Privacy policy
What we collect, why, and how to have information about you or your business corrected or removed. Last updated 1 September 2026.
The short version
- We do not use analytics, advertising or tracking technology. There are no third-party scripts on this website at all.
- We do not sell or share personal information for marketing.
- The only cookies we set are the ones that keep you signed in.
- Most of the business information in the directory came from public sources, not from the businesses themselves. Section 5 explains this, and how to have a listing corrected or removed.
1. Who we are
Windowshoppers is a local business directory covering Bournemouth, Christchurch, Poole and the New Forest.
Windowshoppers is a trading name of Momently Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 17280873, registered office 201 Broadway Lane, Bournemouth, BH8 0AD.
Momently Ltd is the data controller for the personal information described here. That means we decide what is collected and why, and we are responsible for looking after it.
Contact us about anything in this notice — including to correct or remove information about you or your business — at userprivacy@windowshoppers.uk. We aim to respond within 5 working days, and we must respond to formal data protection requests within one month.
For anything that is not about personal information, email hello@windowshoppers.uk.
2. If you only visit the site
You can browse the whole directory without giving us anything and without creating an account. We do not set analytics or advertising cookies, and we do not build a profile of you. Our hosting provider keeps short-term server logs — including IP address, the page requested and the time — for security and to keep the service running. We do not use these to identify individual visitors.
Lawful basis: legitimate interests — keeping the website secure and available.
3. If you create an account
Windowshoppers uses passwordless sign-in. You give us an email address, we send you a link, and clicking it signs you in. We never ask for or store a password.
- Your email address — to sign you in and to contact you about your account
- Dates your account was created and last used — security, and removing dormant accounts
- Which listing you have claimed, if any — to connect you to the business you represent
If we add the features we have planned — saving favourites, and following categories or locations to receive updates — this notice will be updated before those features go live, and we will ask for your consent separately before sending you anything that is not about your own account.
Lawful bases: performance of a contract (running your account); consent (anything you opt into, which you can withdraw at any time).
4. If you claim or pay for a listing
When you claim a listing we record the account that claimed it, when, and how we verified you are entitled to claim it — which may involve sending a code to a phone number or email address already on the listing, or to the business address. We also record which version of our listing terms you accepted and when.
If you buy a paid listing, payment is handled by Stripe. Card details go directly to Stripe and we never see or store them. We keep a record of what you bought, when, and the amount, because we are legally required to keep accounting records.
Lawful bases: performance of a contract; legal obligation (accounting records, kept for 6 years).
5. Information about businesses — including information we did not get from you
This is the section that matters most if you run a business we have listed, and we want to be straightforward about it.
Windowshoppers lists around 1,700 businesses. We did not ask most of them first. The listings were built from public sources, and we are telling you this because UK data protection law requires us to when we obtain information about someone from somewhere other than that person.
If you are a sole trader, or if a business contact detail is also your personal contact detail — your name, your mobile number, an email at your own name — then that information is your personal data and everything here applies to you.
What a listing can contain
Business name; address, postcode and map location; telephone number; email address; website; links to social media profiles only where the business links to them from its own website; opening hours; category and facilities; food hygiene rating; and, where a listing has been claimed, an owner’s name, role and short biography.
Where it came from
- OpenStreetMap — the original import: name, location, category, and some contact details and opening hours
- Food Standards Agency — food hygiene ratings
- The business’s own website — contact details, opening hours, and facts used to write a description
- Companies House — registered company status, used to check whether a business is still trading
- The business owner — anything added after a listing is claimed
We show the source and the date next to individual facts on a listing, so you can see where each piece of information came from and how recently it was checked.
What we do not do
- We do not guess at social media accounts. We only show accounts a business links to from its own website, because attaching the wrong account to a named business is a real harm.
- We do not repeat safety or accreditation claims — such as Gas Safe or electrical competent person registration — from a business’s own marketing. We verify them against the official register or leave them out.
