What we do with your details

If we emailed you and you never asked us to

We find businesses the way anyone can: public company registers, open map data, public business listings, and the business's own website. What we take is the part meant for customers, the trading name, the trade, the town, the phone number and email address published for people to get in touch, and the web address. Nothing behind a login, nothing about you personally, nothing bought from a data broker.

We use it for one thing: to build you a sample website and show it to you once. If you don't reply, that's your answer and we go away.

Why we're allowed to. In the UK this is what the law calls legitimate interest, a business writing to another business, at an address that business published for exactly that, about something to do with its trade. In Australia and New Zealand it rests on the same published-address basis their spam laws recognise. In the United States it follows CAN-SPAM: a real sender, a real address, and an opt-out honoured straight away.

Canada is different, so we treat it differently: we do not send cold email to addresses in Canada. Canadian law wants consent before the first message and we don't have it, so we don't send. If you're in Canada and you write to us, we'll write back, that's you contacting us, which is a different thing entirely.

If you came to us

Then we hold what you typed in: your business name and trade, your address and the areas you cover, your hours, your services, your reviews link, links to photos you chose, your phone number and your email. It's the material your website is made of, and we hold it because there's no site without it.

Why we're allowed to: because you asked us to build it. The legal word is contract, this is what doing the job you paid for takes.

Before anything goes up on our address we email you a six-digit code and ask you to type it back, so nobody but you can put a page about your business on the internet under our name. The code isn't written down anywhere, it's worked out fresh each time and it stops working within half an hour.

While you're still filling the form in, your answers live in your own browser. When you try the looks, what you typed is sent to our computer for a moment, that is how the preview picture gets drawn, and thrown away straight after. Nothing is kept anywhere on our side until you press the button.

We never see your card. Payment goes through Stripe, who take the card details themselves and tell us only that you paid.

Making it stop

One address: alex@fasttweb.com. Say stop, or unsubscribe, or just no. No form, no login, no account to dig up.

We act on it the same day, and it is permanent. Never again means never again: not next month, not from a different list, not when a fresh sweep of public records turns your business up under a slightly different spelling. We match it on your phone number, your web address and your name and town, not on one record, precisely so a second copy of you can't slip through.

Getting your details deleted

Same address: alex@fasttweb.com. Ask us to delete what we hold and we do it within 30 days, and we write back to say it's done.

There's one exception and it's the honest one. If you've told us never to contact you, we keep the bare minimum, business name, town, phone, email, web address, on a do-not-contact list, and nothing else at all. Deleting that too is exactly how you'd end up hearing from us again next year.

How long we keep it

A business we found and never contacted, or contacted once with no reply: 12 months, then deleted.

A sample site nobody bought: the page comes down after 30 days, and the details behind it are deleted within 12 months.

A customer: while your site is live, and for 12 months after your last paid year ends. Then deleted.

Billing records: 7 years, because tax rules require us to keep them.

The do-not-contact list: kept, because keeping it is what makes never again true.

Who else touches it

Three companies, and that's the whole list. Stripe handles payments. Cloudflare is where your website and ours actually run, and it also sends the six-digit code. Google Workspace is our own mailbox, so anything you write to us, and anything we write to you, sits there like any other email.

All three are American, so your details are handled in the United States as well as where you are.

We don't sell your details, we don't rent them, and we don't hand them to advertisers. The only measurement on our site is Cloudflare's own page-counter, which sets no cookie and doesn't know who you are, there are no advertising cookies and nothing that follows you around after you leave.

What you can ask us for

In the UK and Europe you have the right to see what we hold about you, correct it, have it deleted, or tell us to stop using it, and to complain to your country's data protection authority if we handle it badly. Everywhere else we do the same things anyway, because asking twice for something this simple is ridiculous.

You don't need the legal words. Write to alex@fasttweb.com in plain English and tell us what you want done.

Who we are

fasttweb is a product of Zero Backlog LLC, 28 Geary St STE 650 Suite #514, San Francisco, California 94108, United States.

alex@fasttweb.com reaches a person, not a queue.

If this page changes

The date at the top changes with it. If we ever change something that actually affects you, we say so in an email rather than hoping you come back and re-read this page.