Privacy Policy
Last updated
This policy explains what personal information Mypetzilla collects, why, who we share it with, how long we keep it and the rights you have. It applies to everyone who uses mypetzilla.co.uk.
1. Who we are
Mypetzilla (mypetzilla.co.uk) is run by MYPETZILLA LIMITED. In these documents, “we”, “us” and “our” mean MYPETZILLA LIMITED.
- Address: Studio I1c Witan Studios, Witan Gate, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom, MK9 1EF
- Email: [email protected]
- Contact form: mypetzilla.co.uk/contact
We are the controller of your personal information under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. Email us about anything in this policy at [email protected].
2. The short version
- We collect what we need to run a safe pet marketplace, and no more.
- Your email address, phone number and home address are never shown on adverts. Buyers contact sellers through our messages.
- Identity and licence documents you send for checks are private and seen only by our team.
- We don’t sell your information. We only use analytics cookies (Google Analytics) if you accept them.
- Card payments are handled by Stripe. We never see your full card number.
3. What we collect
What you give us
- Account details: your name, email address, phone number and password (stored only in a scrambled form we can’t read back). Only our team sees your phone number.
- Seller details: your display name, seller type, general area (postcode district and town), an optional about text and website, a profile photo and gallery photos (with any captions) if you upload them, and, if they apply, your organisation, charity number and breeding licence details. We remove hidden information, including location data, from these photos. If you add a website, our system visits that page when you save it and about once a week to check it links to Mypetzilla, and keeps the result of the last check.
- Adverts: the details, description and photos of the animals you advertise. We remove hidden information, including location data, from photos when you upload them.
- Verification documents: if you ask us to check your identity, licence or organisation, the documents you upload, such as photo ID, a licence certificate, a charity or company registration, or a letter confirming you act for an organisation.
- Messages you send to other members, and any reports you make about adverts, conversations or reviews.
- Reviews you write about a breeder you bought from, and a breeder's reply. Published reviews show the star rating, the text, any photos you added, your first name and the first letter of your surname, and the month. We remove hidden information, including location data, from review photos.
- Your activity choices: pets you save, search alerts you set up and your email notification settings.
- Contact form messages: your name, email address and what you tell us.
- Newsletter sign-ups: your email address, if you choose to receive our pet advice newsletter.
- Payments: the package you bought, the amount, date and status. Stripe collects your card details directly.
What we collect automatically
- Technical information: like every website, our server receives your IP address, browser type and the pages you request. We use this to keep the site secure and working.
- Security records: a log of important account events (for example sign-ins, password changes and changes to adverts) without your IP address, and short-lived scrambled counters used to stop people guessing passwords or sending spam.
- Cookies: the ones the site needs to work, such as keeping you signed in, and Google Analytics cookies only if you accept them. See our Cookie Policy.
- Your location, only if you ask: if you press “Use my location” when searching, your browser sends us your position once. We work out your postcode district, send it back and don’t store your position.
What others give us
- Other members may send us information about you, for example in a message or a report about an advert.
- Stripe tells us whether a payment succeeded, was refunded or was disputed.
- We may check public registers, such as a council’s licence register or the Charity Commission, to verify details you gave us.
