Privacy & Cookies

This website is operated by Spencer Micro Limited, trading as SpencerMicro, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 07446976) with its registered office at 1 Rowan Close, Towcester, NN12 6XL.

For the purposes of UK data protection law we are the 'data controller' for the personal information described on this page. That means we decide what is collected and why, and we are responsible for looking after it.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration number ZA887646. You can look that up on the ICO's public register.

If you have any question about this policy, or about information we hold on you, contact us at helpdesk@spencermicro.co.uk or on 01327 635 160.

If you fill in the contact or support form on this site, we ask for your name, your email address, your phone number and a description of the problem you need help with. We only ask for what we need in order to reply and to help you.

When you submit that form it creates a support ticket in Zoho Desk, the helpdesk system we use to manage customer enquiries. We use that ticket to respond to you and to keep a record of the work we have done, so that if you come back to us later we know the history.

The lawful basis for this is either performance of a contract (if you are already a customer, or are asking us to quote for work) or our legitimate interests in responding to enquiries about our services.

If you email or phone us instead, we handle that information the same way.

Like almost every website, this one records some technical information when you visit: your IP address, the pages you looked at, roughly where in the world you are, and what browser and device you used.

This site sits behind Cloudflare, a content delivery and security provider. Cloudflare processes your IP address in order to serve the site quickly and to block malicious traffic before it reaches us. This is strictly necessary to run the site securely and does not rely on your consent.

We also use Ahrefs Web Analytics to see which pages are being found and read. Ahrefs Web Analytics does not use cookies and does not store anything on your device. We rely on our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is performing.

A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to store. Some are needed for a site to work at all; others are optional.

We use Google Analytics (GA4) to understand how people find and use the site, for example which services people look at most. Google Analytics sets cookies, so we ask your permission before it loads. If you decline, Google Analytics is not loaded at all and its cookies are never set. You are not tracked for advertising anywhere on this site, and we do not sell or share your data with advertisers.

You can change your mind at any time using the 'Cookie settings' link in the footer of every page. You can also block or delete cookies through your own browser settings, though blocking strictly necessary cookies may stop parts of the site working.

The table below lists everything this site may store on your device, including the one item that is technically local storage rather than a cookie.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.

We do use a small number of trusted suppliers who process information on our behalf: Zoho (helpdesk and ticketing), Google (analytics, and our business email), Cloudflare (site delivery and security), Ahrefs (cookieless site analytics) and OVH (the server this website runs on). Each of these acts on our instructions under a contract.

Some of these providers may process data outside the UK. Where that happens, the transfer is covered by the safeguards UK data protection law requires, such as the International Data Transfer Agreement or an adequacy decision.

We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, for example in response to a valid request from law enforcement.

Support tickets and the correspondence attached to them are kept for as long as you remain a customer and for six years afterwards, which matches the period we are required to keep business and accounting records.

General enquiries that do not turn into work are deleted after twelve months.

Analytics data is retained by Google for fourteen months and is not linked to anything that identifies you personally.

Under UK data protection law you have the right to ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, to have it corrected if it is wrong, and in some circumstances to have it deleted. You can also object to us processing it, ask us to restrict how we use it, and ask for it in a portable format.

Where we rely on your consent, such as for analytics cookies, you can withdraw that consent at any time without affecting anything done beforehand.

To exercise any of these rights, email helpdesk@spencermicro.co.uk. We will respond within one month.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first so we have the chance to put it right.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

If we change how we handle personal information, we will update this page and change the date shown at the top. We would encourage you to check back occasionally.