Privacy & cookies.

The short version: this is a small portfolio site. It does not run ads, it does not sell your data, and it does not build a profile of you.

This policy explains what ugcbyjoe.com does with data when you visit. It is written to be read, not to hide things in legal language. If anything here is unclear, just email me.

Who runs this site

ugcbyjoe.com is a personal portfolio run by Joe Bourne, a freelance UGC (user generated content) creator based in South East England, United Kingdom. For anything data related, I am the person responsible (the "data controller" under UK GDPR).

Contact: joebourne@ugcbyjoe.com

The contact form

When you send the contact form, it is delivered straight to my email inbox. Nothing is saved to a database on this site, and you are never added to a mailing list.

I receive your name, email address, the brand or company you mention, what your enquiry is about, the usage you indicated, and your message. I use this only to reply and to discuss possible work.

How it gets to me: the form is delivered by Resend, an email delivery service, which processes the message solely to hand it to my inbox. Resend is based in the United States, so your message is transferred there under the standard contractual clauses that service relies on. Resend does not use your details for anything else.

Why I am allowed to hold it: my legitimate interest in responding to a business enquiry you chose to send me, and, where we go on to work together, taking steps before a contract at your request.

How long I keep it: if the enquiry does not turn into work, I delete it within about 12 months. If it does, I keep the correspondence for as long as I need it for the job, and then for six years afterwards because HMRC requires business records to be kept that long.

The Rate Report

What it collects: the Rate Report is an anonymous survey. It asks how long you have been creating, your niche, your currency and what you charge. There is no name field, no email field and no account, so a response cannot be traced back to you.

The one technical exception: so that one person cannot submit repeatedly and distort the figures, your IP address is combined with a secret value and put through a one-way hash. Only that hash is stored, alongside the date. It cannot be reversed into an IP address, and it is not used for anything except the one-response-per-day limit.

Where it is stored: Cloudflare D1, a database that runs on the same infrastructure serving the site.

How long I keep it: responses are kept indefinitely, because the value of the report is the size of the sample. As they carry nothing identifying, they are not personal data once submitted.

Cookies

This site sets no cookies at all, and loads no analytics scripts, advertising pixels or third-party trackers.

A few preferences are kept in your browser's own local storage so the site behaves sensibly:

• Light or dark mode: remembers your display choice so the site looks the same next time.
• The free tracker template: anything you type into it stays on your device and is never sent to me.

Because these are strictly functional and set only at your request, no consent banner is needed.

There are no advertising cookies and no third-party tracking cookies. You can clear it any time through your browser settings.

Third parties that help run the site

To put the site online and show the videos, a few trusted services are involved. When your browser loads a page, these services may receive your IP address and basic technical information (such as your browser type), which is normal for how the internet works:

• Cloudflare hosts the site and delivers the portfolio videos (Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare Stream). Cloudflare processes technical request data to serve pages, keep the site secure, and protect against attacks. See Cloudflare's privacy policy for detail.
• Resend delivers contact form enquiries and shop emails to my inbox and yours. It handles the message only to deliver it.
• Stripe takes payment if you buy something from the shop. Your card details go straight to Stripe and I never see or store them. Stripe is the controller of its own payment data, and it holds the transaction record it needs for anti-fraud and accounting rules.

The website typeface is self-hosted, so loading a page does not contact Google or any font service. If you download one of the paid templates, that file loads its typeface from Google Fonts when you open it on your own computer, which is between you and Google.

Where your data goes: Resend and Stripe are based in the United States, so information sent to them is transferred outside the UK under the standard contractual clauses those companies rely on. Cloudflare serves the site from wherever is nearest to you.

I do not control these companies, and I only use them for hosting, email delivery, payments and video, never for advertising or profiling.

Analytics

If site analytics are switched on, I use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is privacy-first: it measures visits and popular pages without cookies and without tracking individuals across the web. If this ever changes to a tool that does use tracking cookies, this page will be updated first and you will be asked for consent.

I also use Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to see how the site performs in search results. These show me anonymous, aggregated data, such as which search terms led people here. They do not track you individually or set any cookies on your device.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask me to show you what personal data I hold about you, correct it, or delete it, and you can object to how it is used. To do any of these, email joebourne@ugcbyjoe.com and I will sort it out.

If you are not happy with how I have handled your data, you can complain to the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk.

External links

This site links to places like Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Once you click through, those sites have their own privacy policies and this one no longer applies.

Changes

If this policy changes, the "last updated" date at the top will change with it. Continuing to use the site after an update means the current version applies.