4. How we use it, and our lawful bases
Data protection law requires a lawful basis for each use of personal information. Ours are:
| What we do | Lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Create and run your account; publish your adverts; deliver messages; send alerts and notifications you set up; provide paid packages | Contract: we need it to provide the service you asked for |
| Send account emails, such as confirming your address, resetting your password and payment receipts | Contract |
| Review adverts, screen for banned content, check sellers, deal with reports, prevent fraud, scams and abuse, and keep animals and people safe | Legitimate interests: running a safe, lawful marketplace and protecting our members and animals |
| Use your phone number to contact you about your account or adverts, and to spot one person selling animals through several accounts, which the PAAG advertising standards ask us to look out for | Legitimate interests (as above) |
| Check identity, licence and organisation documents | Legitimate interests (as above). Where you ask us for a check, also contract |
| Keep payment and accounting records | Legal obligation: tax and accounting law |
| Keep records of your agreement to our terms | Legitimate interests: being able to show what was agreed |
| Keep the site secure, fix problems and improve it | Legitimate interests: a secure, working site |
| Send our newsletter | Consent, which you can withdraw at any time using the link in every email |
| Email account holders our news and offers, unless they ticked “Don’t send me Mypetzilla news and offers” when creating their account | Legitimate interests: telling our members about our own services. You can unsubscribe at any time with the link in every email, or by asking us |
| Understand how people use the site with Google Analytics, to improve it | Consent, given on our cookie banner and withdrawn at any time with “Cookie settings” at the bottom of every page |
| Respond to the police, councils, courts or regulators | Legal obligation, or legitimate interests in preventing crime and protecting animals |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have balanced them against your rights. You can object (see section 10). We don’t use your information for advertising, and we don’t sell it.
5. What other people can see
- Anyone can see live adverts: the advert details and photos, the seller’s display name, seller type, general area (town or postcode district, never a street address) and any check our team has completed, such as “licence checked”. Search engines can show live adverts too.
- Anyone can see published reviews of a licensed breeder: the star rating, the text, any photos the buyer added, the buyer's first name and last initial, the month, and the breeder's reply.
- The member you message sees your display name and what you write. Your email address and phone number are not shared, unless you choose to include them in a message.
- We never show your email address, phone number, home address, identity or licence documents, or account details on the site.
6. Who we share it with
We use a small number of service providers (“processors”), who act only on our instructions and must keep your information safe:
- Stripe processes card payments for adverts. For some purposes, such as fraud prevention and meeting financial regulations, Stripe is a controller in its own right; see Stripe’s privacy policy.
- Brevo (Sendinblue SAS, France) holds our newsletter list and our list of account holders who get our news and offers, and sends those emails. Brevo receives your email address if you sign up to the newsletter, and your email address and name once you confirm a new account, unless you opted out. When you close your account, we take you off that list.
- Google (Google Ireland Ltd and Google LLC) provides Google Analytics. Only if you accept optional cookies, it receives the pages you visit, how you arrived, your browser and device type and your approximate location, and gives us totals. It doesn’t store your IP address. See Google’s privacy policy.
- Our email delivery provider sends account emails, message notifications and search alerts.
- Our hosting provider runs the servers the site and its data are stored on.
- DigitalOcean (DigitalOcean, LLC) stores verification documents, such as photo ID and licences, in a private storage area in its London data centre. Each document is encrypted before it leaves our servers, so DigitalOcean cannot read it.
We also share information when we have to or when it protects people and animals:
- with the police, local councils (which license breeders), the RSPCA or SSPCA, courts and regulators, when the law requires it or to help prevent or investigate crime or animal cruelty;
- with our professional advisers, such as accountants and lawyers;
- with a buyer of the business, if Mypetzilla is sold or merged, who would have to follow this policy.
7. Transfers outside the UK
Some providers, such as Stripe and Google, may process information outside the UK. DigitalOcean is a US company, although it stores our verification documents in London. When they do, we make sure it is protected as UK law requires: either the country has UK “adequacy” status (the European Economic Area does, which covers Brevo), or the transfer is covered by the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, or another lawful safeguard. Contact us for more details.