- We do not state that a business has closed on the basis of a company register alone. A discrepancy is flagged for a human to check.
Lawful basis: legitimate interests — running a directory that helps people find local businesses, and helps those businesses be found. We have considered the impact on individuals and concluded that publishing business contact information which is already publicly available, with a clear route to correction or removal, is a reasonable and expected use. You can object at any time, and if you object to your listing we will remove it.
Getting your listing corrected or removed
Email userprivacy@windowshoppers.uk with the listing name and what is wrong. You do not need an account, you do not need to justify the request, and there is no charge. If you ask us to remove your listing entirely, we will.
Our crawler — WindowshoppersBot
Some of what we compile comes from visiting a business’s own website. Those visits identify themselves in your server logs as:
WindowshoppersBot/1.0 (+https://windowshoppers.uk/privacy; hello@windowshoppers.uk)
If you have arrived here from your logs, that is us, and this is what we are doing. We read the pages of a business’s public website to check details we already hold — an address, opening hours, a phone number — and to understand what the business does, so that the listing describes it accurately rather than generically.
- We honour robots.txt. If you disallow us there, we stop, and we treat a machine-readable reservation as a copyright opt-out rather than a suggestion.
- We rate limit ourselves deliberately, and read at most a handful of pages per business.
- We do not copy your words. Anything we publish is written from extracted facts, not by paraphrasing your text, and it is checked automatically for overlap with your original wording before it can appear.
- We do not collect personal information from your website beyond the ordinary business contact details a customer would use to reach you.
To be excluded entirely — from the crawler and from the directory — email userprivacy@windowshoppers.uk. You do not need to give a reason.
6. Who we share information with
We do not sell your information. We use these service providers:
- Supabase — database and sign-in (London)
- Vercel — website hosting and delivery
- Resend — sends sign-in emails (United States)
- Cloudflare R2 — stores listing photographs
- Stripe — payments for paid listings
Some are outside the UK. Where information is transferred outside the UK we rely on the safeguards those providers have in place, such as the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses. You can ask us for details. We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or to establish or defend legal claims.
7. How long we keep things
- Account and email address — while your account is open, then deleted within 30 days of closure
- Dormant accounts — reviewed periodically; we will email before removing one
- Listing information — for as long as the listing is published
- Removed listings — we keep a minimal record of the removal request so the listing is not re-imported
- Payment and accounting records — 6 years, as required by tax law
- Server logs — short-term, as set by our hosting provider
8. Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to:
- Be told what we hold about you and get a copy of it
- Have it corrected if it is wrong
- Have it deleted, in many circumstances
- Object to our use of it where we rely on legitimate interests — including objecting to your business listing being published
- Restrict how we use it while a dispute is resolved
- Receive it in a portable format, where you provided it
- Withdraw consent at any time, where we relied on consent
Exercise any of these by emailing userprivacy@windowshoppers.uk. We will not charge you and we will not ask why.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first so we can put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.
9. Cookies and browser storage
We do not use analytics, advertising or tracking cookies. There are no third-party scripts on this website, so no other organisation is setting anything in your browser through us.
- Sign-in cookies — keep you signed in. Strictly necessary.
- ws-theme (browser local storage) — remembers whether you chose light or dark appearance. A preference you set yourself.
Because these are strictly necessary to provide a service you asked for, we are not required to ask for your consent, and we do not show a cookie banner. You can clear them in your browser at any time; clearing the sign-in cookies signs you out.
10. Children
Windowshoppers is a business directory intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect information about children. If you believe we hold information about a child, email userprivacy@windowshoppers.uk and we will remove it.
11. Changes to this notice
We will update this notice as the site changes — in particular before we launch favourites, following, or paid listings. The date at the top tells you which version you are reading. If we make a change that materially affects how we use information about you, and we hold your email address, we will tell you.
Windowshoppers is a trading name of Momently Ltd, company number 17280873, registered in England and Wales. Registered office: 201 Broadway Lane, Bournemouth, BH8 0AD.