Privacy notice

This notice explains what personal data The Pet Bill (thepetbill.com) handles, why, and what you can do about it. It covers two groups of people: visitors to the site, and vet practices whose prices we publish. It is written to meet the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Who is responsible

The controller is ZILIO Marzena Rewers, Gliwicka 35, 42-600 Tarnowskie Góry, Poland. You can reach us about anything in this notice at [email protected].

Visitors

What we collect

• We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which does not set cookies and does not build a profile of you. It gives us counts such as page views and the countries visits come from.
• When you follow a link to a practice's website or phone number, the link passes through our own redirect, which writes one log row per click. Each row holds the practice, the target (website, phone or booking), the type of page you were on, the service in view, the time, and a coarse referrer host: the host name of the page the click came from, which is normally thepetbill.com itself. Only the host name is kept, never the address of the page. There is no IP address and no cookie in the row, or anywhere else in this log.
• Postcode and town searches are matched against a lookup that ships with the site. If you tap "use my location", your browser asks your permission first; the location is used in your browser to find nearby practices and we do not store it.
• If you email us, we receive your email address and whatever you write, and use it to answer you.
• The site is served by Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes technical data such as IP addresses to deliver pages and protect the site from attacks.

Why, and on what basis

We rely on legitimate interests (UK GDPR and GDPR Article 6(1)(f)): running a useful, secure website, understanding which pages help people, and showing practices how many visitors we send them, without tracking individuals. We answer emails because you asked us to.

Advertising

The site does not show personalised ads yet. Before we switch on Google AdSense, we will add Google's certified consent banner so you can accept or refuse advertising cookies, and we will update this notice and our cookie notice first. Ads will only be personalised if you agree.

Vet practices

What we publish

For each practice we publish facts it has made public on its own website: its name, address or postcode, website, phone number, the group that owns it if stated, and the prices on its published price list, with the date we checked them and a link to the source. We never publish the names of individual vets or staff.

Most of this is information about businesses, not people. Where a practice is run by a sole trader or a partnership, or is named after a person, some of it may count as personal data, so we treat it with the same care.

Why, and on what basis

We rely on legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)). Pet owners have a strong interest in comparing vet prices, and the Competition and Markets Authority requires practices to publish standard price lists so that they can be compared. We have weighed that against the practices' interests: we use only information the practice has chosen to publish for the public, we publish facts only, every price links to its source, and any practice can object at any time.

Evidence we keep

When we collect a price list, we keep a private copy of the price table we read, a fingerprint of it and the time, so we can show what the page said if a price is questioned. We also keep a dated copy of each website's terms of use. None of this is published.

Your right to object

A practice can ask us to stop at any time by emailing [email protected]. We remove the practice and its prices at the next update, and add its website to a permanent do-not-crawl list so we never collect from it again. We keep that list, and the date and reason for each entry, so that we can keep the promise.

How long we keep data

• Click log rows: kept for as long as the site runs, as evidence of how many visitors each practice receives. They contain no IP address and no cookie.
• Emails: as long as we need them to deal with your message, and then deleted, except opt-out requests, which we keep as the record behind the do-not-crawl list.
• Practice prices and their history: for as long as the site runs, because price history is part of the comparison. A practice that opts out is removed from the site.

Who else receives data

Cloudflare hosts the site and stores the click log. Cloudflare may process data outside the UK and the European Economic Area under the safeguards the law requires. We do not sell personal data, and we do not sell practices' price lists.

Your rights

You have the right to ask for a copy of your personal data, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to data portability where that applies. Email [email protected]. If you are unhappy with our answer, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK (ico.org.uk) or to the data protection authority in the EU country where you live or work.

Changes

We will update this notice before anything here changes, including before advertising is switched on.