Data processing agreement

This agreement is between you, the account holder, and us, Benmetrics. It covers the information Benmetrics handles about visitors to the websites in your account, which we call “visitor data” below.

In the words of data protection law, you are the “controller” of visitor data: you decide that your website’s visits are counted, and why. We are your “processor”: we do the counting for you, on your instructions.

If you add a website for a client, your client is the controller, you are their processor and we are yours. You confirm that your client has agreed to that.

“Data protection law” means the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and the European Union’s GDPR where it applies to you.

What it is for. Counting visits to your websites and showing you the results. Nothing else.

Whose information. People who visit the websites in your account.

What information. Two kinds:

• A visitor’s IP address and their browser’s description of itself. These are personal data. We use them for the instant it takes to count a visit and place it in a country, and we never store them.
• The record of the visit: the pages opened, where the visitor came from, their country and region, the type of device, and the scrambled number that stops one person being counted twice in a day. The full list is on the privacy page.

Until the day’s key is deleted, shortly after the day ends, someone who held that key and already knew a visitor’s IP address and browser could in theory work out which number was theirs. After that nobody can. To be on the safe side, this agreement treats every record of a visit as visitor data, whatever its age.

Nothing sensitive. Benmetrics isn’t built to hold names, contact details, or sensitive information such as a person’s health or beliefs, and our terms ask you not to send it any.

For how long. For as long as the website is in your account. The record of each individual visit is deleted after 25 months. The daily totals are kept until you remove the website.

• We handle visitor data only on your written instructions. Those are this agreement, our terms, the line of code you put on your website, and the choices you make in your account, such as which buttons and events to count.
• We use visitor data only to provide Benmetrics to you, which includes keeping the service running and secure. We don’t sell it, share it, mix one customer’s data with another’s, or use it to build a picture of any person.
• If we think one of your instructions breaks data protection law, we will tell you.
• If a law ever requires us to do something else with visitor data, we will tell you before we do it, unless that law forbids us from telling you.

Anyone working for us who can reach visitor data has agreed to keep it confidential, and can reach it only because their work needs it.

We protect visitor data with measures suited to what it is. At the moment:

• A visitor’s IP address and browser description are never written to our database, our logs or our queues. An automated test checks this each time the software changes.
• The key that scrambles visitor numbers is replaced every day and the old one deleted, so past visits can’t be traced back to anyone.
• Everything travels encrypted, between a visitor’s browser and us and between you and your account.
• The database is encrypted where it is stored.
• Passwords are stored in a scrambled form that can’t be read back.
• An account can see only the statistics of its own websites.
• Only the people who need to can reach the systems that run Benmetrics.
• Our hosting company keeps backups of the database so that it can be restored after a failure.

We will keep these measures at least as strong as they are now, and review them as Benmetrics grows.

You agree that we may use the companies below to help provide Benmetrics. Data protection law calls them “sub-processors”. They are the only ones that handle visitor data.

Laravel Cloud Laravel Holdings Inc.

Servers in London, United Kingdom

Runs the service: the servers the app runs on and the database everything is stored in. It uses Amazon Web Services for the servers, Neon for the database and Cloudflare for the network in front of them.

Bunny BunnyWay d.o.o.

Servers around the world

Delivers this website and the counting script, and carries each visit from a website to us. Its servers see a visitor’s IP address, because that is how anything is delivered over the internet, and tell us which country and region it belongs to. Bunny keeps a log of each request for three days, set to shorten IP addresses so that they no longer point to one person. A visitor is answered by whichever of Bunny’s servers is nearest, so a visit from outside the UK passes through one near the visitor on its way to London.

• Each one works to a written contract with us that holds it to the same standards as this agreement. If one of them fails to meet them, we answer to you for it.
• Before we add or replace one, we will email you at least 30 days beforehand. If you object, tell us. If we can’t settle it between us, you can remove your websites or delete your account before the change takes effect.

The visits we record are stored in London, in the United Kingdom, and nowhere else.

On its way to us, a visit passes through Bunny’s network, which answers each visitor from the location nearest to them. For a visitor outside the United Kingdom, that location is outside it too. The three-day log Bunny keeps of the requests it carries is held on Bunny’s own systems.

The servers and the database Laravel Cloud runs for us are in London. Its staff could in principle reach them from outside the United Kingdom.

Where any of this counts as sending personal data out of the United Kingdom, it is done under a safeguard that UK data protection law recognises: a decision that the destination protects data adequately, or the standard contract terms approved for the purpose.

People have the right to ask what is held about them, and to have it corrected or deleted. With Benmetrics there is nothing to find: no record of a visit can be traced to a person, by you or by us. You can tell anyone who asks exactly that.

• If you need our help with a request, ask and we will give it.
• If someone sends us a request about one of your websites, we will pass it to you and not answer it ourselves.

• If we learn that visitor data has been lost, destroyed, changed, or seen by someone who shouldn’t have seen it, we will email you without delay, and within 72 hours at most.
• We will tell you what happened, what data was involved, what we have done about it and what we suggest you do. If we don’t know everything straight away, we will tell you what we know and follow up.
• We will help you with anything you need to report to the regulator or to the people affected.

• If you need to carry out a data protection impact assessment that involves Benmetrics, or to consult the regulator about one, we will give you the information you need about how Benmetrics works.
• We will cooperate with the Information Commissioner’s Office if it asks how we handle visitor data.

• This agreement lasts for as long as you have a website in your account.
• When you remove a website, or delete your account, we stop counting at once and delete that website’s visitor data, daily totals included, within the hour.
• Your reports stay open to you until then, so take any record of the figures you need before you remove the website.
• Backups of the database, which our hosting company keeps for recovery, are replaced within 30 days. They are used for nothing else in the meantime.

We will give you the information you reasonably need to check that we are keeping to this agreement. Start by asking us in writing, and we will answer within 30 days.

If that isn’t enough, you or an independent auditor you appoint may inspect how we handle visitor data:

• give us at least 30 days’ notice;
• keep it to once a year, unless there has been a breach or a regulator requires more;
• keep what you learn confidential;
• the cost of your audit is yours;
• it can’t include anything that would expose another customer’s data.

• This agreement is part of our terms. Where the two disagree about visitor data, this agreement wins.
• The limits on what each of us owes the other, under if something goes wrong in the terms, apply to this agreement too, as far as the law allows.
• It is governed by the same law as the terms.
• We may update it in the way the terms describe, with 30 days’ notice of any change that makes a real difference to you.

Benmetrics is independently built and owned in Scotland.

To ask us anything about this page, write to us through our contact form. If your organisation needs a signed copy of this agreement for its records, ask and we will send one.