PRACTICALAUTOMATION

Privacy notice

Last updated 21 October 2026. This explains what personal information we hold, why, who helps us handle it, and how to ask us to stop.

Who we are. Practical Automation Limited, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 17479293. Registered office: 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ. We are responsible for the personal information described here. For anything about your information, email will@practicalautomation.co.uk, and you will get a reply from Will Darbey, the director.

If you fill in a form on this website

The contact form asks for your name, email, phone number, your trade or type of business, and what you would like help with. Without you typing anything, it also records how you reached the form: the labels on the advert link you clicked (such as which advert, which campaign and the search words it was shown for), whether you came from a Google advert or a Facebook link, and the website, or the page of this website, you came from. Netlify, which receives the form, also logs the internet address and browser it was sent from, as it does for every visit (see below). We use that record only to judge which of our adverts and pages work, which is our legitimate interest. The tailored advice form asks for your name, email, company size, industry and what you are trying to solve.

We use these details to reply to you, to arrange the call you asked for, or to send you the tailored thinking you requested. We do this because you asked us to, and so we can take the steps you want before any work is agreed. Your details are not added to a mailing list and are not used for anything else.

If we contacted you about your business

We sometimes write to businesses we think our services could help. For this we use business contact details: your name, your role (for example, director), your work email address, and your company's name, website and location. Names and roles come from the public register at Companies House. We find and check work email addresses using Hunter (hunter.io), a service that looks for business email addresses on public web pages. We may also use Apollo (apollo.io) or Kaspr (kaspr.io), which provide business contact details from their own databases; these can include a work phone number. We also use your company's own website and other public web pages.

Some older records we hold came from a business contact data provider. We no longer use it, and we never use those records to contact anyone.

We do this on the basis of our legitimate interest (the legal term for a genuine business reason that does not outweigh your own rights) in telling businesses about services relevant to them. We only send unrequested emails to limited companies and limited liability partnerships, and every one says who we are and how to stop them. Our sales emails come from will@practicalautomation.uk, which belongs to us. We contact businesses by email only: we never phone anyone who has not asked us to. We will only add you to a newsletter if you ask us to.

We may also build an example web page for your business, using your public logo and colours, to show what we mean. It sits at an unlisted web address: anyone with the link can open it, but search engines are asked not to list it. It says on the page that it is an example and not your website. It keeps a count of how many times it has been opened and the time of the first and last opening. Because the page was made for your business, that tells us whether our email was looked at. It does not record who opened it, their IP address or their device, and it sets no cookies.

To stop hearing from us, reply "stop" to any email, or email will@practicalautomation.co.uk. We stop the same day we see it and take down any example page we made for you. We keep your email address and company name on a do-not-contact list so we never write to you again by mistake. You may get one short reply confirming this. If you also want us to delete everything else we hold about you, say so and we will.

Emails and calls with us

If we exchange emails or speak on a call, we keep the emails and our notes of the call so we can follow up on what was agreed. If we would like to record or transcribe a call to take accurate notes, we will ask you at the start, and we will not record if you say no. If we work together, we keep what the work needs, and records the law requires us to keep, such as invoices.

We keep emails and call notes because we have a genuine business need to follow up properly. We keep what client work needs because it is part of our agreement with you, and invoices because the law requires it.

Visiting this website

This website sets no cookies. To count visits it uses Umami, an analytics service that uses no cookies and, in Umami's own words, does not collect any personally identifiable information. It records which pages are opened, the website or search engine a visitor came from, any advert labels in the page address, the type of browser, device and operating system, screen size, language, and the country, region and town or city the visit came from. Umami works out the location from your IP address, which it uses for that and to tell one visit from another, but does not keep. It also records when a form is sent or the button to book a call is clicked. It never sees what you type into a form. Umami cannot tell who you are, and does not follow you across other websites.

The website loads its fonts from Google Fonts, which means your browser connects to Google, and Google receives your IP address (the number that identifies your internet connection). Our website host, Netlify, keeps a record of each visit, including your IP address, for security and to keep the site running.

Who helps us handle your information

We do not sell your information, and we only share it with the services we use to run the business:

Our list of prospects and contacts is kept on our own computer, with a copy in our Google account. Some of the services above are based in the United States, so your information is processed there, under each provider's own terms for transferring information out of the UK.

No decision that affects you is made by a computer alone.

How long we keep it

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, and ask us to correct it, delete it, or stop or limit using it. You can also ask for a copy in a form you can pass to someone else. You can object at any time to our using your details to contact you about our services, and we will stop. There is no charge for any of this. Email will@practicalautomation.co.uk and we will reply within one month.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first so we can put it right. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days and tell you what we are doing about it. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or 0303 123 1113.

Information we handle for clients

When we build something that handles your own customers' or staff's information, we do that on your behalf under our agreement with you, and this notice does not cover it.

Changes to this notice

If we change how we use personal information, we will update this page and the date at the top.