Last updated

19 October 2026

Privacy Policy

How We Handle Your Data

Overview

We take your privacy very seriously. Please read this privacy policy carefully as it contains important information on who we are and how and why we collect, store, use, and share your personal information. It also explains your rights in relation to your personal information and how to contact us or supervisory authorities in the event you have a complaint.

This policy covers personal information handled for Griffin website enquiries, business contacts and account administration under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, as amended, and the EU GDPR where applicable. Customer content processed through Griffin is handled on the customer’s instructions under the applicable service agreement and data processing terms. The customer normally determines the purposes of that processing; individuals should contact their organisation about that use of their data.

Key Terms

It would be helpful to start by explaining some key terms used in this policy:

We, us, our: BlackBox Hosting Limited, registered in England and Wales under company number 08728513, with its registered office at The Studio, Brewer Street, Bletchingley, Surrey, England, RH1 4QP. Griffin is a trading name of BlackBox Hosting Limited. BlackBox Hosting Limited is the controller for the personal information covered by this policy, except where it acts on a customer’s instructions as described above.
Personal information: Any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual
Special category personal information: Personal information revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, genetic and biometric data, data concerning health, sex life, or sexual orientation
You: As a user of our website, a customer, supplier, or potential customer or supplier

Personal Information We Collect About You

We may collect and use the following personal information about you:

Your name and contact information, including email address, telephone number, and company details
Business billing details, invoices and payment records, where relevant to your relationship with us
Your professional online presence, e.g., LinkedIn profile
Your enquiry, demo, support and business correspondence history
Information about how you use our website, IT, communication, and other systems
Your IP address if you contact us through our website

This personal information is required to provide you or inform you about our services. If you do not provide personal information we ask for, it may delay or prevent us from providing services to you.

How Your Personal Information Is Collected

We collect information from you when you enquire about Griffin, request a demo, contact support or administer an account. We may also receive business contact details from your organisation or publicly available business sources, such as Companies House or LinkedIn. Technical information may be collected through the website and service; see the Griffin Cookie Policy for information about cookies and similar technologies.

How and Why We Use Your Personal Information

Under data protection law, we can only use your personal information if we have a proper reason for doing so, e.g.:

To comply with our legal and regulatory obligations
For the performance of our contract with you or to take steps at your request before entering into a contract
For our legitimate interests or those of a third party
Where you have given consent

A legitimate interest is when we have a business or commercial reason to use your information, so long as this is not overridden by your own rights and interests.

Purposes and lawful bases

What we use your personal information for	Our reasons
To provide services to you	For the performance of our contract with you or to take steps at your request before entering into a contract
To comply with our legal and regulatory obligations	Compliance with legal obligations
Marketing our services to: existing and former customers; third parties who have previously expressed an interest in our services; third parties with whom we have had no previous dealings.	Consent where required; otherwise our legitimate interest in promoting relevant business services, subject to your right to object.
To receive goods or services from you	For the performance of our contract with you or to take steps before entering into a contract
To comply with our legal and regulatory obligations	Compliance with legal obligations

What we use your personal information for	Our reasons
To provide services to you	For the performance of our contract with you or to take steps at your request before entering into a contract
To comply with our legal and regulatory obligations	Compliance with legal obligations
Marketing our services to: existing and former customers; third parties who have previously expressed an interest in our services; third parties with whom we have had no previous dealings.	Consent where required; otherwise our legitimate interest in promoting relevant business services, subject to your right to object.
To receive goods or services from you	For the performance of our contract with you or to take steps before entering into a contract
To comply with our legal and regulatory obligations	Compliance with legal obligations

For business representatives, our legitimate interests include managing enquiries, accounts and supplier relationships, providing support, preventing misuse and securing our services. Where you personally enter a contract, contractual necessity may apply instead. We rely on legal obligations for required accounting and regulatory records, and consent where required for optional cookies or marketing.

