Edgware Carpet Cleaners Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy explains how Edgware Carpet Cleaners collects, uses, stores, and protects your personal data when you use our carpet cleaning and related services. It applies to all Edgware Carpet Cleaners customers and prospective customers in our service area, including anyone who makes an enquiry, books a service, or otherwise interacts with us as a private individual or on behalf of a business.
Edgware Carpet Cleaners is committed to complying with the UK General Data Protection Regulation GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. We only process personal data in a lawful, fair, and transparent manner and only for purposes that you would reasonably expect in connection with our services.
Data Controller
For the purposes of data protection law, Edgware Carpet Cleaners is the data controller for the personal data described in this Privacy Policy. This means we decide how and why your personal data is used. If you have any questions about this policy or how we handle your personal data, you can contact us using the contact details provided on our website or in your service documentation.
Personal Data We Collect
We may collect and process the following categories of personal data about you when you make an enquiry, request a quote, book a service, or otherwise interact with us:
Identification and contact details: name, address of the property where services are carried out, billing address, and other basic contact details you choose to provide.
Service and booking information: details of the services you request or receive, dates and times of appointments, access instructions for the property, and relevant notes you provide about the premises or items to be cleaned.
Payment and transaction information: details relating to payments made for our services, such as amount, date, method of payment, and basic billing information. We do not store full payment card details when payment is processed through a secure third-party payment processor.
Communication records: records of your communications with us, including enquiries, service confirmations, feedback, and any complaints or follow-up correspondence.
Technical information: limited technical information may be collected when you visit our online pages, such as your device type, approximate location, and pages visited. This is used to help us improve our services and customer experience.
Lawful Bases for Processing
We process your personal data only where we have a valid lawful basis under data protection law. The main lawful bases we rely on are:
Performance of a contract: to take steps at your request before entering into a contract and to perform our contract with you. This includes handling enquiries, providing quotes, managing bookings, carrying out cleaning services, and administering payments.
Legal obligation: to comply with legal requirements, such as tax and accounting rules, record keeping obligations, and responses to lawful requests from public authorities.
Legitimate interests: to operate, protect, and develop our business in a way that you would reasonably expect, and which does not override your rights and freedoms. This may include managing customer relationships, improving our services, preventing fraud, ensuring security of our systems and personnel, and handling feedback or complaints.
Consent: where required by law, we may rely on your consent for specific activities, such as certain types of direct marketing. When we rely on consent, you have the right to withdraw it at any time.
How We Use Your Personal Data
We use the personal data we collect for the following purposes:
To respond to enquiries, provide quotes, and arrange appointments.
To provide and manage carpet cleaning and related services at your premises.
To process payments, issue invoices, and maintain accurate financial records.
To communicate with you about your bookings, including confirmations, reminders, and any changes or follow-up relating to the service.
To handle feedback, queries, and complaints, and to improve our customer service and the quality of our work.
To keep internal records for business management, planning, and reporting.
To comply with legal and regulatory obligations and to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.
Data Retention
We will retain your personal data only for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected, including to meet any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.
In general, we may retain your core customer records and service history for up to six years after the last interaction with you, in line with legal limitation periods and tax record obligations. Records relating to enquiries that do not lead to a booking may be kept for a shorter period, typically no longer than two years.
Where we rely on your consent for marketing or other optional communications, we will keep your contact details for that purpose until you withdraw your consent or object to such processing, after which we will stop using your data for those purposes and either delete or anonymise it, unless we need to keep some information to comply with our legal obligations or to resolve disputes.
Data Processors and Sharing of Personal Data
We do not sell your personal data to third parties. However, we may share your personal data with trusted third parties who act as data processors on our behalf. These organisations only process your data under our instructions and in accordance with data protection law.
Categories of data processors may include:
Payment processors and financial service providers that securely handle payments and refunds.
IT and cloud service providers that support our booking, communication, and data storage systems.
Professional advisers such as accountants and legal advisers for business administration and compliance.
Where necessary, we may also share personal data with independent contractors or staff who carry out cleaning services on our behalf, but only to the extent needed to perform the work, such as your name, address, and service details.
We may disclose personal data where required to do so by law, or where we reasonably believe it is necessary to protect our rights, property, or safety or that of our customers or others.
If we transfer personal data outside the United Kingdom or European Economic Area, we will ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect your data in accordance with GDPR requirements.
Your Data Protection Rights
Under data protection law, you have a number of rights in relation to your personal data. These include:
Right of access: you have the right to request confirmation of whether we process your personal data and to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you, together with certain information about how we use it.
Right to rectification: you have the right to request that inaccurate or incomplete personal data about you is corrected or updated.
Right to erasure: in certain circumstances, you have the right to request that we delete your personal data, for example where it is no longer needed for the purposes for which it was collected, or where you withdraw consent and there is no other lawful basis for the processing.
Right to restrict processing: you may ask us to restrict the use of your personal data in certain circumstances, such as while we verify the accuracy of the data or consider an objection you have raised.
Right to object: you may object to our processing of your personal data where we rely on legitimate interests as our lawful basis. You also have an absolute right to object to the use of your personal data for direct marketing.
Right to data portability: where processing is based on consent or on a contract and carried out by automated means, you have the right to receive your personal data in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format and to request that it be transferred to another controller where technically feasible.
Right to withdraw consent: where we process your personal data on the basis of your consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time. This will not affect the lawfulness of processing before consent was withdrawn.
You can exercise your rights by contacting us using the contact details provided on our website or in your service documentation. We may need to verify your identity before responding to your request.
Security of Your Personal Data
We take appropriate technical and organisational measures to safeguard your personal data against unauthorised access, accidental loss, destruction, or damage. These measures may include access controls, secure storage, staff training, and regular review of our security practices. While we take reasonable steps to protect your data, no system can be completely secure and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
Changes to This Privacy Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in the law, our services, or how we handle personal data. Any significant changes will be communicated where appropriate, and the updated policy will be made available through our usual channels. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically to remain informed about how we protect your personal data.