Clearfield
Privacy Notice
Who we are
Clearfield is a competitor intelligence service for UK businesses, run as a sole trader business. Clearfield is the data controller for the personal data described on this page.
The way to reach us is by email, at hello@getclearfield.co.uk. If you want to ask about anything on this page, that is the address to use.
This website does not track you
This website is a set of static pages. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics and tracks nothing about you. There is no account, no session, and nothing that follows you between pages or between visits.
The site does carry a design preview of a future client portal, sign-in page included. It is labelled as a mock-up, there is nothing live behind it, and it shows input fields only as part of that mock-up: nothing on this site submits anywhere, and nothing you type into them is stored or sent.
The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. As part of delivering and protecting the site, Cloudflare processes technical data about visitors, including IP addresses and request logs. That is a normal part of web hosting and it happens before anything reaches us. We do not collect anything about your visit ourselves.
If you email us
Email is our only contact channel, so if you get in touch we will have whatever your message contains. That is usually your name, your email address and the content of what you wrote.
We use it to reply to you, to answer questions, and to provide the service you have asked about. We keep correspondence only for as long as it is relevant, and then no longer.
What our reports monitor
Clearfield produces intelligence reports about businesses. A report covers competitor companies that a client names, and it is built only from public sources: the competitors' own websites, the job listings they publish, aggregate figures from review sites, press coverage, and the public registers at Companies House.
The subject of a report is a company, not a person. We are interested in what a business does in public, such as what it charges, who it is hiring and how it presents itself, and not in the individuals who work there.
How we keep personal data to a minimum
Public business sources sometimes contain personal data, so we cut it out rather than carry it along.
Company officer names from Companies House are not extracted into our reports, and no report names an officer. Reviewer names are not extracted from review pages, and no review quote in a report is attributed to a named person.
We do not use personal data to build a profile of an individual, to contact anyone, or to make any decision about a person. We do not sell it, and we do not share it with anyone for their own purposes.
We do not keep collected monitoring data indefinitely either. It is kept for up to six months and then deleted, and that covers the captures a report is built from as well as what we derive from them.
Companies House information
Part of a report can come from the public registers at Companies House. That information is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and reports that carry it say so.
Our lawful basis
For the monitoring described above, and for handling correspondence, our lawful basis under UK GDPR is legitimate interests.
For taking payment and producing a report you have bought, our lawful basis is performance of a contract.
The interest is a straightforward one. Businesses are entitled to understand the public behaviour of their competitors, and we are entitled to reply to people who write to us. We keep that balance on the right side by using public sources only, by stripping personal data out instead of carrying it, and by producing reports about companies rather than about people. If you think we have the balance wrong in your case, tell us and we will look at it properly.
Who we share information with
We do not sell personal data, and we do not pass it to anyone to use for their own purposes.
A report goes to the client who commissioned it, and nowhere else. Our website host, Cloudflare, processes visitor technical data as described above, as part of hosting the site.
If you buy a one-off report through the card checkout, payment is processed by Stripe, Inc. Stripe receives your card details and the details you enter at checkout (company name, website, competitor names); we receive your email address, the checkout details, and confirmation of payment, and we use them solely to produce and deliver the report you bought. Stripe's own privacy policy applies to its processing. Card checkout is not open yet, so a report ordered by email is paid for by a means we agree with you in writing first, and we tell you who will process that payment before you make it.
Producing a report involves sending captured public-source material to a third-party AI provider, Anthropic, which acts as our processor and handles that material only on our instructions, to interpret it and draft the report. That processing may take place outside the UK, including in the United States; those transfers are covered by the UK Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, which forms part of our data processing agreement with Anthropic, and you can ask us for a copy. We send nothing for this purpose beyond that captured material, the interpretations we derive from it, and the details of your own order - your company name, your sector, what you asked us to monitor, and the names and websites of the competitors you asked us to watch.
Your rights
Under UK GDPR you have the right to be told how your data is used, to ask for a copy of it, to have it corrected if it is wrong, to have it deleted, to restrict how it is used, to object to it being used, and to ask for it in a portable form. Some of these apply only in particular circumstances, and if one of them does not apply to your request we will say so plainly and explain why.
Because we rely on legitimate interests, the right to object matters here in particular. You can object to what we do and we will consider it and reply.
To use any of these rights, email hello@getclearfield.co.uk. There is no charge, and we will reply as promptly as we can and in any event within the time UK GDPR allows.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, please tell us first, at hello@getclearfield.co.uk, so we have a chance to put it right.
You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk. Coming to us first is not a requirement; you can go straight to them if you prefer.