Do not include sensitive personal information in general enquiries. Customer prompts, files and other content submitted through Griffin may contain personal information, including special category information. Its permitted use, security, recipients and retention must be specified in the customer’s data processing agreement; this policy does not imply that such content is never processed.

Promotional Communications

We may use your personal information to send you updates (by email, text message, telephone, or post) about our services.

We use consent where required for electronic marketing. Where the law permits marketing without consent, we rely on our legitimate interest in promoting relevant business services, subject to your rights and applicable marketing rules. You may object to direct marketing or withdraw consent at any time.

We will always treat your personal information with the utmost respect and never sell or share it with other organisations for marketing purposes.

You may opt out using the unsubscribe option in a marketing message or by contacting us using the details below.

We may ask you to confirm or update your marketing preferences if you instruct us to provide further services in the future, or if there are changes in the law, regulation, or the structure of our business.

Who We Share Your Personal Information With

We routinely share personal information with:

Third parties we use to help deliver our services to you, e.g., subcontractors
Other third parties we use to help us run our business, e.g., marketing agencies, website hosts, professional advisers
Third parties approved by you, e.g., social media sites you choose to link your account to or third-party payment providers
Our banks

We only allow our service providers to handle your personal information if we are satisfied they take appropriate measures to protect your personal information. We also impose contractual obligations on service providers relating to ensure they can only use your personal information to provide services to us and to you. We may also share personal information with external auditors, e.g., in relation to ISO accreditation and the audit of our accounts.

We may disclose and exchange information with law enforcement agencies and regulatory bodies to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations.

We may also need to share some personal information with other parties, such as potential buyers of some or all of our business or during a re-structuring. Usually, information will be anonymised, but this may not always be possible. The recipient of the information will be bound by confidentiality obligations.

We will not share your personal information with any other third party.

Where Your Personal Information Is Held

Information may be held at our offices, third-party agencies, service providers, representatives, and agents as described above (see above: ‘Who we share your personal information with’).

Some providers may process information outside the UK or EEA. The safeguards described below apply where a restricted international transfer takes place.

Transferring Your Personal Information Out of the UK/EEA

To deliver services to you, it may sometimes become necessary for us to transfer your personal information outside the UK/European Economic Area (EEA), e.g.:

Share it with your and our service providers located outside the UK/EEA
If you are based outside the UK/EEA

These transfers are subject to special rules under European and UK data protection law.

For restricted transfers, we use an applicable adequacy decision or appropriate safeguards, such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or UK Addendum, and EU Standard Contractual Clauses where relevant. We carry out the assessments required by applicable law. You can request information about the safeguards using the contact details below.

If you would like further information, please contact us (see ‘How to contact us’ below).

Your Rights

You have the following rights, which you can exercise free of charge:

Access: The right to be provided with a copy of your personal information (the right of access)
Rectification: The right to require us to correct any mistakes in your personal information
To be forgotten: The right to require us to delete your personal information in certain situations
Restriction of processing: The right to require us to restrict processing of your personal information in certain circumstances, e.g., if you contest the accuracy of the data
Data portability: The right to receive the personal information you provided to us, in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format and/or transmit that data to a third party in certain situations
To object: The right to object:
At any time to your personal information being processed for direct marketing (including profiling)
In certain other situations to our continued processing of your personal information, e.g., processing carried out for the purpose of our legitimate interests
Not to be subject to automated individual decision-making: The right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing (including profiling) that produces legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affects you

For further information on each of those rights, including the circumstances in which they apply, please contact us or see the Guidance from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on individuals’ rights under the General Data Protection Regulation.

