Privacy Policy

What is this Privacy Policy for?

This privacy policy is for this website (calmspacecounselling.com) and served by site owner, Erica Ruse Whalley, and governs the privacy of its users who choose to use it.


The policy sets out the different areas where user privacy is concerned and outlines the obligations & requirements of the users, the website and website owners. Furthermore the way this website processes, stores and protects user data and information will also be detailed within this policy. This website and its owners take a proactive approach to user privacy and ensure the necessary steps are taken to protect the privacy of its users throughout their visiting experience. This website complies to all UK and EU laws and requirements for user privacy.


If you have any questions about this privacy policy, you can contact us.

Who is Calm Space Counselling?

Calm Space Counselling is an independent counselling business, run by Erica Ruse Whalley.

How do we collect information from you?

We obtain information about you when you use our website, for example, when you contact us about our services or to ask a question, review/sign a proposal or contract for work, make a payment through our online accounting system, contact us through social media, or if you register to receive our newsletter.

What type of information is collected from you?

The personal information we collect might include your name, address, email address, IP address, and information regarding what web pages are accessed and when.

How is your information used?

We may use your personal information to:


  • receive/reply to an enquiry that you have made;
  • process appointments that you have booked;
  • process orders and payments that you have made;
  • to carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into by you and us;
  • seek your views or comments on the services we provide;
  • publish comment(s) that you have submitted on our blog;
  • notify you of changes to our services;
  • send you communications which you have requested and that may be of interest to you. We will not contact you for marketing purposes unless you have given your prior consent.

We may use non-personal information about you such as IP address, device type or geographical location in order to monitor activity on our website to better understand how our website is being used, and what countries our visitors come from. This data is tracked by Squarespace and Google Analytics; for further information, see the Squarespace and Google Analytics privacy policies. However, we do not match your IP address to any other information that would identify you as a unique individual person.


We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity, or until such time as you request that we delete your information.

Who has access to your information?

We will not sell or rent your information to third parties. We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.


We may pass your information to our third party service providers, agents, subcontractors and other associated organisations for the purposes of completing tasks and providing services to you on our behalf (for example to process payments or send the email newsletter). However, when we use third party service providers, we disclose only the personal information that is necessary to deliver the service and we have a contract in place that requires them to keep your information secure and not to use it for their own direct marketing purposes. We can provide information on which services have access to your data in their role as data processor for Calm Space Counselling upon request.

Security precautions

When you give us personal information, we take steps to ensure that it’s treated securely. When you are on a secure page, a lock icon will appear next to the web address.


Non-sensitive details (eg name, email address) are transmitted over the Internet, and although this website and any other systems we use for data capture use SSL protection, we cannot guarantee that the data will be 100% secure when it is transmitted. As a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us through enquiry forms, registration forms, or email enquiries, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your information, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems.

How you can access and update your information

If you change email address, or any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, you can contact us here to request that we update it, or you can use the link included at the bottom of our email newsletter.


You have the right to ask for a copy of the information that we hold about you. You also have the right to request that we delete the information that we hold about you.


To make such a request, you can contact us using the form on this page.

Transferring your information outside of Europe

As part of the services offered to you through this website, the information which you provide to us may be transferred to countries outside the European Union (“EU”). By way of example, this may happen if any of our data processors' servers are located in a country outside of the EU. These countries may not have similar data protection laws to the UK. By submitting your personal data, you’re agreeing to this transfer, storing or processing. If we transfer your information outside of the EU in this way, we will take steps to ensure that appropriate security measures are taken with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected as outlined in this Policy.

If you use our services while you are outside the EU, your information may be transferred outside the EU in order to provide you with those services.

Cookies

This website uses cookies to generate user statistics such as which pages on our website were the most popular, how many visits we received from a certain country, or other stats that help us better understand our audience. This website is built on the Squarespace platform. Squarespace may use cookies which are necessary for the proper operation of their system (such as attributing a comment on a blog post, or putting a product into your shopping cart), and to track the usage of this website in order to help us understand how the site is being used – and ultimately provide an improved user experience. You can read more about these cookies here. You can read the Squarespace privacy policy here.

This website also uses tracking software provided by Google Analytics  to monitor its visitors to better understand how they use it. Google Analytics will save a cookie to your computer's hard drive in order to track and monitor your engagement and usage of the website, but we do not use Google Analytics to save or collect personal information that can be used to identify you as a unique individual person. You can read Google's privacy policy here for further information.

By accepting the Cookie Notification message, you consent to the use of such cookies from Squarespace and Google Analytics. If you choose not to accept the Cookie Notification message, or if you subsequently delete or block cookies, you won't have access to certain features that make your experience more efficient and certain parts of this website may not function properly.

Email newsletter

This website may operate an email newsletter, used to inform subscribers about news, products and services supplied by Calm Space Counselling. Users can subscribe through an online automated process should they wish to do so, but do so at their own discretion. Subscribers are given the opportunity to unsubscribe and/or manage their email preferences at any time through the MailChimp system. This process is detailed at the footer of each email campaign.

Subscriptions are taken in compliance with all relevant privacy laws; we will not subscribe you to any marketing lists or send you information without your prior consent. All personal details relating to subscriptions are held securely within the MailChimp system. No personal details are passed on to third parties nor shared with companies / people outside of the company that operates this website. You can read the MailChimp privacy policy here.

Email marketing campaigns published by this website or its owners may contain tracking facilities within the actual email. Subscriber activity is tracked and stored in a database for future analysis and evaluation. Such tracked activity may include; the opening of emails, forwarding of emails, the clicking of links within the email content, times, dates and frequency of activity [this is by no far a comprehensive list].  This information is used to refine future email campaigns and supply the user with more relevant content based around their activity. To find out more about the types of tracking associated with our email campaigns, read the MailChimp privacy policy.

External website links

Although this website strives to only include quality, safe and relevant external links, users are advised adopt a policy of caution before clicking any external web links mentioned throughout this website. (External links are clickable text / banner / image links to other websites)

The owners of this website cannot guarantee or verify the contents of any externally linked website despite their best efforts. Users should therefore note they click on external links at their own risk and this website and its owners cannot be held liable for any damages or implications caused by visiting any external links mentioned.

Social media platforms

Communication, engagement and actions taken through external social media platforms that this website and its owners participate on are custom to the terms and conditions as well as the privacy policies held with each social media platform respectively.

Users are advised to use social media platforms wisely and communicate / engage upon them with due care and caution in regard to their own privacy and personal details. This website nor its owners will ever ask for personal or sensitive information through social media platforms and encourage users wishing to discuss sensitive details to contact them through primary communication channels such as by telephone or email.

This website may use social sharing buttons which help share web content directly from web pages to the social media platform in question. Users are advised before using such social sharing buttons that they do so at their own discretion and note that the social media platform may track and save your request to share a web page respectively through your social media platform account.

Shortened links in social media

This website and its owners through their social media platform accounts may share web links to relevant web pages. By default some social media platforms shorten lengthy urls [web addresses].


Users are advised to take caution and good judgement before clicking any shortened urls published on social media platforms by this website and its owners. Despite the best efforts to ensure only genuine urls are published, many social media platforms are prone to spam and hacking and therefore this website and its owners cannot be held liable for any damages or implications caused by visiting any shortened links.

Review of this Policy

We keep this Policy under regular review. This policy was last updated on 24 April 2021.