Legal
Privacy notice
Last updated: 29 September 2026
This notice explains what AutomateFX does with personal information. It is written to match what this website and our business actually do. If something here does not match what you experience, tell us and we will fix it.
This notice is not legal advice, and we do not claim any certification or accreditation.
1. Who we are
AutomateFX is a United Kingdom business providing website design and build, workflow automation and custom software services. Work is delivered remotely across the UK, with in-person support available across Sussex and nearby areas.
For anything about this notice or your information, contact hello@automatefx.co.uk or call 01273 011 108.
2. What we collect, and when
| Where it comes from | What we hold | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The contact form on this site | Name, email, and optionally business name, phone number, enquiry type and your message | To reply to you |
| The contact form, about how you arrived | Which page you landed on, which website sent you (the site’s name only, never what you searched for), and any campaign tag in the link you followed | To know which of our own efforts actually reach people. See section 4. |
| Emailing or calling us | Whatever you choose to tell us | To reply to you |
| The assistant on this site | What you type, and contact details only if you choose to give them | To answer you and, if you ask, to arrange a human follow-up |
| Analytics, only if you agree | Anonymous usage statistics | To understand which pages are useful |
| Public business sources | Published business contact details, where we contact a business directly | See section 5 |
We do not buy contact lists, and we do not ask for anything we do not need.
3. What we use it for
- Replying to your enquiry and having the conversation that follows
- Preparing quotes and delivering work you have asked us to do
- Keeping records of work and payments where we are required to
- Improving this website, where you have agreed to analytics
We do not sell your information. We do not use it for advertising, and we do not add you to a mailing list because you sent an enquiry.
4. Cookies, analytics and storage
How we know where an enquiry came from
When you send us an enquiry, we record how you got here along with it: the page you first landed on, the name of the website that linked to you, and any campaign tag that was in the link. This tells us whether our own advertising and writing is worth doing.
Two things we deliberately do not do. We never record what you searched for — a search engine passes that to us and we reduce it to the site’s name before it is stored. And we never record your IP address, your device or your browser for this purpose.
Reading the address of the page you are already on stores nothing on your device and needs no permission, so it always happens. Remembering it while you move between pages does store something, so we only do that if you agreed to analytics below. If you decline, the site works exactly the same and we simply learn less.
This site sets no analytics or advertising cookies unless you say yes. Nothing is loaded from Google, and no analytics cookie can be created, until you actively choose to allow it. If you decline, nothing is loaded at all.
We ask once, with a banner. If you agree, we load Google Analytics, which sets cookies
(_ga and a related identifier) and sends usage data to Google. If you decline
or ignore it, none of that happens.
We store your choice in your browser's local storage on your own device under
afx-analytics-consent. That is not a cookie, it is never sent to us, and it
contains no identifier — only the word granted or denied.
You can change your mind at any time:
Fonts are served from this site itself, so no third party sees your visit for that. Contact form submissions are received and stored by our own service running on Cloudflare’s network, which operates outside the UK as well as inside it, so that information is transferred internationally.
5. Contacting businesses directly
Sometimes we contact a business that has not contacted us first, to ask whether an introduction to what we do is relevant to them.
Where we get the details. Only from a business contact route that the business has published itself — for example an email address on its own website or in a public business directory — or from details you have given us. We do not guess email addresses, we do not buy or rent contact lists, and we do not collect personal or private contact details.
Who we contact. Incorporated companies and limited liability partnerships only. We do not send this kind of message to sole traders or to individuals.
What we do with it. We record the address, the business name, where we found the address and when, what we publicly observed about that business, and whether we contacted it. We use this to send one short, individually written first email. We do not run automated sequences and we do not send automatic follow-ups.
Our lawful basis. Legitimate interests — our interest in making a small number of relevant, individually researched introductions to other businesses. We have carried out a balancing assessment and you can ask us for a summary of it.
Saying no. Every message we send tells you how to stop. Reply and say so, and we will add you to our do-not-contact record and will not contact you again. You can also object at any time by emailing hello@automatefx.co.uk.
6. The assistant on this site
The chat assistant is an AI assistant, not a person, and we say so in the panel itself. A person reads every enquiry it passes on.
- Your messages are processed by an AI model provider in order to generate a reply.
- The conversation is held in your browser for the current tab only and is cleared when you close it.
- We keep a transcript only if you ask for a human follow-up and give us contact details. Otherwise it is not retained.
- It sets no cookies and loads no third-party tracking.
- We keep operational records of the assistant for three days — how long a reply took, what it cost to generate, and whether it succeeded. These contain none of what you typed and none of the reply. They carry a random reference that exists only to group one tab’s messages together, is not linked to you, and is discarded when you close the tab.
- Please do not type anything sensitive into it. It is there to answer questions about our services, not to take confidential information.
7. Our lawful bases
| What we are doing | Lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Replying to an enquiry you sent us | Legitimate interests, and steps prior to entering a contract |
| Delivering work you have engaged us for | Performance of a contract |
| Keeping financial records | Legal obligation |
| Analytics | Your consent, which you can withdraw at any time |
| Contacting a business directly | Legitimate interests (see section 5) |
8. Who else is involved
We do not sell or trade your information. It reaches these providers only because they operate part of this service:
- Netlify — hosts this website.
- Cloudflare — runs the service that receives and stores contact form enquiries, runs the assistant’s backend, and holds the operational logs for both.
- OpenAI — generates the assistant’s replies. We ask it not to retain them.
- SMTP2GO — delivers email we send from our own domain.
- Google — Analytics only where you have agreed to it, and Gmail, which carries email you send to or receive from us.
- Discord — where enquiry notifications reach us internally.
Formspree previously handled contact form submissions and no longer does. It is named here only so that this notice matches what earlier visitors were told.
Some of these are outside the UK, so using this site involves international transfers.
9. How long we keep things
- Enquiries that go nowhere: up to 24 months, then deleted.
- Customer and project records: for the length of the engagement and afterwards as long as we are required to keep financial records.
- Assistant conversations: not kept, unless a lead is created from one.
- Do-not-contact records: kept for as long as we send business email, because deleting them would defeat their purpose.
- Analytics: held by Google under its own retention settings, and only where you agreed.
10. Your rights
Under UK data protection law you can ask us to give you a copy of your information, correct it, delete it, restrict what we do with it, or provide it in a portable form. You can also object to processing we carry out under legitimate interests.
Where we rely on legitimate interests — including when we contact a business directly — you can object and we will stop unless we have compelling grounds not to. In practice, for business contact, we will simply stop.
Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time. For analytics, the button in section 4 does exactly that.
Email hello@automatefx.co.uk and we will respond within one month.
11. Complaining
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first so we can put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK supervisory authority, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113.
12. Security
This site is served over HTTPS. We limit who can reach the systems holding enquiry data and we do not keep information we have no reason to hold. No method of transmitting information over the internet is completely secure, and we are not going to claim otherwise.
13. Changes
If we change what we do with information, we change this notice and update the date at the top. Material changes to how we contact businesses will be reflected here before they start.
14. Contact
Email hello@automatefx.co.uk, call 01273 011 108, or use the contact form.