8. How long we keep it
We keep information only as long as we need it:
| Information | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account | While it is open. You can close it yourself in your account settings. Your name, email address, phone number and password are deleted or anonymised within 90 days after it closes, except the records below |
| Adverts and their photos | While live, then up to 12 months after they end, to deal with questions, reports and fraud. If a report or a message we still keep refers to the advert, we keep only its title with that record |
| Messages | Up to 2 years after the last message in a conversation. Longer if reported or under investigation |
| Reviews | Published reviews stay while the breeder's account is open. You can ask us to remove your review at any time. If you close your account, your review stays but no longer shows your name; if you or the breeder delete your account, it is deleted. Review photos are deleted with the review. Reviews we did not publish are kept for 2 years; their photos are deleted when we refuse or remove the review |
| Verification documents | Photo ID: deleted within 90 days after our decision. Licences and registration papers: kept while the approval is valid and deleted within 90 days after it ends. Anything we turn down: deleted within 90 days after our decision. If you close your account, all of them are deleted within 30 days. We keep a record of what we checked, when and the result while your account is open and for 2 years after |
| Reports, warnings and bans | Up to 6 years, so banned sellers can’t return |
| Payment records and agreement to our terms | 6 years after the end of the financial year they relate to, as tax law requires |
| Contact form messages | Up to 2 years |
| An advert started before signing in | 7 days, unless you sign in and continue it |
| Newsletter sign-up | Until you unsubscribe; then Brevo removes you from the list |
| News and offers to account holders | Until you unsubscribe or close your account. After you unsubscribe, Brevo keeps your email address only to make sure you are not emailed again |
| Security log of account events | Up to 6 years |
| Server access logs (including IP addresses) | Up to 30 days |
| Anti-spam counters | 1 day |
We may keep information for longer if the law requires it, or if it is needed for a legal claim or an investigation.
9. Keeping it safe
We protect your information with encrypted connections (HTTPS), scrambled passwords, private and encrypted storage for verification documents, limited staff access, and a record of when our team views private information such as verification documents or conversations. No website can be completely secure, so please use a strong password that you don’t use anywhere else. If a data breach is likely to put you at risk, we will tell you and the ICO as the law requires.
10. Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to:
- access the personal information we hold about you and get a copy of it;
- correct information that is wrong or incomplete (you can change many details yourself in your account);
- delete your information, where we no longer have a good reason to keep it;
- restrict how we use it, for example while we check something you have told us;
- object to uses based on our legitimate interests;
- move information you gave us to another service, in a common format;
- withdraw consent at any time, for example to the newsletter.
To use any of these rights, email us at [email protected] or use the contact form. It’s free. We may ask you to confirm your identity, and we will reply within one month (longer for complex requests, in which case we will tell you why).
If you ask us to delete your account rather than close it, we delete it straight away and permanently: your sign-in, names, seller profile, adverts and photos, messages you sent and conversations you were in, reviews you wrote or received, verification documents, and saved pets and alerts. We keep only payment records (amounts and dates, without your name) and a record that the deletion happened. We cannot delete an account while we are investigating a report, fraud or a legal request about it.
11. Automated checks
We check adverts automatically for wording and details that break our rules or the law, such as banned breeds or animals too young to leave their mother. Some problems stop an advert being submitted until it is changed; others are highlighted to our team. These checks don’t decide on their own whether an advert is approved: a person reviews every advert. We don’t make decisions about you based only on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects.
12. Children
You must be 18 or over to have an account, and the site is not designed for children. If you think a child has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.
13. If you used the old Mypetzilla website
Mypetzilla used to run on older software. When we moved to the new site, we carried over account details from the old website so that previous members can reactivate their account and keep their history. We rely on our legitimate interests in continuing the service for existing members.
- Old account details are stored securely and are not shown on the site.
- You can reactivate your account from the “Activate your account” page, using a link sent to the email address you used before.
- If an old account is not reactivated within 24 months of the new site launching, we delete it.
- You can ask us to delete your old account details at any time.
14. Changes to this policy
We will update this policy when how we use information changes. The date at the top shows the latest version. If a change matters to you, we will tell you by email or on the site before it takes effect. See also our Terms and Conditions.
15. Questions and complaints
If you have a question or a complaint about how we handle your information, please contact us first and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office: visit ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or call 0303 123 1113.