Privacy notice

The controller of the personal data described in this notice is the United States business trading as Bling Marketing, whose address and telephone are given below.

Business address: 456 Raintree Dr, Oswego, IL 60543, United States. Telephone: (318) 498-6750.

For anything to do with personal data — a question, a request, a complaint — write to [email protected]. That address is monitored by a named person and you do not need an account to use it. It is deliberately separate from our support queue, because most of the people whose data we hold have never signed up to anything of ours.

We have not appointed a statutory data protection officer. If that changes, this notice will name them.

Bling Marketing is a marketplace, so it holds personal data about two very different groups, and almost everything about the two is different: how we got the data, why we hold it, what legal basis applies, how long we keep it, and who else sees it.

• Providers. Service businesses that open an account, buy credits and buy leads. They came to us, agreed to our terms, and can sign in and see everything we hold. Section 3 covers them.
• Customers who made an enquiry. People who wanted a job done and left their details with us or with one of our sources. They have no account with us, and in most cases they have never seen our website. Their contact details are the thing providers pay to unlock. Section 4 covers them, and section 5 explains how their data reaches us and what we record about the permission to hold it.

If you are a customer and you want to know what we hold, have it corrected or have it deleted, go straight to section 9 — or just write to [email protected].

We also hold data about our own staff, and about people who write to us without being either of the above. Those are covered by the same rights and the same contact route, and the same retention rules apply where they are relevant.

This is everything we hold about an account holder, why we hold it, the legal basis we rely on, how long we keep it, and who outside our own systems sees it. “Our infrastructure” below means the hosting, database and file-storage providers named in the register in section 6.

Where the data comes from

All of it comes from you, or is generated by your use of the service. We do not buy data about providers, and we do not enrich your profile from third-party sources.

What we do not do

We do not sell your data. We do not advertise to you off-platform using your data, and we do not upload it to an advertising platform. We do not send you marketing without your consent — and service messages about money you have paid or a lead you have bought are not marketing, which is why they have no unsubscribe link and cannot be turned off.

You are reading the most important section of this notice. If you made an enquiry about getting work done and your details ended up with us, here is exactly what we hold and what happens to it.

We are a marketplace for enquiries. When you asked for quotes — on a form, on a comparison site, or through a partner who collects enquiries — your enquiry may have been passed to us so that providers who do that kind of work can respond to you. Our business model is that a provider pays us for the ability to contact you about that enquiry. We tell every provider, in our terms, that they may use your details for nothing else.

Things worth knowing

• More than one provider may contact you. An enquiry has a limited number of seats and each is sold once. Normally at most 5 providers can buy the same enquiry, and some are sold to only one.
• We never sell your details as a list. A provider buys one enquiry at a time and cannot bulk-export enquiries.
• A provider’s access is time-boxed. We stop showing your details in the provider’s dashboard 90 days after they bought the enquiry. They will also have received a copy by email, which is their own record; our terms limit what they may do with it and require them to delete it when it is no longer needed.
• We do not sell special category data. We do not ask for, and do not knowingly hold, information about health, ethnicity, beliefs, sex life, trade union membership or criminal records. If an enquiry you wrote contains something like that, it is because you put it in your own description; tell us and we will remove it.
• We do not market to you. We will never email or text you to sell you something. The only messages you might get from us are a reply to a request you sent us.

Enquiries reach us in three ways: uploaded in bulk from a partner who collected them, fed to us automatically by a partner’s system, or entered by our own staff from an enquiry made directly to us.

Every enquiry must arrive with a record of where the permission to pass it on came from. This is not a preference of ours; our system rejects the enquiry outright if that record is missing. Specifically we require, and store immutably against the enquiry: the type of source, which partner or supplier it came from, which upload or feed it arrived in, their own reference for it, who at our end brought it in and when, a description of where and how the permission was captured, when it was captured, and where available a link to the evidence and the IP address the permission came from.

