Privacy Notice

Who we are

West Country Software is a website of West Country Automation Ltd ("WCA"), a limited company registered in England and Wales under company number 17305076, founded and run by Will Crawshaw and Harvey Wood. Our registered office is Flat 303 Gosling Lodge, 8 West Parkside, London, SE10 0PD. For the personal data described in the sections below on this page (up to and including "Your rights"), we are the "data controller", meaning we decide what is collected and why. Further down, "Working with our client organisations" explains a different role we sometimes hold: data processor.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s independent data protection regulator, under registration number ZC186083. You can verify this on the ICO’s public register at ico.org.uk.

If you have questions about your data, or want to make a request under UK data protection law (UK GDPR), email us at hello@westcountryautomation.com.

What we collect and why

1. Analytics data

This site sets no cookies and does not use analytics cookies. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which measures traffic without cookies, without fingerprinting and without tracking you across sites or sessions. There is no cookie banner on this site because there is nothing to consent to.

Cloudflare Web Analytics reports aggregate figures only: which pages were viewed, which sites referred visitors, and broad device and country information. It does not build a profile of you, and we cannot identify individual visitors from it.

2. Bookings and calls

When you book a discovery call through our website, we collect your name, email address and the time you choose, and optionally a phone number and any message you add. We use this only to arrange, confirm and run the call.

The booking creates an event in our Google Calendar (part of Google Workspace) and generates a Google Meet video link, which Google emails to you as a calendar invitation. We also receive an internal notification email about the booking, delivered through Resend. We do not use your booking details for marketing.

3. Email correspondence

If you email us directly, we will have your email address and whatever you write. We keep correspondence for as long as it is useful for our working relationship, then delete it.

4. Server and security logs

Our site is served via Cloudflare, which keeps basic request logs (IP address, timestamp, page requested) for security, abuse prevention and performance reasons. These logs are retained by Cloudflare on a rolling short term basis and we do not combine them with anything else.

Legal basis, sharing and retention

Under UK GDPR we rely on the following legal bases:

• Legitimate interests, for responding to your enquiries, providing our services, and basic security logging.
• Contract, where you have engaged us as a client, to perform the work agreed.

We do not sell your data. We use the following processors, each of which handles specific data on our behalf under their own privacy commitments:

Where a processor is based outside the UK or EU, we rely on UK International Data Transfer Agreements, the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or equivalent safeguards as set out in those providers' terms.

How long we keep your data:

• Analytics data: aggregate only, retained by Cloudflare. No record identifying an individual visitor is created.
• Booking details: held as calendar events in our Google Workspace, and within the related booking notification emails. We remove them when they are no longer needed for our records.
• Client correspondence: kept for the duration of our working relationship plus 6 years for accounting and legal record purposes.
• Server logs: short term rolling retention by Cloudflare (typically days, not months).

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you
• Have inaccurate data corrected
• Have your data erased (the "right to be forgotten")
• Restrict or object to our processing of your data
• Receive your data in a portable format
• Withdraw consent at any time, for anything we do on the basis of consent

To exercise any of these rights, email hello@westcountryautomation.com. We will respond within one month.

If you are not happy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk. We would appreciate the chance to address your concerns first, but it is your right to go directly to the ICO.

Working with our client organisations

West Country Software designs, and in most cases hosts and supports, bespoke software for organisations including those in health and social care. Where we do this, our client (for example, a home care provider) is the data controller for the personal data held in that software: information about the people they support, their staff, and their day-to-day operations. WCA acts only as their data processor. We process this data on their behalf, only for the purposes they have instructed, and under a written data processing agreement between us.

We do not decide what data is collected, why it is collected, or how long it is kept; those decisions sit with our client. If your data is held in a system we have built or support, and you have a question about how it is used, or want to exercise a right such as access, correction or erasure, please contact that organisation directly. They are the data controller and are responsible for responding to you.

We have completed the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit, the annual assessment the NHS uses to check that organisations handling health and social care data meet the required standards for data security and information governance. We are also Cyber Essentials certified, the UK Government-backed standard that protects against the most common cyber attacks. Details of all our registrations and certifications, and how to verify each of them independently, are on our compliance page.

We take our responsibilities as a processor seriously. Where WCA can access personal data within a client's system, that access is:

• limited to a small number of named, authorised individuals working on that engagement;
• protected by multi factor authentication and logged on the client's own audit trail;
• never copied, exported or reused outside delivering the agreed service; and
• removed when an individual leaves the engagement, and removed entirely when the contract ends, unless the client asks us to retain support access.

If you have a concern specifically about how WCA, as a processor, has handled data on a client's behalf, you are welcome to contact us at hello@westcountryautomation.com and we will look into it together with the relevant client.

Accessibility and other formats

This notice is published here in plain, web accessible HTML for anyone to read at any time, free of charge. We do not currently issue this notice in printed form, since West Country Software does not deliver care services directly or meet service users in person; where one of our client organisations provides service users with printed information (for example a leaflet on admission to their service), that is the client's own document as data controller, published separately from this notice.

If you need this notice in a different format, for example large print, an audio version, or a translated copy, contact us at hello@westcountryautomation.com and we will do our best to help.

Cookies in detail

This site sets no cookies at all, so there is no cookie table to publish and no cookie banner to interact with.

Cloudflare Web Analytics, which we use to measure traffic, works without cookies and without fingerprinting. If you have visited this site before and your browser still holds cookies from an earlier version of it, you can clear them through your browser at any time.

Changes to this notice

If we make material changes we will update the date at the top and, where appropriate, flag the change on the site. The current version is always the one published here.

Contact

Questions, requests or complaints: hello@westcountryautomation.com