Privacy Policy

Last updated: 1 October 2026

This policy explains what personal information Green Orb Web Design collects, why, who else handles it, how long it is kept and what your rights are. It has two parts, and a final section that applies to both:

Part A: this website and our web design services
Part B: the GreenOrb Statistics plugin and Pro licences
Who receives your information, how long we keep it, and your rights

Who we are

Green Orb Web Design is run by Phillip Johnson, a sole trader, at 13 Viewfield Road, Ayr, KA8 8HH, Scotland. We are the data controller for the personal information described in this policy.

For any question about this policy or your information, email [email protected]. GreenOrb Statistics customers can also use [email protected].

Part A: this website and our web design services

When you contact us

If you use our contact form, email us or phone us, we receive what you send: usually your name, email address, phone number and your message. Messages from the contact form are delivered to us by email. We use them to reply and, if you ask, to prepare a quote. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in answering enquiries, or taking steps you have asked for before entering into a contract.

Spam protection on our forms

Our forms use Google reCAPTCHA to tell real visitors from automated spam. reCAPTCHA sends information about your browser and how you use the page to Google. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in keeping our forms free of spam, and Google’s privacy policy applies to the information it receives.

When you become a client

When we design or build a website for you, we keep your contact details, details of the project, and the invoices and payments for it. We need these to carry out our contract with you, and UK tax law requires us to keep accounting records.

If the work involves a website that holds personal information about other people, such as your customers, we handle that information only on your instructions and only for the work you have asked us to do.

Website statistics

We use two analytics tools on this site:

Google Analytics, through Google Site Kit. It runs only if you accept statistics cookies in our cookie banner. Google receives information such as the pages you visit, how you arrived, your browser and device type, and your approximate location. We do not use it for advertising. Google keeps this information for the retention period set in our account, which is at most 14 months. Our lawful basis is your consent.
GreenOrb Statistics, our own plugin. Its data stays on our web server and is never sent to anyone else. Until you accept statistics cookies, it counts your visit without cookies, using a code that changes every month. If you accept, it sets one first-party cookie, greenorb_statistics_visitor, so that a return visit is recognised. Your IP address is used to look up your approximate location and is not stored. Individual visits are kept for 365 days, after which only monthly totals remain. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used, and your consent for the cookie.

Videos, audio and maps

Some pages embed YouTube videos, SoundCloud audio or a Google map. When one of these loads, the provider receives your IP address and browser details and may set its own cookies. Our cookie banner asks for your consent before these embeds load.

Fonts, images and site delivery

Cloudflare sits in front of this website to protect it from attacks and make it faster. Every request to the site, including your IP address, passes through Cloudflare.
Google Fonts: some of the typefaces on this site are loaded from Google’s servers, so your browser sends your IP address to Google when a page loads.
Optimole resizes and delivers our images from its own servers, which receive your IP address and browser details.

Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in running a fast and secure website.

Blog comments

If you comment on a blog post, we store your name, email address, website if you give one, your comment, and your IP address and browser details to help catch spam. Your email address is never published. To show a profile picture, a scrambled code made from your email address may be sent to Gravatar, a service run by Automattic.

Cookies

Apart from cookies that are strictly necessary for the site to work, we only set or allow cookies after you accept them in our cookie banner. You can change your choice at any time using the cookie settings link at the foot of every page.

Our Cookie Policy lists the cookies in use.

Part B: the GreenOrb Statistics plugin and Pro licences

The free version sends us nothing

The free version from WordPress.org does not register you, does not ask for your email address and sends us nothing. It contains no licensing or reporting code, so we have no way of knowing that you installed it.

When you buy GreenOrb Statistics Pro

Purchases are handled by Polar Software, Inc., our merchant of record. Polar collects your name, email address, billing address and payment details to take payment and meet its own tax and anti-fraud obligations. Polar is a controller for that information, and its own privacy notice applies.

From Polar we receive only what we need to issue and support your licence: typically your name, email address, country, plan and order reference. We never see or store your card details. Our lawful basis is performance of our contract with you.

Licence checks and updates

When you activate a licence, your site sends the licence key, its web address and the installed plugin version to Polar, which keeps them as the activation record for that site.
Once a day, your site confirms the licence is still valid by sending the licence key and its activation reference to Polar.
When WordPress checks for updates, the Pro version sends the licence key, your site’s web address and the plugin version to our update service at greenorbwebdesign.com, which runs on Cloudflare. It confirms the licence and returns a download link. We keep no record of these requests beyond short-lived counters that prevent abuse, and Cloudflare’s own short-term logs.

We use this to keep licences within the number of sites your plan allows, to deliver updates, and to see which versions are still in use so that we can support them. None of it includes information about your site’s visitors or content.

Your visitors’ data never reaches us

GreenOrb Statistics records analytics in the WordPress database on your own server. There is no cloud service behind it, nothing is copied to us, and we have no way to read it. If you run the plugin on your website, you are the data controller for what it records, and your own privacy notice should describe it. The plugin can add suggested wording to WordPress’s Privacy Policy Guide, based on your settings.

If you turn on the optional Ask AI feature, your site sends statistics directly to the AI provider you choose, using your own API key. That information does not pass through us.

Support emails

If you email us for support, we keep the correspondence so that we can follow up and have a record of what was asked and answered.

Who receives your information

We do not sell personal information or share it for advertising. These organisations receive or process it for the purposes described above:

Fasthosts, our web host and email provider, which stores this website, its database and our email.
Cloudflare, which protects and delivers this website and runs our plugin update service.
Google, for Analytics, reCAPTCHA, Google Fonts, YouTube and Google Maps.
Optimole, which delivers our images.
SoundCloud, for embedded audio.
Automattic, for Gravatar profile pictures on comments.
Polar Software, Inc., our merchant of record for GreenOrb Statistics Pro, which is an independent controller for payment information.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it.

Transfers outside the UK

Several of these providers, including Google, Cloudflare and Polar, are based in the United States or process information there. Where they do, the transfer is protected by the UK–US data bridge for companies certified under it, or by the provider’s contractual safeguards approved under UK law.

How long we keep information

Enquiries that don’t lead to work: up to 12 months after our last contact.
Client records, orders and invoices: six years, as UK tax law requires.
Support correspondence: up to three years.
Licence records: while the licence is active, and afterwards only as long as the records above require.
Blog comments: until the post is removed or you ask us to delete yours.
GreenOrb Statistics data about visits to this site: individual visits for 365 days, monthly totals for longer.
Google Analytics: at most 14 months.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and ask us to correct it, delete it, restrict how we use it, or give it to you in a portable form. You can object to our use of it where we rely on our legitimate interests. Where we rely on your consent, such as for analytics cookies, you can withdraw it at any time through the cookie settings above, without affecting anything that happened before.

Email [email protected] and we will respond within one month. We do not make decisions about you by automated means.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. We would appreciate the chance to put things right first.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, we update the date at the top of the page.