Privacy

Three different relationships, and why that matters

Data protection law cares about who decides what happens to information. In BSK View there are three answers, and it is worth knowing which one applies to which information.

Your customers’ details: you decide, we act. The names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, job histories, quotes and invoices you put into BSK Vieware yours. In legal terms you are the “controller” and we are the “processor”: you decide what is collected and why, and we only do what the software does on your instructions. We do not sell it, we do not use it to market to anybody, and we do not use it to train anything. If you tell us to delete something, we delete it.

Your own account: we decide. Your name, your business name, your email address, what plan you are on and what you have paid are ours to look after. Here we are the controller, because we decide what we need in order to run the service and bill for it.

Company information from the public register: we decide. If your plan includes Prospect Finder, we look companies up on the Companies House public register and keep a copy so the same company does not have to be fetched twice. That copy includes directors’ names and roles. Those people are not our customers and are not your customers, and we are the controller for that information. There is a section on it further down, because it is the part most people would not expect.

What we hold about you

Because you have an account with us:

• Your name and email address, and the same for anybody else you invite into your workspace.
• Your business name, address, VAT number and payment details as you have entered them.
• Which plan you are on, whether you are in a trial, and your billing history. Card details are handled by Stripe and we never see or store a card number.
• The date each person last signed in, taken once a day, so we can tell an account that is being used from one that has gone quiet.
• Anything you write to us in a support request.

We use it to run your workspace, to bill you, to answer you when you get in touch, and to know whether the product is working for you. We do not sell it.

Where your data is kept

Your records and your files are in London. The database and the file storage are hosted in Amazon Web Services’ London region, and the parts of the app that read and write them run in London too.

Some of the services around it are not. Stripe, which takes your subscription payment, and Resend, which sends email, are both United States companies and process some information outside the United Kingdom. The hosting provider also runs a global network that serves pages from wherever the visitor is.

We say which is which rather than claiming everything is in the UK, because the second half is the part that would matter to you.

Who else touches it

These are the companies we rely on to run BSK View. Each one only gets what it needs for its job.

We will tell you before we add another one. We do not name a legal transfer mechanism here for the services outside the UK; that wording is being settled and this page will carry it when it is.

Company information from the public register

Prospect Finder searches the Companies House register, which is published by the UK government and free for anybody to read. When a company is looked up we keep a copy so that the next person to look at it does not cost another request to the register.

What we keep about a company’s directors and controlling people:

• Their name.
• Their role, such as director or secretary.
• The dates they were appointed and resigned.

And nothing else. The register also publishes partial dates of birth, service addresses, nationality, occupation and country of residence. We do not keep any of it. The register response is cut down to the three things above before it is stored, so the rest is never written down at all.

A copy is shared between workspaces, because whether a company exists is the same fact for everybody and looking it up twice would be a wasted request to a public service. Nobody can read it through the app except through Prospect Finder itself.

If you are named on the register and you want to know what we hold about you, or you want it removed from our copy, write to us and we will deal with it. We cannot change what Companies House itself publishes; that has to go to them.

Business contact details from websites

Prospect Finder can check whether a company has a website and, if it does, look on that website for a way to contact the business. This only reads pages the business has published publicly.

We deliberately keep less than we could:

• Only general business addresses, such as info@, enquiries@ or sales@. A named person’s address is skipped.
• An address is skipped as well if it matches the name of one of the company’s directors, so somebody whose own name is in their business email is not caught by accident.
• What is found is kept for your workspace only, and is not shared with other workspaces.

These are the business’s own published contact details. If you contact them it is your responsibility to do so appropriately and to honour any request to stop.

Enquiry forms and campaign pages

If you put one of our enquiry forms on your website, or use a campaign landing page, whatever a visitor types into it is stored in your workspace as a lead. We keep the whole submission exactly as it was sent, not just the fields we recognise, so nothing a visitor told you is quietly dropped.

That means it is your form and your responsibility to tell visitors what you are collecting and why.

Email

Ordinary email such as a quote, an invoice or a review request is sent from bskview.com, with your business having its own address at that domain.

Marketing email is sent from a separate domain, bsksend.com. Keeping the two apart means a marketing problem cannot damage the delivery of somebody’s invoice.

Marketing goes only to people who have agreed to receive it. Every marketing email carries an unsubscribe link, and an address that unsubscribes, bounces or reports spam is suppressed automatically and will not be sent to again.

Where we measure whether email arrived, and where we do not:

• Marketing emailscontain a small invisible image and links that pass through us, so opens and clicks can be counted. We record the referring page, a rough browser type and whether it was a phone. We do not record the reader’s IP address, in any form.
• Review request emails contain the same small image, so you can see whether the request was opened.
• Quote and invoice emails do not. They link to a page we host, so we already know when it was opened and a tracking image would add nothing but the cost.

Cookies, and the analytics we do not run

We run no third-party analytics. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel and no visitor tracking of any kind in the app, and we set no advertising or analytics cookies.

We set three cookies, all of them necessary for the app to work:

• A sign-in cookie, so you stay signed in as you move between pages.
• A theme cookie, remembering whether you chose light or dark.
• A short-lived bsk_flash cookie that carries a message like “Customer deleted” from one page to the next. It holds only the wording, never any of your data, and is cleared as soon as it is shown.

The records we keep of our own activity

Some of what we hold is about what happened rather than about a person, and it is worth saying it exists.

• An activity log for your workspace, recording actions such as sending a quote or deleting a customer, who did it and when. It is how a question about what happened can be answered.
• A record of when our own staff read your data. There are limited circumstances where somebody at Business Sorted Kent can look at a workspace, usually because you have asked for help. Those reads are logged.
• A daily note of when each person last signed in. The date only.

What we send to ourselves

We run an internal console, Spotlight, which is how we see whether BSK View is working across our clients. It also belongs to Tavern Creative Ltd, so this is not a third party.

It receives, for each workspace:

• The workspace name and its address in the app.
• The account owner’s email address, so we can get in touch.
• Counts, such as how many customers or invoices exist. Never the records themselves, and never their contents.
• What plan you are on and what it is worth to us.
• The date each person last signed in.

Your customers’ details are never included, and neither is the text of anything you have written.

If you cancel

Cancelling does not delete anything. Your workspace becomes read-only: everything is still there, you can still open it, and you can still download all of it. What you cannot do is create or change records.

Your own customers are not affected either. A quote or invoice you had already sent can still be opened by the person you sent it to.

If you want it all deleted sooner than that, ask us and we will do it.

Getting a copy of everything

There is a button in Settings, under Your data, that builds a copy of your whole workspace and gives it to you as a single zip file. It contains spreadsheets of your records, PDF copies of every quote and invoice exactly as your customers received them, and every file you have uploaded.

It works at any time, including during a trial that has run out and in a workspace that has gone read-only after cancelling. That is deliberate: the person most likely to need their data is the person on their way out.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to what we are doing with it. Ask and we will answer within a month.

If the request is about information one of our clients holds about you, such as being a customer of a business that uses BSK View, then it is their information rather than ours. Tell us and we will pass you to them, and we will help them answer you.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. We would rather you told us first, so we can put it right.

Getting in touch

Write to Tavern Creative Ltd at 84 Abbots Walk, Wye, Kent, TN25 5ES, or use the Requests page inside the app, which reaches us directly.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office under number ZB110990.