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Privacy notice

This notice explains what personal information Project WORD collects through Project WORD, why, and your rights. Project WORD is the controller of this information, of The Studio, Ketley, Telford, Shropshire, TF1 5DJ. Contact us about privacy through our contact page, or by email at sales@projectword.co.uk.

What we collect

  • Your account: your name, email address and a scrambled (hashed) version of your password, so you can manage your listing.
  • Your listing: what you put on it, such as the business name, description, contact details, address, keywords and photos. Listings are public: that is what they are for.
  • Messages: what you send through our contact page or to a business through its listing.
  • Payments: if you upgrade, our payment provider Stripe takes your card details. We never see them; we keep a record of your subscription.
  • Technical information: the address of your device when you sign up, sign in or send a message, kept for a short time to stop abuse, and a cookie that keeps you signed in.

Why we use it

  • To run your listing and your account, and to take payments for upgrades (to carry out our agreement with you).
  • To check listings and keep the directory free of spam and unsuitable businesses (our legitimate interest in a trustworthy directory). Our checks visit the website on a listing, look up its postcode, and may ask an AI service to read the listing and say whether it looks like a real business.
  • To email you about your listing, and about offers and upgrades for it (our legitimate interest in telling businesses about our service). Every marketing email has a link to stop them, and you can stop them at any time.
  • To measure how the site is used, only if you agree to analytics cookies (your consent).

Who we share it with

We use trusted providers to run the site, and they only use your information to provide their service to us: our hosting provider; Amazon Web Services (Amazon SES) to send email; Stripe for payments; postcodes.io to place postcodes on the map; OpenStreetMap, whose map tiles your browser loads when you view a map; Anthropic, whose AI reads new listings when that check is switched on; and Google for reCAPTCHA on our forms and, if you agree, Google Analytics. Some of these providers process information outside the UK, under safeguards the law recognises. We do not sell your information.

How long we keep it

We keep your account and listing while you use the site, and remove them if you ask us to close your account, except for records we must keep by law, such as payment records. Sign-up and sign-in records used to stop abuse are kept for a few days.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of your information, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, or to have it in a portable form. You can stop marketing emails at any time. To use any of these rights, contact us. If you are unhappy with how we use your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).