Privacy notice
This page sets out, in plain terms, what information I receive when you contact me through the site, what I do with it, and the control you keep over it. This is a one-person practice: there is no marketing team and no shared inbox passed around an office.
Who is responsible
This site is the working record of Cormac Vane, an adviser on AI-search clarity for service businesses. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and equivalent rules, the person responsible for the information described here is the operator of aisearchesoptimization.com. If you have a privacy question or want to act on one of your rights, write to hello@aisearchesoptimization.com.
What I receive
When you send the form on the enquiry page, the following reaches me:
- Your name and email address — so I can reply and address you properly.
- Another contact channel, if you add one (phone, LinkedIn, Signal), for when email is not how you prefer to talk.
- Whatever you write about the work: the site, the service category, the search problem, and the pages you point me at. Only name and email are required; the rest is yours to share or hold back.
I use these details for one thing: to answer the enquiry you sent. You are not signed up to a list, your details are not handed to anyone else (the only exception is the payment processor noted below, and only when a payment actually takes place), and nothing is pooled or mined beyond our own exchange. Alongside the message, the form keeps the time it was sent and a salted SHA-256 hash of your IP address, which is what stops automated abuse. The raw IP is never written down, and neither are browser fingerprints or device details.
What I do not collect
- No tracking cookies. The analytics I use runs without cookies and keeps no per-visitor identifier.
- No retargeting pixels, no marketing-automation tags, no ad-network trackers are wired into the site.
- No automated profiling, and no automated decisions that carry a legal effect for you.
- No selling or sharing of personal information with commercial partners. That is simply not how this practice earns its keep.
Why I am allowed to process it
Form messages are handled under GDPR art. 6(1)(b), as steps taken at your request before any possible engagement. The IP hash that guards the form against abuse rests on GDPR art. 6(1)(f), a legitimate interest in keeping the form usable. Where payment-outcome data exists, it is processed on the contractual basis.
How long I keep it
- Enquiry messages: held for the length of the engagement and 24 months after, so I keep the thread of the conversation, then deleted. Messages that do not turn into work are held for 12 months and then deleted.
- Payment records: held for as long as tax and accounting law requires (usually 5–6 years), then deleted.
- IP hashes: held for 90 days, which is enough for abuse protection, then deleted.
- Email threads: held while we are working together, or for 24 months after our last contact, whichever runs longer.
Your rights
Under GDPR and comparable laws you can ask to see your information, correct it, delete it, take it elsewhere, limit how it is used, or object to its use. To do any of these, write to hello@aisearchesoptimization.com and I will reply within 30 days. If you think the law has been broken, you may complain to your local data-protection authority.
Where the data lives
The servers that run this site are in European Union (Germany). Should any extra processors (email provider) sit outside the European Union, those transfers rely on standard contractual clauses together with the safeguards each one publishes.
Changes to this notice
I update this notice whenever the way I handle information changes in a way that matters. The "Updated" date at the top marks the current version. When a change is significant, I flag it on the home page for 30 days so returning readers notice it.