What we collect, why, and what we do with it.

Who we are and how to contact us

Stride Consultancy Partners Limited, trading as Hardy & Butler, is the controller of any personal data collected through this website. We are registered in England and Wales, company number 16218979, and our registered office is Acorn House, Dog Lane, Kelsall, Tarporley CW6 0RP. If you have any question about this notice or about your data, email hello@hardyandbutler.ai.

What we collect

This website collects personal data in two places. The contact form: your name, your work email address and what you are trying to fix, and, if you choose to give them, your company, your role, your company size and where you would like to start. And the sign-up for The Wire weekly: your email address and nothing else. We do not collect anything beyond those. There is no account and no chat widget.

The form also records when it was opened and submitted, carries a hidden field that should stay empty, and counts how many enquiries have arrived from the same connection in the last hour and the last day. These checks exist only to stop automated spam. For the counting, our code keeps a one-way SHA-256 hash of your internet address, never the address itself: the full hash in a counter that forgets each entry after one hour for the per-address count and after twenty-four hours for the site-wide count, and the first twelve characters of the same hash in a log line that records the date and time, whether the enquiry was sent, dropped or refused and, when it was sent, your company name. Log lines are deleted after ninety days.

Why we collect it, and the lawful basis

We use your details to reply to your enquiry and, if you want to go further, to arrange a call and an audit. The lawful basis is legitimate interest: you have contacted a business about its services and both of us have an interest in that conversation happening. We have weighed that against your interests and do not think a reply to an enquiry you sent us is something you would not expect.

We do not use the details from the contact form for marketing, and an enquiry never puts you on a mailing list. We do not sell, rent or share your details with anybody for their own purposes.

The Wire weekly

If you give us your email address for The Wire weekly, we use it to send you one email a week, on a Friday, carrying the week's briefings on one sheet. The lawful basis is consent. Nothing is sent until you click the link in the confirmation email, an address that is never confirmed is forgotten after seven days, and every weekly email carries a link that removes you with one click and no questions.

The list is held in a file on our own hosting, above the web root, beside the contact form's handler. The sign-up carries the same anti-spam checks as the contact form: a hidden field that should stay empty, a timing check, and counters that keep a one-way hash of your internet address for an hour and for a day. The log records the first twelve characters of a one-way hash of your email address, never the address itself, and log lines are deleted after ninety days. The emails themselves leave through Hostinger's mail service and MailChannels' relay, exactly as an enquiry does, and are described under Where it is stored below.

We keep your address for as long as you stay subscribed. Unsubscribe and it is deleted at once, not marked and kept. We do not count opens or clicks: the emails carry no tracking pixel and the links in them are plain links to this website.

Cookies and analytics

This website sets no cookies until you say so. With your consent, given through the banner on your first visit and changeable at any time from Cookie settings at the foot of every page, it uses Google Analytics to count visits: the pages read, how people arrived, an approximate location worked out from the connection, the kind of device and browser, and a random number that tells one visitor from another. The lawful basis is consent. Google signals and advertising features are switched off, we keep Google's event data for two months, and Google LLC in the United States processes it under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and Google's data processing terms. Say no and nothing is set, nothing is sent, and no request leaves this site for any third party. The cookie policy names each cookie and how long it lasts.

Who handles your enquiry

The form on this website is handled by our own code, on our own hosting. There is no third-party form service. When you press send, your details are passed to Hostinger, who provide our hosting and our email and who deliver the enquiry to our inbox, and Hostinger's outbound mail is relayed by MailChannels. Both act only on our instructions and neither uses your details for their own purposes. MailChannels operates outside the UK; that transfer is covered by the data processing terms we are subject to as a Hostinger customer. To draft our reply we use Claude, an AI service provided by Anthropic. Claude reads your enquiry and produces a draft, and a person checks, changes if needed, and sends every reply. Anthropic handles the text of your enquiry in the United States only to produce that draft; the transfer is covered by Anthropic's data processing addendum, which incorporates the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, and Anthropic does not use it to train models. A copy of your enquiry also goes, with the draft, to the Microsoft 365 mailbox of Stride Consultancy Partners Limited, the company Hardy & Butler is a trading name of, so the person approving the reply can read it. Apart from that, no copy of your enquiry is kept anywhere other than our own inbox and the short anti-spam log described above. If you choose to book a call through the link on our contact page, the booking is handled by Cal.com, Inc. on its own website under its own privacy policy; nothing is sent to Cal.com until you follow that link.

How long we keep it

Addresses on The Wire weekly list stay until you unsubscribe. Enquiries stay in our inbox. We review them every six months and delete anything that did not lead to a conversation. If your enquiry becomes an engagement, the details move into our client records, which are covered by the privacy terms in our engagement agreement rather than this notice. You can ask us to delete your enquiry at any time and we will.

Where it is stored

Your enquiry is held as an email in our inbox with Hostinger, The Wire weekly list is held in a file on our hosting with Hostinger, and the emails we send you travel through MailChannels' relay, which operates outside the United Kingdom. Where Hostinger or its relay stores or handles data outside the UK, the transfer is covered by the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses in Hostinger's data processing addendum, which applies to us as a Hostinger customer. The approval copy is held in a Microsoft 365 mailbox belonging to Stride Consultancy Partners Limited, and Anthropic handles the text of your enquiry in the United States while the draft is produced.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to:

• be told how your data is used, which is what this notice is for;
• ask for a copy of the data we hold about you;
• have inaccurate data corrected;
• have your data erased, where there is no good reason for us to keep it;
• restrict how we use your data while a question about it is settled;
• object to our use of your data where we rely on legitimate interest, including at any time to any direct marketing;
• receive your data in a portable format, where the processing is automated and based on consent or contract;
• not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you. We make no such decisions.

To exercise any of these, email hello@hardyandbutler.ai. We will reply within one month. There is no charge.

How to complain

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, tell us first and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office: Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF, telephone 0303 123 1113, ico.org.uk.

Changes to this notice

If we change what the website collects, we will change this notice and the date at the top. We will not apply a change backwards to data you have already given us.