How we handle your personal information. Last updated: 22 August 2026.
This privacy policy explains how Hark Tech ("we", "us", "our") collects, uses and protects your personal information when you contact us through this website or engage our repair and 3D printing services. We comply with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.
Hark Tech is a sole trader business operated by Grant Harkness, based in Basingstoke, Hampshire, United Kingdom. We are the data controller for any personal information you provide to us.
Contact: repairs@harktech.co.uk
When you contact us through the website contact form or directly by email, we collect:
When you subsequently engage our services, we additionally collect and hold:
When you request a promotional print offer, we collect your email address, the campaign and referring source supplied with the landing-page link, the exact consent wording and version shown to you, and the times at which you requested and confirmed the email. We also record the private offer code issued and any print order that later uses it. A pending request is not treated as marketing consent. We do not retain your raw IP address in the offer-consent record.
We describe the cookies, analytics and third-party services used on the website in section 3 below.
We use limited first-party measurement and a small number of third-party services to run and improve the website. Persistent attribution storage and all third-party analytics or advertising are gated behind the cookie consent banner.
A first-party cookie named harktech_session is used by the admin area so that signed-in staff stay signed in. It is not used for public visitor tracking. We store your cookie-banner choice in your browser’s localStorage under harktech-consent so we do not ask again.
Our server records a limited page-event log containing the page path, coarse source or referring site, browser user-agent and request IP address. We use it to measure whether pages work, filter automated traffic and understand aggregate traffic sources. It never records form contents, names, email addresses or full external URLs, and raw page-event and page-view rows are deleted after 90 days.
If you accept analytics, we additionally set htk_attr for up to 90 days. It stores only your first and latest non-direct source, campaign label and the path of the Hark Tech landing page. A session cookie named htk_sid lasts until the browser session ends and lets us join that visit to an upload, enquiry, booking or order. An ephemeral htk_tab_id value in session storage distinguishes tabs for journey diagnostics without identifying you across browser sessions. If you reject analytics, these values are removed and no persistent first-party attribution is attached to a conversion.
If you click Accept all on the consent banner, we load Google Analytics 4 (property G-YGPE3HEDJ1) to understand which pages are useful. GA4 sets first-party cookies (names beginning _ga) that last up to 2 years. The data sent to Google includes anonymised IP address, the URL you visited, device type, and approximate geographic location. We do not receive your name, email, or any form data you enter on the site through this channel. Google’s own privacy information is at policies.google.com/privacy.
If you click Reject all, GA4 runs in Google’s Consent Mode v2 “denied” state: no cookies are set, and only anonymous, cookieless signals (page-view pings with no identifier) are sent.
On our help articles (URLs beginning /help/) only, and only after you click Accept all, we display ads served by Google AdSense (publisher pub-8131319359316939). AdSense may set third-party cookies (from googlesyndication.com and doubleclick.net) to show relevant ads, prevent fraud and measure performance. We do not use AdSense on the homepage, service pages, case studies, contact form, or any page involved in our repair/printing workflow.
You can manage your AdSense personalisation directly at myadcenter.google.com and opt out of personalised ads at optout.aboutads.info.
If you click Accept all on the consent banner, we load the Meta Pixel (ID 2002597900345200) so that we can measure how well our Facebook and Instagram posts and ads bring people to the site. The pixel sends Meta a record of which pages you visited and may set cookies on your device.
If you then submit an enquiry while that choice remains active, we may also send a Lead event through Meta’s server-side Conversions API. This can include a one-way hashed version of your email address and phone number, your IP address and browser user-agent, and Meta click or browser identifiers. It does not include your enquiry description or uploaded files. We use this only to measure advertising performance.
If you click Reject all, or have not made a choice, the Meta Pixel is not loaded and no server-side Meta Lead event is sent. You can manage Meta’s use of off-Facebook activity at facebook.com/off_facebook_activity and read Meta’s policy at facebook.com/privacy/policy.
The website is served through Cloudflare, which acts as a content-delivery network and denial-of-service shield. Cloudflare sees your IP address and user-agent in order to protect the site from abuse. It is a data processor acting under our instructions and does not use this information for advertising. More details at cloudflare.com/privacy.
You can revoke or change your consent at any time by clearing your browser’s storage for harktech.co.uk (the banner will re-appear on your next visit), or by using your browser’s privacy controls to block cookies for this domain.
We use your personal information for the following purposes only:
We will never sell your data, share it with third-party marketers, or send you unsolicited marketing messages.
We process your personal data under the following UK GDPR lawful bases:
We share your information only where strictly necessary:
All customer and enquiry data is stored on a server located in the United Kingdom, on systems we control directly. We do not use cloud CRM providers. Backups are encrypted and held on-site.
We retain customer and job records for as long as they are needed to provide our services and for the statutory periods required by UK tax and accounting law, generally six years from the end of the tax year in which the transaction took place. After that period, records are securely deleted.
Contact form submissions that do not lead to a job are retained for up to 12 months and then deleted.
Unconfirmed promotional-offer requests are deleted after 30 days. Confirmed consent evidence is retained while we rely on that consent, and a minimal suppression record is retained after an unsubscribe so that we can honour the opt-out. Offer issuance and redemption records are retained for fraud prevention, accounting and campaign measurement where necessary.
STL and 3MF files uploaded to the 3D-printing pricing tool but not used to place an order are retained for up to 30 days so that we can validate the auto-generated quote against a real slicer. After that the file itself is deleted; a short metadata record (file size, material, infill, computed estimate) is kept for analytics for up to 12 months.
If a print file is refused under our safety policy, the order file and review evidence follow the normal print-order retention and dispute schedule. When the file itself is due for deletion, we retain only its SHA-256 fingerprint, refusal dates and policy version so that the same bytes can be recognised if renamed and submitted again. A SHA-256 fingerprint is a one-way technical identifier and does not contain the model geometry or filename.
Files deliberately saved to a Trade Account are retained while the saved part or account remains active so that you can reorder the approved revision. You can ask us to archive a saved part or close the account. We will then delete account-only files and identifiers when they are no longer required, while retaining transaction and accounting records for the periods described above.
Under UK GDPR you have the right to:
To exercise any of these rights, please email repairs@harktech.co.uk. We will respond within one calendar month.
To request deletion of your personal data, including any data collected when you interact with us through Facebook, Instagram or other Meta services, email repairs@harktech.co.uk with the subject line "Data deletion request", including the name and email address (or social-media account name) you used with us. We will confirm and complete the deletion within one calendar month, except where UK tax and accounting law requires us to retain transaction records (see section 8). We do not sell your data, and no account is required to use our services.
If you send us a device for repair, please be aware that the work may involve powering it on and, in some cases, accessing the operating system in order to test the repair. We do not intentionally access, read or copy your personal files. If you have specific concerns about data privacy on a device, please tell us when you contact us, we can usually perform repairs without booting the operating system at all.
We strongly recommend you back up any important data before sending a device to us. We cannot be held responsible for loss of data that occurred before or during the course of diagnosing a hardware fault.
We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data, including encrypted transport (HTTPS), access controls on our admin systems, locked physical storage for customer devices, and regular security updates to our server software.
We may update this privacy policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or legal obligations. The "last updated" date at the top of this page will always show the most recent version. Significant changes will be communicated via the website.
For any questions about this privacy policy or how we handle your data, please contact us at repairs@harktech.co.uk.
