Privacy notice
Read this if you want to know what becomes of the details you send us through the enquiry form. It applies to the website at leedssubsidence.co.uk and to nothing else, and the organisation answerable for the information described below is Leeds Subsidence. Subsidence is the whole subject of this site, so enquiries about damaged buildings are more or less the only personal information we ever deal with.
Who holds this information
Leeds Subsidence publishes the site and makes the decisions about what happens to an enquiry, which in data protection language makes us the controller of it. There is no postal address, telephone line or named officer given on these pages, so please do not go looking for one: the contact page is the way to reach us, and what you send there arrives with the people who look after enquiries.
What comes in, and from where
Information reaches us along two routes. The first is whatever you type: your name, an email address, a telephone number, the postcode or address of the property, and your own account of what the building is doing, whether that is stepped cracking above a window, a door that has stopped shutting or a bay pulling away from the wall. Photographs can be attached, and any later emails or messages between us are kept alongside the original form. The form is delivered by a third party rather than written by us: Basin (usebasin.com) The second route is automatic. The delivery network that serves our pages keeps technical logs of the requests made to it, such as the requesting IP address, the time, the page wanted and what the browser says about itself. Those logs exist so that the site can be served and defended, not so that we can build a picture of you. Please do not send photographs that show people. If one does, we delete the photograph.
What it is used for, and why that is lawful
The main reason we hold what you send, and the basis in law we rely on for it, reads as follows: To answer your enquiry and pass it to one specialist covering your area, which is what you ask us to do when you send it. Our legitimate interest is in answering the people who contact us and in running the introduction service, for which the specialist pays us. We have assessed that this does not override your interests, because you have asked us to make the introduction and you can take your enquiry elsewhere at any time. Passing the enquiry along is the entire purpose of the form, and this is what that means in practice: Your enquiry, with the details you gave, is passed to one specialist firm covering the area you told us about, so that they can contact you about it. They use it only to answer your enquiry and to arrange any visit or work you agree with them, and from that point they are responsible for how they handle it. We do not pass your details to anyone else for their own use. There are three lesser purposes. We keep a record of what was asked and what was answered, so that a question coming back weeks later can be dealt with properly. We look at server logs to keep the site secure and working. And where the law obliges us to produce or preserve something, we do. The first two rest on our legitimate interests in running an honest enquiry service; the third rests on legal obligation. Nothing here is used for marketing, you are not profiled, no decision about you is taken by software alone, and we do not sell personal information to anyone.
Hands other than ours
Parts of this service run on systems belonging to other companies, which means a little handling happens outside our own hands. Those suppliers are set out here: Basin delivers the enquiry form; and Google supplies the typefaces the pages are set in, so your browser requests those files from Google. Each of them handles it only to do that job for us. We would also give information to a regulator, the police or a court where the law required it, and to nobody else.
Sending information abroad
Pages are served from a spread of machines and our email sits at the site's own domain, so information about a visit or an enquiry does not necessarily stay inside one country. The regions involved and the protection relied on are these: The network that serves the pages holds its technical logs where its own regions are set.
When the record is deleted
Nothing about an enquiry is meant to sit with us for good. What we treat as the record is the form as you submitted it, any photographs you attached and the messages that passed between us afterwards; when the time comes, the whole lot goes together rather than in pieces, and we keep no separate archive of old enquiries once that has happened. The rule we work to is this: We keep an enquiry for twelve months from the last contact about it, so that we can answer a later question about what was said and who it went to. After that it is deleted from the form service and from our email, and any backup copy is overwritten on the provider's normal cycle. You can ask us to delete it sooner at any time. If you would sooner it went earlier than that, say so through the contact page and we will deal with it. Bear in mind that the specialist who received your enquiry keeps its own records for its own reasons, and that is a matter for its privacy notice, not ours.
How it is protected
Every page and every submission travels over an encrypted connection, so what you type into the form is not readable by anyone watching the line between your device and us. On our side, the mailbox that receives enquiries is reachable only by the people who actually answer them, accounts are protected by passwords, and access is not given to anyone who has no reason to read a stranger's photographs of their own house.
Asking us to act on your information
The law gives you a set of rights over information that is about you: You have the right to ask what personal information we hold about you and to receive a copy; to have it corrected; to have it deleted; to restrict how we use it; to object to our using it; and to receive what you gave us in a form you can take elsewhere. Ask through the contact page and we answer within one month, without charge; we may ask you to confirm who you are. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113, though we would rather you told us first. Start with the contact page. We aim to reply within a month, and if it is not obvious from your message that the enquiry was yours we may ask you to help us confirm it before we act. Exercising a right costs you nothing. If our answer leaves you dissatisfied, this is the route open to you: If you complain to us about how we have handled your personal information, we acknowledge it within 30 days and reply as soon as we can.
Age of the person enquiring
Subsidence is a problem for owners, landlords and tenants, and these pages are written for adults; we are not looking for enquiries from anyone under eighteen and the site is not aimed at them. If it becomes clear that a child has filled in the form, we will delete what was sent instead of passing it on, and an adult in the household is welcome to send the enquiry themselves.
Trackers: none
This site sets no cookies of its own. No analytics package is installed, so your visit is not counted or profiled, and there is no advertising network watching from behind our pages. The typefaces are served from Google Fonts, which means your browser fetches the font files from Google as the page loads: that is a request for a file, not something planted on your device.
When this notice is updated
This notice will be rewritten if our suppliers change or if the way an enquiry is handled changes. Whatever appears on this page is what we are doing now, and it replaces anything said here before. If you sent an enquiry some time ago and want to know what was in force at the time, ask us through the contact page.