If you would like to exercise any of those rights, please:

Write to us using the address in ‘How to Contact Us’
Let us have enough information to identify you (e.g., your full name, address, and customer or matter reference number)
We may request proportionate additional information where reasonably necessary to verify your identity; please do not send identity documents unless we ask for them.
Let us know what right you want to exercise and the information to which your request relates

You have the following rights, which you can exercise free of charge:

Access: The right to be provided with a copy of your personal information (the right of access)
Rectification: The right to require us to correct any mistakes in your personal information
To be forgotten: The right to require us to delete your personal information in certain situations
Restriction of processing: The right to require us to restrict processing of your personal information in certain circumstances, e.g., if you contest the accuracy of the data
Data portability: The right to receive the personal information you provided to us, in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format and/or transmit that data to a third party in certain situations
To object: The right to object:
At any time to your personal information being processed for direct marketing (including profiling)
In certain other situations to our continued processing of your personal information, e.g., processing carried out for the purpose of our legitimate interests
Not to be subject to automated individual decision-making: The right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing (including profiling) that produces legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affects you

If you would like to exercise any of those rights, please:

Write to us using the address in ‘How to Contact Us’
Let us have enough information to identify you (e.g., your full name, address, and customer or matter reference number)
We may request proportionate additional information where reasonably necessary to verify your identity; please do not send identity documents unless we ask for them.
Let us know what right you want to exercise and the information to which your request relates

You have the following rights, which you can exercise free of charge:

Access: The right to be provided with a copy of your personal information (the right of access)
Rectification: The right to require us to correct any mistakes in your personal information
To be forgotten: The right to require us to delete your personal information in certain situations
Restriction of processing: The right to require us to restrict processing of your personal information in certain circumstances, e.g., if you contest the accuracy of the data
Data portability: The right to receive the personal information you provided to us, in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format and/or transmit that data to a third party in certain situations
To object: The right to object:
At any time to your personal information being processed for direct marketing (including profiling)
In certain other situations to our continued processing of your personal information, e.g., processing carried out for the purpose of our legitimate interests
Not to be subject to automated individual decision-making: The right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing (including profiling) that produces legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affects you

If you would like to exercise any of those rights, please:

Write to us using the address in ‘How to Contact Us’
Let us have enough information to identify you (e.g., your full name, address, and customer or matter reference number)
We may request proportionate additional information where reasonably necessary to verify your identity; please do not send identity documents unless we ask for them.
Let us know what right you want to exercise and the information to which your request relates

Retention and Security

We retain personal information for as long as necessary for the purpose for which it was collected. For enquiries and demo requests, we consider whether the enquiry remains active and whether follow-up is reasonably expected. Account and supplier records are retained for the relationship and any further period required for accounting, legal obligations or resolving claims. Technical and security logs are retained for the period needed to investigate incidents, protect services and meet contractual requirements. Marketing information is retained while it is lawfully used for that purpose; we may retain a minimal suppression record to honour an opt-out. Customer content, prompts, responses and audit logs processed on a customer’s behalf follow the retention and deletion arrangements in that customer’s contract. We delete or anonymise information when it is no longer needed.

We apply technical and organisational measures appropriate to the information and risks, limit access to authorised people who need it, and require confidentiality.

The measures used for customer content depend on the agreed Griffin service and deployment, as documented in the customer contract and data processing schedule.

We also have procedures in place to deal with any suspected data security breach. We will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected data security breach where we are legally required to do so.

How to Complain

We hope that we can resolve any query or concern you may raise about our use of your information.

The General Data Protection Regulation also gives you the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in particular in the European Union (or European Economic Area) state where you work, normally live, or where any alleged infringement of data protection laws occurred. The supervisory authority in the UK is the Information Commissioner, who may be contacted at https://ico.org.uk/concerns or telephone: 0303 123 1113.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

Last updated: 19 October 2026.

We may change this privacy notice from time to time. When we do, we will inform you via our website.

How to Contact Us

Please contact us using the postal address below if you have questions about this policy or the personal information we hold about you.

For privacy enquiries, requests to exercise your rights or complaints, please write to: Griffin Privacy, BlackBox Hosting Limited, The Studio, Brewer Street, Bletchingley, Surrey, England, RH1 4QP.

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