Confidentiality & Data Protection
1. What this covers
The self-assessment tool and, eventually, the real evidence-upload portal involve a facility sharing real information: property details, photos, staff training records, floor plans, and in some cases guest-incident records. This policy governs what happens to all of it.
2. The self-assessment tool specifically
As currently built, the self-assessment tool runs entirely in the visitor’s own browser. Answers, scores, and the property intake form are not transmitted to or stored on any ASF server — nothing is sent anywhere unless the visitor chooses to download their own PDF report. This is a structural privacy guarantee, not a policy promise: the tool simply has no backend to send data to yet.
3. Once a real portal exists
When facility registration and evidence upload move beyond the free self-assessment (not yet built), the following commitments apply:
- Evidence a facility uploads is used only for the assessment it was submitted for, not repurposed for any other facility’s review or any commercial purpose
- Access is limited to the specific assessor(s) assigned to that facility and the minimum ASF staff needed for quality review
- A facility can request a copy of everything ASF holds about it, and can request correction of factual errors
- Data is retained only as long as needed for the accreditation cycle plus a reasonable audit window, then deleted on a defined schedule
4. The public registry — what’s public and what isn’t
Once built, the public registry (so anyone can verify a claimed certification) will show a facility’s name, location, accreditation status, and level — never the underlying evidence, photos, or detailed assessment notes behind that status. The result is public; the evidence is not.
5. Assessor confidentiality obligation
Every ASF Tourism assessor signs a confidentiality undertaking before conducting any assessment, covering everything observed on-site that isn’t part of the final published result — including anything incidentally seen or discussed that falls outside the scope of the standard itself.
6. Security of uploaded evidence
Once the evidence portal exists, uploaded files will be encrypted in transit and at rest, access-logged, and subject to the same IT security standard ASF already applies to its healthcare accreditation data under ASF-POL-18.