What we collect, and what we don't.

The enquiry form, the booking page and the build wizard collect what you type into them: your name or business name, email address, phone number if you give one, and what you told us about your business. We use it to reply to you and to build what you asked for. Nothing on this site is sold or passed to an advertiser.

The “Report a problem” link on this site, and on the sites we host for clients, sends us what you type, the address of the page you were on (without anything after the page name), the size of your screen, your browser and device type, and your email address only if you choose to give one. We use it to find and fix the fault and to reply if you asked us to. A hashed form of your network address is used to limit how many reports one person can send. Reports are kept for as long as they are useful for fixing the problem, and you can ask us to delete one at any time.

We find businesses through public sources — Google Business listings and the contact pages of their own websites — and we keep what those sources publish: business name, trade, address, phone number, website, star rating, review count, and any email address published on the site.

In Canada this relies on CASL's implied consent by conspicuous publication: a business published a contact address, did not say it refuses unsolicited mail, and our message relates to what it does. If a website asks not to receive unsolicited messages, we record that and do not write. In the United States the same message is sent under CAN-SPAM, which is an opt-out regime.

Every commercial email carries our postal address and an unsubscribe link that works indefinitely. Use it and we stop, permanently — the address goes on a suppression list precisely so that it cannot be contacted again by a later campaign.

Our marketing emails contain a single invisible image. When your mail program loads it, we record that the message was opened and when. We use this only to judge whether a subject line worked across a whole batch.

We do not put this in booking confirmations, receipts, or any other message you asked us to send — whether you opened your own appointment reminder is not our business.

To stop it, set your mail program not to load remote images, which every major one can do. Apple Mail loads these images automatically whether or not you read the message, so for many recipients the figure does not record a person at all.

If we built a sample site for your business, we record when that page is loaded: the time, a one-way hash of the IP address, the browser's user-agent string, and the page you came from. We keep the hash rather than the address so that repeat visits can be recognised as one visitor without us holding anyone's IP address.

We use this to know whether the site is worth following up on. It is deleted with the site.

We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages are read. It sets cookies in your browser and Google processes that data on its own terms. Your browser's "do not track" and cookie-blocking settings are respected by it.

Payments are handled by Stripe. Card numbers are entered on Stripe's systems and never reach ours — we see only the outcome, the amount, and the last four digits.

If you use the assistant on a concept site, your question is sent to Anthropic to be answered. Do not type anything confidential into it.

Customer records are kept while you are a client and for seven years afterwards, which is how long Canadian tax rules require business records to be held. Prospect records are kept until they are no longer useful or you ask us to remove them. Unsubscribes are kept forever on purpose: forgetting one is how somebody gets emailed twice.

You can ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. Email sales@greatnorth.agency and we will answer within 30 days, which is what PIPEDA requires. You do not need an account, and you do not need to explain why.

If you are unhappy with how we answer, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Great North Agency
27 Concession RD 6 Cheptsow Ontario N0G1K0
sales@greatnorth.agency