Privacy policy

Who we are

This website is operated by Michal Blance Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 12698296, with its registered office at REGISTERED OFFICE ADDRESS.

For the purposes of UK data protection law we are the data controller for the information described below. That means we decide why and how it is used, and we are responsible for looking after it.

If you have any question about this policy, or about the information we hold on you, email info@michalblance.com.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration number ICO REGISTRATION NUMBER.

What this policy covers

This policy covers michalblance.com and any enquiry you send us through it. It does not cover other websites we link to — including our clients' sites — which have their own policies.

What we collect

What you give us

If you fill in the contact form, we receive the details you type into it:

• your name;
• your email address;
• your company name, if you choose to give one;
• which of our services your enquiry is about;
• whatever you write in the message field.

Only your name and email address are required. Please don't put confidential or sensitive information in the message field — a first enquiry isn't the right place for it, and we'll ask for anything of that kind through a more appropriate channel.

What we receive automatically

Our hosting provider records standard technical information every time a page is requested, including your IP address, the type of browser and device you are using, the page requested, and the time of the request. This is part of how any website is delivered and kept secure; we do not use it to build a profile of you or to identify you.

Cookies and tracking

This website does not set any cookies. There is no analytics, no advertising pixel, no session tracking and no third-party tag of any kind. That is why you have not been asked to accept a cookie banner — there is nothing to consent to.

One thing is worth naming, because it is not obvious from the page itself: the typefaces used on this site are delivered by Google Fonts. Your browser fetches them from Google's servers when a page loads, which means Google receives your IP address as part of that request. No cookie is set by this, and we receive nothing back, but the request does leave your browser.

Why we use your information, and our lawful basis

To reply to your enquiry and discuss working together

Lawful basis: taking steps at your request before entering into a contract, and our legitimate interest in responding to people who approach us about our services.

To keep the website working and protect it from abuse

Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in running a secure, functioning website and in preventing spam and automated attacks on our contact form.

To meet our own legal and accounting obligations

Lawful basis: compliance with a legal obligation, where correspondence forms part of a record we are required to keep.

We do not use your details for marketing. We will not add you to a mailing list because you sent an enquiry, and we do not sell or rent personal information to anyone.

Who else handles it

We use a small number of service providers to run this site. They act on our instructions and may not use your information for their own purposes:

• Vercel Inc. — hosts the website and delivers it to your browser.
• Intuit Inc. (Mailchimp Transactional) — delivers the enquiry from the contact form to our inbox.
• Our email provider, EMAIL PROVIDER NAME, which stores the correspondence in our mailbox.

These providers are based in, or store data in, the United States. Where personal information is transferred outside the UK, that transfer is covered by the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, or another safeguard permitted under UK data protection law.

We may also disclose information where we are required to by law, or where it is necessary to establish or defend a legal claim.

How long we keep it

We keep enquiry correspondence for RETENTION PERIOD from our last contact with you, after which it is deleted.

If your enquiry becomes a piece of work, the correspondence is kept for as long as we are working together and then for as long as we are required to retain business records — normally six years for accounting purposes.

Server logs held by our hosting provider are retained for a short period on a rolling basis and then discarded.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• ask what personal information we hold about you, and get a copy of it;
• have inaccurate information corrected;
• ask us to delete information we no longer have a good reason to keep;
• ask us to restrict how we use it while a concern is resolved;
• object to us using it on the basis of legitimate interests;
• receive information you gave us in a portable, machine-readable format.

To exercise any of these, email info@michalblance.com. We will respond within one month. There is no charge, and we will not ask you to justify the request.

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. We would rather you came to us first so we can put it right.

How we protect it

The site is served over HTTPS, so anything you submit is encrypted in transit. Access to the mailbox that receives enquiries is limited to the people who need it and protected by multi-factor authentication. No system is perfect, but we take the security of information you trust us with seriously.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle personal information, we will update this page and change the date at the top. Where a change is significant, we will say what changed rather than quietly replacing the text.