Privacy notice
Mitcham Hearing deals with one subject, hearing tests, and this notice deals with a different one: you, and the details you hand over when you ask us for help. It applies to the pages published at hearingaidsmitcham.co.uk and to the enquiry form that sits on them. The controller, meaning the party answerable for what follows, is Hearing Aids Mitcham.
Who you are dealing with
The publisher of this website, and the decision maker when an enquiry arrives, is Hearing Aids Mitcham. We would rather you came to us in writing through the contact page on this site, because that way your message reaches the people who actually handle enquiries. There is no separate privacy department to ask for: put your question in plain words and it will be read.
What reaches us, and by which route
Nearly all of it is simply what you chose to write. The form asks for a name, an email address, a telephone number and a postcode or address, so that we know which area you are in, and it leaves room for you to describe the hearing difficulty and who the appointment would be for. Pictures can be attached if you think they help, and there is one thing we ask about those: Please do not send photographs that show people. If one does, we delete the photograph. If you write to us again afterwards, that correspondence sits with the original enquiry. Separately, and automatically, the delivery network that serves these pages notes the ordinary technical details of a request, such as an IP address, the time, the page asked for and the browser used. Delivery of the form itself is handled by Basin (usebasin.com)
The reasons, and the law behind each one
Start with the main reason we hold an enquiry at all, and the basis in law we rest it on: 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 what was said so that there is a record of the enquiry and of our reply if a question comes up later, we rely on the delivery network's logs to keep the site standing and to deal with abuse of it, and we treat these as our legitimate interests too. Where the law requires us to retain or disclose something, a legal obligation is the basis. Four things do not happen here. We do not send marketing, we do not build profiles, no decision about you is made by a machine, and nothing is sold to anybody. 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.
Hands other than ours
Bits of this website run on systems that belong to other companies, so a measure of handling takes place outside our own hands, and the record names them: 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
Since the pages are served from a network of machines and our email sits at this site's own domain, the question of where information rests has a factual answer rather than a comfortable one: 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
One rule covers every enquiry, instead of 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.
Encryption, and who actually sees it
Your browser talks to this site over an encrypted connection, including the moment you press send, so the contents of the form are not readable in transit. Inside, an enquiry is reachable only by the small number of people who have to deal with it, and accounts are protected by passwords that are not shared. No system is beyond all risk, but nothing is left lying about where it need not be.
What you are entitled to ask of us
Information that describes you comes with rights attached, and here they are: 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. The contact page is the place to start, and we will reply within a month, or explain why we need longer. If our answer leaves you unsatisfied, you can take it further: 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
Booking a hearing test is an adult matter, whether for yourself or for a parent or partner, and nothing on this site is aimed at anyone under eighteen. We do not knowingly take enquiries from children. Should it turn out that one has come in, we delete it rather than pass it on, and an adult is welcome to send the enquiry themselves.
Cookies, counters and adverts: none of them here
This website sets no cookies of its own. No analytics package is installed, so nobody here is counting your visit or watching which pages you read, and there are no advertising tags, no pixels and no remarketing lists. The typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser fetches the font files from Google's servers as the page opens; that request is not something we see, measure or use.
If this notice is rewritten
A change in how enquiries are handled, or a change of supplier behind the site, means this page gets edited to match. Whatever is showing here is the version in force, and there is no older edition hiding somewhere else.