What I do with your information.

Who I am

Genies-Lamp is operated by Luke Beresford-Ward, based in West Sussex. I'm the data controller for anything collected through this website, which in practice means I'm the person responsible for it and the person you'd complain to. You can contact me at luke@genies-lamp.co.uk about anything on this page.

What I collect, and when

If you fill in the enquiry form I collect your name, your work email address, your company name, and whatever you choose to tell me about your website and what you need doing to it. That's the only place on this site where I ask you for anything, and every field on it is there because it makes my first reply more useful rather than because it makes a better sales record.

If you email or call me directly then I hold whatever is in that correspondence, which is normal for anybody who has ever been sent an email. And like almost every website, my hosting keeps standard technical logs including IP addresses, which exist so the site can be kept secure and working rather than so anybody can be identified.

Why I'm allowed to hold it

For enquiries, the lawful basis is legitimate interests, on the grounds that you contacted me asking for something and replying to you is the obvious consequence of that. If we go on to work together then the basis becomes contract, because I can't deliver a job without holding your details and I can't meet my legal obligations around invoicing and tax without keeping records of it.

I don't rely on consent for anything, which is deliberate, because consent-based processing is mostly what marketing lists are built on and there isn't one here.

How long I keep it

Enquiries that don't turn into work are deleted after twelve months, and if you tell me it's a no then I'll delete it sooner and I won't chase you in the meantime. Records relating to actual paid work are kept for six years after the end of the engagement, because HMRC requires that and I don't have discretion over it.

Who else sees it

Nobody buys or rents your details, and I don't share them with partners or affiliates, because there aren't any. The only third parties involved are the ordinary tools any small business runs on, so my email provider, my CRM, my accounting software and my website host, all of which process data on my instructions under contract rather than for their own purposes.

Some of those providers operate outside the UK, and where that happens the transfer is covered by the standard safeguards under UK data protection law. If you'd like to know exactly which providers are involved then email me and I'll tell you, since there's no reason for it to be a secret.

Cookies

This site uses cookies to make basic things work and to give me a rough sense of which pages people actually read. It doesn't run advertising cookies, it doesn't build a profile of you across other websites, and it isn't feeding anything into a retargeting audience, mostly because I don't advertise.

Anything you send me about your website

If you give me access to your HubSpot account, or send me a page, or share anything about your business while we're talking, I treat that as confidential and use it only for the work we've discussed. Access is returned or revoked when the job finishes, and I won't show your site as an example anywhere without asking you first and accepting no as an answer.

What you can ask me to do

Under UK data protection law you can ask for a copy of what I hold about you, ask me to correct it if it's wrong, ask me to delete it, or object to my holding it at all. You can also ask me to restrict what I do with it while a question is being sorted out.

Email me and I'll deal with it within a month, usually a good deal faster, because for a business this size it's a matter of searching an inbox rather than raising a ticket somewhere. If you think I've handled something badly then you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, though I'd rather you told me first so I have a chance to put it right.

Changes to this page

If this notice changes then the date at the top changes with it. I won't quietly alter it and hope nobody notices, and if a change is significant enough to affect anyone I've already spoken to then I'll tell them directly.