Privacy notice
This is the privacy notice for Kent Subsidence Help, the website at kentsubsidencehelp.co.uk. It explains what becomes of the details you type into the enquiry form, which go to one subsidence specialist working in your area so that the firm can contact you about the problem. The controller for that information is Kent Subsidence Help.
The controller, and how to reach us
Kent Subsidence Help publishes these pages and decides what is done with an enquiry, which puts us in the position of controller under UK data protection law. The contact page on this site is the route to us for anything to do with privacy, whether that is a question, a request about your own information, or a complaint. Please use it rather than looking for a telephone number or a postal address, as neither is published here.
What we hold, and where it came from
Most of it is simply what you wrote. The form asks for your name, an email address, a telephone number, the postcode or address of the property, and whatever you care to tell us about the cracking, sticking doors or movement you have noticed; photographs can be attached as well. If you write again afterwards, or we reply, those messages sit alongside the original enquiry. Submissions reach us through a form service: Basin (usebasin.com) Quite apart from anything you type, the delivery network that serves these pages keeps technical logs, such as an IP address, the time of a request, the page asked for and the browser's own description of itself. Those exist so the site stays up and abuse can be spotted, not so that visitors can be identified. One request about pictures: Please do not send photographs that show people. If one does, we delete the photograph.
Why we hold it and what makes that lawful
The principal purpose, and the basis in law we rely on for it, is set out here: 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 enquiry service, for which the specialist pays us. We have assessed that this does not override your interests, because you have asked us to pass your enquiry on and you can take your enquiry elsewhere at any time. Alongside that, we keep what was said as a record of the enquiry in case a query comes back weeks later, we use the technical logs to keep the website secure and working, and where a law places a duty on us we meet it. Those rest on our legitimate interests, or on legal obligation where one applies. The passing-on itself is described here: 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. The list of things we do not do is short. No marketing emails, no newsletter, no profiling, no decisions taken about you by machine, and nothing sold or handed to list brokers.
Other hands on an enquiry
Parts of the machinery behind this site belong to other companies, so a limited amount of the handling is done for us rather than by us: Basin delivers the enquiry form; Bunny serves the pages; Namecheap provides our email; 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.
Information that crosses a border
Where the servers sit, and where our email arrives, decides whether anything leaves the country: The network that serves the pages holds its technical logs in the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States. The form service operates from the United States and is certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
When an enquiry is deleted
There is a fixed answer to this rather than a judgement made case by case: 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. The network that serves the pages keeps its technical logs for no more than 3 days.
Looking after it
Traffic between your browser and this website runs over an encrypted connection, so what you put in the form cannot be read as it travels. Once it reaches us, the enquiry is open only to the people who actually deal with it: reading what you sent, replying to you and passing it to the specialist. Nobody else here has reason to look at it, and nobody else is given access.
Your rights, and how to use them
Data protection law hands 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. A request starts at the contact page, and if we cannot do what you have asked we will tell you why. Should our answer leave you dissatisfied: 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.
Enquiries and age
Subsidence is a matter for owners, landlords and tenants, and everything here is written for adults. The site is not aimed at anyone under eighteen and we do not set out to collect a child's details. If it becomes clear that a child has sent an enquiry, we delete it instead of passing it on. A parent or guardian who thinks that has happened can ask us through the contact page to remove it.
No cookies, nothing tracking you
This website sets no cookies of its own. There is no analytics package counting visits, no advertising pixel, no tag manager and nothing assembling a profile of what you read. The typefaces come from Google Fonts, which means your browser fetches the font files from Google's servers while the page loads. Nothing we publish follows you on to another site.
Revisions to this notice
If the way enquiries are handled changes, or one of the suppliers behind the site changes, this notice is rewritten to match. Whatever wording appears on this page is the version in force at that moment.