Privacy policy

Browsing this site sets no cookies, loads nothing from another company, and tells no advertiser you were here. We count page views ourselves, in a way that cannot identify you.

If you fill in the contact form, we keep what you send so we can quote the work and get back to you. That is the only personal information we hold about customers, and you can ask us to delete it at any time.

VanHouten's Landscaping, based in Onaway, Michigan. Contact details are on the contact page, and any question about this policy can go to either owner.

We keep our own basic statistics so we know which jobs people are interested in. For each page view we record:

We do not store your IP address. It is used for a moment to stop the contact form being flooded, then discarded without being written down.

We do not store the name of your browser either. It is read once, only to work out whether the visit came from a person or a search engine crawler, and then discarded the same way. All that is kept is that single yes or no, which says nothing about you.

We use no cookies at all on the public pages, so there is no cookie banner to click. The only cookie this site can set is the sign-in cookie for the two owners when they use the back office.

There are no third-party trackers, no advertising pixels, and no analytics company involved. The typefaces are built into the site rather than fetched from a font service, so loading a page does not tell anyone else you were here.

The random number in the previous section lives in your browser's session storage, which your browser clears when you close the tab. It is not linked to anything about you, and because we save only a scrambled version, it cannot be turned back into anything identifying. It exists so that one person reading four pages is not counted as four visitors.

The contact form asks for:

We read it, we quote the work, and we contact you about that job. That is all. We do not sell it, share it for marketing, or add you to a mailing list, because we do not have one.

The address is used to find the property on a map before we visit. Opening that map is something one of us does by hand, and only then does the address reach Google.

Photos are converted and resized when they arrive, which strips the hidden information cameras attach to a picture, including the GPS coordinates a phone records. We never see that data and it is never stored.

Only the two owners. There are no other staff accounts and no agencies with access.

Three companies handle the data because they run the machinery underneath, and none of them are permitted to use it for anything of their own:

Enquiries are kept while they are useful, which for a quote that turns into work means as long as we keep records of that work, and for one that goes nowhere means until we clear it out. Ask us and we will delete yours sooner.

Page view statistics are kept indefinitely, because they contain nothing about any particular person.

Write to us and we will tell you what we hold about you, correct it if it is wrong, or delete it. There is no form to fill in and no charge. Since this is a small business rather than a large one, the answer comes from a person.

If you would rather not appear in the page counts at all, browsing with JavaScript turned off stops them being recorded.

This is a site about landscaping work. It is not aimed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.

The site is served over an encrypted connection. Enquiries are stored on the server behind a sign-in that only the owners have, protected by their Google accounts rather than by a password we invented.

No system is perfect. If something goes wrong that affects your information, we will tell the people involved rather than hope nobody notices.

If this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. There is no archive of old versions, so if that matters to you, keep a copy.