Privacy Notice

Your right to tell us to stop

You can tell us to stop contacting you at any time, for any reason, and we will. You do not need to give a reason and you do not need to explain yourself.

To stop marketing from us, do any one of these:

• Reply STOP to any text message we send you.
• Email privacy@sitesmiths.io and ask us to stop.
• Tell us on the phone if we call you.

When you do, we will stop contacting you and we will keep a record of your number for the sole purpose of making sure we do not contact you again. That record is used for nothing else.

This is your legal right under Article 21 of the UK GDPR, and it is absolute — we cannot refuse it or ask you to justify it.

Where we got your information

If we contacted you and you have never dealt with us before, we did not get your details from you directly. We got them from public business listings on Google Maps, collected on our behalf by a data provider called Outscraper.

We only ever collect details that a business has chosen to publish publicly as its business contact information.

What information we hold

For businesses we have contacted or may contact:

• Business name
• Business phone number
• Business address or trading area
• Google rating and number of reviews
• Business category (for example: plumber, electrician)
• Whether the business currently has a website
• A record of any contact between us, and how you responded

For customers, we also hold what we need to do the work and get paid: your name, email address, the content you give us for your website, and payment records.

If you contact us — by email, by phone, or by filling in one of our online forms — we hold what you give us: normally your name, your business details, your phone number, your email address and your message, and a record that you agreed to be contacted.

We do not collect or hold special category data — nothing about health, race, religion, politics, or anything similar.

Why we use it, and our legal basis

To contact businesses that might want a website (legitimate interests).

We look for businesses with good customer reviews that do not appear to have a website, and we offer to build one. Our legitimate interest is finding customers for a small business. We have weighed this against your privacy and consider it proportionate because: we only use business contact details that were already published publicly; we contact you about a service directly relevant to your trade; we identify ourselves clearly every time; we keep contact to a small number of messages; and we stop immediately when asked. If you disagree with that balance, you can object — see above, and we will stop.

To answer you when you get in touch (steps before a contract).

If you fill in one of our forms or email us, we use your details to reply and to talk through what you need. If you decide not to go ahead, we delete your enquiry within 12 months.

To provide services to customers (contract).

Once you become a customer, we use your information to build your website, communicate with you, and take payment.

To meet our legal obligations (legal obligation).

We keep records of sales and payments for as long as UK tax law requires.

How long we keep it

If you never become a customer, we delete your details 12 months after we last contacted you.

If you ask us to stop contacting you, we keep only your phone number on a do-not-contact list, indefinitely, so that we do not contact you again by mistake.

If you become a customer, we keep your records for six years after our last work for you, which is the period required by UK tax law.

Who else sees it

We use a small number of established service providers to run the business. Each of them handles your information only on our instructions, under a contract:

Sales callers. We sometimes work with self-employed sales callers who phone businesses on our behalf. They see only the business name, phone number, trade and town needed to make the call, and they record the outcome in our own system. They work under a written agreement that requires them to use your details only for that call, keep them secure and confidential, keep no copies, and delete them when they stop working with us. They always say they are calling on behalf of Sitesmiths, and if you tell them you do not want calls, we will not call you again.

Some of these providers are based outside the United Kingdom, mainly in the United States. Where information is transferred outside the UK, it is protected by the safeguards UK data protection law requires — either a UK adequacy decision, or standard contractual clauses with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with anyone for their own marketing.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• Object to us using your information for marketing — absolute, see above
• Access a copy of the information we hold about you
• Correct anything that is wrong
• Erase your information
• Restrict how we use it
• Portability — receive your information in a transferable format
• Object to processing based on legitimate interests, on grounds relating to your situation

To use any of these, email privacy@sitesmiths.io. We will respond within one month. There is no charge.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first at privacy@sitesmiths.io — we would rather fix it.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at any time:

Changes to this notice

If we change how we use personal information, we will update this page and change the date at the top.