Privacy Policy

Last updated: 21 September 2026

Who we are

Whinstone Digital is a sole-trader web design and development business operated by Alex Smith, based in North East England. For anything in this policy, contact WhinstoneDigital@gmail.com.

What we collect

Depending on how you interact with the site, we may collect:

• Your name, email address, business name and website, when you use a contact form, the free security scan request, or the client agreement tool
• Billing name and email, when you pay for a service via Stripe Checkout
• The content of any message you send us directly

We do not collect or store payment card details ourselves — all card payments are handled entirely by Stripe (see "Third parties" below).

Why we collect it

We use this information to respond to enquiries, deliver the services you've paid for or requested, issue receipts and invoices, and meet our own legal and tax obligations. We do not sell or rent your data to anyone, and we don't use it for advertising.

Cookies & tracking

This site does not use analytics, advertising, or tracking cookies. If you go through to Stripe Checkout to pay for a service, Stripe may set its own cookies on their domain as part of processing your payment securely — that's covered by Stripe's own privacy policy, not this one.

Third parties

We use a small number of trusted providers to run this business, each of whom processes data under their own privacy terms:

• Stripe — payment processing (card details never reach us directly)
• Cloudflare — website hosting and delivery

How long we keep it

We keep enquiry and contract-related information for as long as needed to deliver the service, and financial records (invoices, payment records) for at least 6 years, in line with UK HMRC record-keeping requirements. Anything else is deleted once it's no longer needed.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to have inaccurate data corrected, and to request it be deleted where we're not required to keep it for legal reasons (such as tax records). To make a request, email WhinstoneDigital@gmail.com. If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy occasionally as the business grows — the date at the top will always show when it was last changed.