We contract with every supplier of enquiries on the basis that they warranted the capture was lawful and that they indemnify us if it was not, and we keep a register of them. A supplier cannot be switched on in our system without a recorded contract reference. If we find that a supplier’s enquiries were not lawfully collected, we withdraw them, tell the providers who bought them to delete them, and return those providers’ credits.

If you want to know exactly where your enquiry came from, ask us at [email protected] and we will tell you what that record says.

We share personal data with four kinds of recipient, and no others.

• Providers who buy an enquiry. They receive the customer’s contact details and the enquiry, and they become independently responsible for that data in their own right. This is a disclosure, not processing on our behalf, and it is the central purpose of the service. It is described in section 4.
• Suppliers who process data on our behalf — our processors, listed in the register below. Each is bound by a written agreement that permits them to use the data only to provide the service to us, requires security measures, and forbids them from using it for their own purposes.
• Professional advisers and authorities — our accountants, auditors, insurers and lawyers, and a tax authority, a regulator, a court or law enforcement where we are legally required or legally entitled to disclose.
• A buyer of the business, if we are ever sold or reorganised. We would tell you, and the buyer would be bound by this notice.

We do not sell personal data to advertisers, data brokers or list builders, and we do not participate in advertising audiences or data co-operatives.

Our sub-processor register

We publish the full list rather than a vague category, because “trusted partners” tells you nothing. An entry marked to be confirmed is a supplier we have not yet appointed: no agreement is in place, and no data has been sent to it. We update this register before appointing anyone new.

We are a United States business and the people whose data we hold are in the United States. Where each of our suppliers processes data is stated in the register above, supplier by supplier, rather than summarised here in a sentence that could not be checked against it.

The residency decision for the platform has not been finalised. It matters more than it sounds, because the jurisdiction of the file storage is fixed at the moment the storage is created and cannot be changed afterwards. We will update this notice with the outcome, and the register above always shows the current position rather than the intention.

We minimise what leaves our own systems: our email provider is asked to keep our message content for 15 days, because our own copy is the authoritative record and a longer window at their end buys nothing.

You can ask us at [email protected] where any supplier in the register processes data.

We do not keep personal data “as long as necessary” and leave it at that. Each class has a term, and the terms are enforced by scheduled jobs with verification queries rather than by a policy document nobody runs. The table is the whole schedule.

These rights belong to everybody in this notice — providers and customers alike. You do not need an account to use any of them, you do not have to give a reason, and it is free. Write to [email protected].

What happens when a customer asks us to erase an enquiry

This is worth spelling out, because it is the request we most expect and the one that takes the most work. When we have verified that the request is really from you, we:

• withdraw the enquiry, so it can no longer be bought;
• erase your contact details from our records in place, leaving the surrounding commercial record intact but empty of you;
• redact the copy of your details inside every delivery record and every piece of delivery evidence, keeping only the fingerprint and the timestamps so the evidence still verifies;
• notify every provider who bought the enquiry that the record has been withdrawn and must be deleted;
• add a one-way fingerprint of your phone number and email address to a list that is screened on every future import, so the same details cannot be loaded again;
• automatically return the credits of any provider who bought the enquiry recently, so nobody has a commercial reason to argue about your request.

We will do all of that within 30 days of verifying your request, and we will list anything we are legally required to keep — for example an invoice — rather than quietly keeping it.

Automated decisions

We do not make decisions about you by wholly automated means that have a legal or similarly significant effect. Two things come close, and both are explained here rather than buried:

• A credit-return claim can be approved automatically where our own data already verifies it — for example when we can see you bought the same contact before. That decision can only go in the provider’s favour; a refusal is always made by a person.
• Our fair-use controls can automatically route a provider’s claims to manual review. That is a decision to involve a human, not to replace one.

