Privacy Policy

1. What this policy covers — and what it doesn't

This policy explains what Localscript Ltd does with information about you — the researcher, administrator or agency contacting me about transcription work.

It does not cover the recordings you send me to transcribe. When I transcribe your audio, you are the data controller and I am your data processor, acting only on your written instructions. That relationship is governed by the Data Processing Agreement signed between us before any audio moves, not by this policy. Nothing in this policy gives me any right to use participant data for my own purposes.

The short version: your participants' data is handled under a contract you control. Your own contact details are handled under this policy.

2. Who I am

Localscript Ltd is the data controller for the information described in this policy.

Localscript Ltd Registered in England and Wales, company no. 17388152 Registered office: 13 The Terrace, Barnes, London, SW13 0NP Registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, reference ZC217301

Contact: monty@localscript.co.uk

Localscript is run by one person, Montagu Franks. There is no data protection officer, because the business is not required to appoint one. Email me and you reach the person who makes the decisions.

3. What I collect, and why

3.1 When you enquire

If you email me or book a call, I hold:

Lawful basis: legitimate interests — responding to someone who has contacted me about my services. You can object at any time and I will delete the enquiry.

Please don't send me participant details, recordings, or anything identifying a research participant in an enquiry email. Recordings are never transferred by email under any circumstances, and an enquiry does not need them.

3.2 When you book a call

Booking a call records your name, email address and the time you chose. This is handled through Calendly — see section 5.

Lawful basis: legitimate interests, or steps taken at your request before entering a contract.

3.3 When you become a client

For clients I additionally hold: the signed Data Processing Agreement and any Data Sharing Agreement, purchase order numbers, invoices, payment records, and our correspondence about the project.

Lawful basis: performance of a contract, and legal obligation for accounting and tax records.

3.4 If I contact you first

If I email you about Localscript and you have not contacted me, I obtained your name, work email address and role from a publicly available professional source — a university department or staff page, a published paper, a research council or funder database such as UKRI Gateway to Research, or a professional directory.

I hold only your name, work email address, role and institution, and a note of what suggested you might have transcription work.

Lawful basis: legitimate interests — contacting a professional at their work address about a service relevant to their work. I have weighed this against your interests and consider it proportionate because the contact is work-related, the volume is low, the information is minimal and publicly published, and you can stop it in one reply.

Your rights here are absolute. Reply asking me to stop and I will delete your details immediately and permanently, and I will not contact you again. Every email I send says so. I do not buy contact lists, scrape personal email addresses, or contact anyone at a personal address.

If you would rather never hear from me at all, email monty@localscript.co.uk and I will add you to a suppression list — a record of your email address kept solely to make sure I don't contact you.

4. What I don't do

• I don't sell, rent or share your details with anyone for marketing.
• I don't send newsletters or bulk marketing email.
• I don't use your data, or any transcript or recording, to train, fine-tune or evaluate any machine learning model. Ever, for any purpose.
• I don't run advertising or behavioural tracking on the website.
• I don't name clients, quote them, or reference their projects publicly without written permission.

5. Who else touches your data

I keep this list short deliberately. These are all of them.

About email. My email runs on Microsoft Exchange Online, bought through GoDaddy as a reseller. Microsoft stores mailbox content — message bodies, calendar entries and attachments — at rest only within the country the account is registered to, which is the United Kingdom. GoDaddy administers the subscription rather than handling the mail itself.

About Calendly. Calendly is a US company and booking a call means your name, email address and meeting time are transferred to the United States. Calendly relies on the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, the Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum as its transfer safeguards.

I have kept this deliberately narrow. Calendly only ever sees the fact that a named person booked a meeting. No recording, transcript, participant detail, anonymisation log or re-identification key is ever transferred to Calendly, or to any other service outside the United Kingdom, under any circumstances. That is a contractual commitment in every Data Processing Agreement I sign, not a policy I could quietly change.

If you would rather not use Calendly, email me and we will arrange a time directly.

About recordings. Recordings and transcripts do not pass through any of the services in the table above. They are transferred by a secure route you choose, processed on a single machine in the UK, and returned by the same route. This is set out in full in the Data Processing Agreement.

6. The website

The Localscript website sets no tracking cookies and runs no advertising or analytics scripts. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.

There is also no form to fill in. Every button on the site opens your own email client — nothing you type is ever submitted to the website or to my hosting provider.

The site is hosted by Netlify, a US company, and served from a global content delivery network, so the page itself may be delivered from a server outside the UK. The only personal data involved is the IP address recorded in standard server logs, which exists to keep the site running and secure. It is not used to build a profile of you and is not linked to anything else I hold. No recording, transcript or participant data is ever stored on or transmitted through the website.

7. How long I keep things

Ask me to delete something earlier and I will, unless the law requires me to keep it.

8. How I keep it safe

• Full-disk encryption on every device.
• Multi-factor authentication on email and every account holding client information.
• No shared accounts, no shared devices, no other person with access.
• Recordings and transcripts are held separately from business records and deleted on the 30-day schedule.
• The measures protecting recordings and transcripts specifically are set out in Annex D of the Data Processing Agreement and in my Information Security Policy, available on request.

9. Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask me to:

• tell you what I hold about you, and give you a copy;
• correct anything wrong;
• delete it;
• restrict what I do with it while a question is resolved;
• give it to you or someone else in a portable format;
• stop processing it where I'm relying on legitimate interests — including all contact from me.

Email monty@localscript.co.uk. I will respond within one month, and usually within a few days. There is no charge.

If a request relates to a research participant rather than to you, I am not the controller and cannot act on it directly — I will pass it to the researcher who commissioned the transcription, within 48 hours, as required by the Data Processing Agreement.

10. Complaints

If I have got something wrong, tell me first — monty@localscript.co.uk — and I will respond within 2 working days.

The full procedure, including what happens next and the independent routes available if my answer does not satisfy you, is set out in the Localscript Complaints Policy.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at any time, whether or not you have raised it with me:

Information Commissioner's Office Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF 0303 123 1113 · ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint

11. Changes

If I change this policy I will update the date at the top. Material changes affecting existing clients will be notified by email.