Privacy policy

This site is run by Muhammad Usman, a freelance web developer. When this policy says “I”, it means me; when it says “you”, it means anyone visiting the site or sending a message through it.

If you send a message through the contact form, I keep the name, email address and message you typed. That is the only personal information the site asks for.

If you ask for help with the Balm Shopify theme through its support form, I also keep your store address and any files you attach, and use them only to answer your request.

The site also records ordinary server logs: the pages requested, the time, and a truncated IP address, kept for a short period to keep the site running and secure.

To reply to you. A message stored in my inbox is the only record of your enquiry, and the email address is how I answer it.

Nothing you send is used for marketing, sold, or added to a mailing list. If we go on to work together, our correspondence becomes part of that project’s records.

The site uses Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity to understand how it is used: which pages people visit, where they arrive from, which sections they read and whether the contact form works. Clarity can also record anonymised sessions and heatmaps of clicks and scrolling; text you type into forms is masked.

If you are in the European Union, the rest of the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, these tools only set cookies if you choose Accept in the cookie banner. If you decline, Google Analytics receives basic visit counts without cookies and Clarity does not run. Elsewhere the tools run without asking first, unless you decline. To tell which applies, the site asks its server for your country, which comes from your IP address; the address is not stored by this site. You can change your choice at any time with “Cookie settings” at the bottom of every page.

The site sets no advertising cookies, and nothing is sold or used to target ads.

Preferences such as a chosen theme are kept in your own browser and never sent anywhere.

Messages are delivered by email through my email provider, which acts on my instructions and under its own privacy commitments. They are not stored anywhere else, and no one else receives your details.

Visit statistics are processed by Google (Google Analytics) and Microsoft (Clarity) under their own privacy terms.

Enquiries are kept for as long as they are useful to the conversation, and deleted on request at any time. Balm support requests are kept for 12 months after they are closed, and their attachments are deleted when the request closes. Server logs are rotated automatically.

You can ask what I hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. Send the request through the contact form or reply to any email from me and I will deal with it promptly.

If the site starts collecting anything new, this page will say so, with the date above updated. Material changes will be noted at the top of the page for a while.