How we verify a request

We have to be sure a request is genuine, because handing someone else’s data to the wrong person is itself a breach. We will ask you to confirm the request from the email address or phone number on the record, or to give us enough detail about the enquiry for us to match it with confidence. We will not ask you for identity documents unless we genuinely cannot verify you any other way, and we will explain why if we do.

Timescales, and the self-service route

We answer within one month. For a genuinely complex request we may take up to two months longer, and we will tell you inside the first month if that applies and why. We track every request against its deadline.

A provider’s own data pack is built on demand from the data page in the dashboard. The download link is signed and expires after 15 minutes; you can re-issue it as often as you like while the pack itself lives. You can request a new pack once every 30 days. The pack deliberately does not include the contact details of the customers whose enquiries you bought, because those are somebody else’s personal data and the right to a copy of your own data does not extend to theirs; the commercial facts of every purchase are all there.

We set one cookie, and it exists to keep you signed in. We set no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies, and we store nothing else in your browser. That is why you have not been asked to accept anything.

The full detail — the cookie’s name, what is in it, how long it lasts and how to remove it — is in our cookie notice.

What follows is what we actually do, not a list of adjectives. We hold no security certification — we are not ISO 27001 certified and we have no SOC 2 report — and we would rather say so than imply one.

• In transit, everything travels over TLS. The site instructs browsers never to connect to it insecurely, and it runs a strict content-security policy that blocks injected scripts.
• Passwords are stored using Argon2id, a memory-hard hashing function built for this job. We cannot recover your password, only replace it.
• Session tokens are stored as one-way digests, so a copy of our database does not yield a usable session. So are the browser fingerprints on security events.
• Customer contact details are physically separated from the information providers browse. They live in a different table, reached through a single piece of code, behind database rules that return no rows at all to a connection that has not proved it is entitled to them — including a connection from an administrative console.
• Phone numbers and email addresses used for matching are held as one-way fingerprints rather than as searchable text, so duplicate detection and deletion screening work without a searchable index of contact details.
• Access is by capability, not by job title. Every read and every write asks whether this actor holds this specific permission. Some staff roles are structurally blocked from customer contact details; a finance role can see the money and not the people.
• Every reveal of a customer’s contact details by our staff is recorded individually, one record at a time, and bulk reveal is not possible through the interface.
• The audit trail cannot be rewritten. Its records are append-only and chained together, so an alteration is detectable. The database refuses an update or a delete even from its owner.
• Providers cannot bulk-export enquiries, and a provider’s view of a purchased customer’s details ends automatically after the period in section 8.
• At rest, our database and our file storage are encrypted by the providers that operate them, and we require that of every provider we appoint. Backups are encrypted, and restoring one re-applies every erasure that had already been carried out, so a restore cannot quietly bring deleted data back.
• Every supplier is contracted before it processes anything, and we keep the register in section 6 current.

If something does go wrong, we investigate immediately. Where a breach is likely to put you at risk we tell the people affected without undue delay, and we make whatever notifications the law requires of us.

Please tell us first, at [email protected]. We would rather fix it. Say what happened and what you would like us to do, and we will reply.

Nothing in this notice takes away any right you have to complain to a regulator or other authority, or to go to court. Which authority that is depends on where you live and on which privacy laws cover you, so we do not name one here rather than send you to the wrong place — but if you ask us at [email protected] we will tell you what we know about how your data was handled, which is the part we can answer for.

This notice carries a version and an effective date at the top of the page, and we record which version was in force when you gave us a consent, so we can always show you what you were told at the time.

When we make a material change — a new purpose, a new lawful basis, a new category of recipient — we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect, and we will publish the change here. Where a change needs your consent, we will ask for it rather than assume it.

Anything about personal data: [email protected]. No account needed. This is the route to use if you are a customer whose enquiry we hold.

Anything about an account, an order or a lead: [email protected].

By post: 456 Raintree Dr, Oswego, IL 60543, United States.

By telephone: (318) 498-6750.