.
Where our own marketing refers to engagement types or typical occasions, it does so only in fully generic terms ("a recent wedding in Provence") and only with anonymised details that cannot be triangulated back to any specific engagement or client.
If you ever see a reference you believe could relate to your engagement in any public or private channel, written or said, please notify our director immediately. Such references are vanishingly rare, but every single one is investigated.