Privacy notice
Hampshire Subsidence is a website about cracking, settlement and ground movement beneath buildings, and it offers one enquiry form. This notice sets out what happens to the details that come through that form, and it applies to the website at hampshiresubsidence.co.uk and to nothing else. The organisation making the decisions about that information is Hampshire Subsidence.
The organisation behind the site
Hampshire Subsidence publishes these pages and decides what becomes of an enquiry, so in data protection language we are the controller. If you want to reach a person about anything in this notice, please use the contact page on this site; that is the route we monitor, and messages about privacy are dealt with the same way as any other enquiry.
The details we end up holding
Nearly all of it arrives because you typed it in. The enquiry form asks for your name, an email address, a telephone number, the postcode or address of the property, and a description of what you are seeing, the cracks, when they appeared, what the building is like. You can attach photographs as well. Please do not send photographs that show people. If one does, we delete the photograph. Anything you write to us afterwards, and anything we write back, sits alongside the original enquiry as part of the same record. Separately, the delivery network that serves these pages writes ordinary technical logs of requests, which include IP addresses, timestamps and details of the browser asking for a page; these are a by-product of running a website rather than something we collect about you. The form itself is delivered by a third-party service: Basin (usebasin.com). Where typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts, the request for the font file reaches Google's servers rather than ours.
Our purposes, and what makes each one 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. Beyond that, we keep a record of what was said in case a question comes back later about the enquiry or how it was handled; we look at server logs to keep the site working and to spot abuse; and where the law obliges us to retain or disclose something, we rely on that legal obligation. Legitimate interests and legal obligation are the only two bases in play. There is no contract between you and us, so we never rely on one. Things we do not do: no newsletters or marketing, no profiling, no automated decision-making, and no selling or renting of your details to anyone. 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.
Suppliers who touch an enquiry
The site does not run on equipment we own outright, so a small amount of handling happens elsewhere on our instructions. Those suppliers are: 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
Given where the servers sit and where our email arrives, some of this information can be processed outside the United Kingdom. The detail, including the safeguard relied on, is as follows: 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.
The life of an enquiry with us
We do not hold enquiries open-endedly, and we keep no archive of old ones for interest or for statistics. The record we are talking about is the form as you submitted it, any photographs attached to it, and the correspondence that followed. The period, and what happens at the end of it, 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. The network that serves the pages keeps its technical logs for no more than 3 days. If you ask us to delete your enquiry sooner, we will, unless there is a legal reason we have to keep something for a while longer.
How it is looked after
Pages and form submissions travel over an encrypted connection, so what you type cannot be read in transit by someone watching the network. Once an enquiry reaches us, it is visible only to the people who actually deal with enquiries, and nobody else is given access to it.
What you are entitled to ask for
Data protection law hands you a set of rights over information 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. Use the contact page to make a request and we will deal with it. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, this is what happens next: 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 from young people
Subsidence is something owners, landlords and tenants deal with, and these pages are written with adults in mind; the site is not aimed at anyone under eighteen. If it becomes clear that an enquiry has come from a child, we delete it rather than pass it on, and we would ask a parent or guardian to get in touch instead.
No cookies and no tracking
This website sets no cookies of its own. There is no analytics package counting your visit, no advertising network watching it, and no tracking pixels anywhere on these pages. You can read the whole site without anything being stored on your device by us.
If this notice is revised
We will rewrite this notice if the way enquiries are handled changes, or if one of the suppliers behind the site changes. Whatever version appears on this page is the one that applies now, and it replaces anything published here before it.