Privacy notice

Ham Agency Ltd ("HAM", "we", "us") is the controller of the personal data described here.

• Registered in England and Wales, company number 11265213.
• Registered office: 510 The Chocolate Factory, 5 Clarendon Road, London N22 6XJ.
• Contact for anything in this notice: theteam@ham.agency, or post to the registered office marked for the attention of the director.

We are a small business and are not required to appoint a data protection officer. Steph Hamill, our director, is responsible for how we handle personal data.

We collect only what we need for the thing you asked for.

Please do not send us health information or other sensitive personal data through the site. Our forms and tools do not ask for it.

UK data protection law requires a lawful basis for each use. These are ours.

Our legitimate interests are running and growing HAM, answering people who contact us, and knowing which parts of the site are useful. We have weighed these against your interests and rights. You can object at any time (see Your rights).

Marketing emails

We follow the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. If you give us a company email address, we may send a short follow-up about what you asked for and occasional HAM updates related to it. If you are a sole trader or a partnership, or you used a personal email address, we will only send you marketing if you have opted in. Every email we send has a one-click unsubscribe, and unsubscribing is free.

We never add you to the Steph Sense newsletter unless you tick the box. The box is always unticked to start with.

Automated scoring

The quiz and scorecards score your answers automatically to suggest a practice, a stage or a grade. That result has no legal effect and no similarly significant effect on you. It is a starting point. A person reads anything that leads to a conversation about work.

Raise Ready applications and client briefs are never scored automatically. A person reads every one.

We do not use cookies for analytics or advertising. Our analytics tool, Vercel Web Analytics, does not use cookies and does not identify individual visitors. It counts visits in aggregate.

The law lets us count visits this way without asking first, as long as we tell you and give you a simple, free way to object. We treat your browser's Global Privacy Control setting as an objection, and the switch below stops your visits being counted on this device. The switch stores one small setting in your browser, only to remember your choice.

The client brief and the Raise Ready application keep your unsent answers in your browser's session storage, so a refresh does not lose them. This is strictly necessary for a form you chose to fill in. It stays on your device, is cleared when you send the form or close the tab, and is not read by us or anyone else.

If we ever add a tool that stores information on your device and is not strictly necessary for the site to work, we will ask for your consent first and update this notice.

When you book a call, you use our booking provider's own pages, and its own cookie notice applies there.

We never sell personal data. We share it only with providers who process it on our behalf under written data processing terms, and only for the purposes in this notice.

Steph Sense is published by Steph Hamill on Substack. Once you are subscribed, Substack also holds your subscription under its own privacy policy, and you can unsubscribe from any issue.

We may also share personal data with our professional advisers (such as accountants and lawyers) under a duty of confidence, and with authorities where the law requires it. If HAM is ever sold or restructured, personal data may pass to the new owner, who must use it in line with this notice.

Some of our providers process data in the USA or elsewhere outside the UK. This includes staff at a provider, or at its US parent company, reaching UK-held data from outside the UK to support and secure their service. Where they do, we rely on UK adequacy regulations (including the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, where the provider is certified under it), or on the ICO's International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses. Ask us if you would like details of the safeguard for a particular provider.

You have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you
• ask us to correct it if it is wrong or incomplete
• ask us to delete it
• ask us to restrict how we use it
• object to how we use it, and in particular object to direct marketing at any time, which we will always respect
• ask for data you gave us in a portable format
• withdraw your consent at any time, where we rely on consent.

To use any of these rights, email theteam@ham.agency. There is normally no charge. We will reply within one month. For complex requests we may extend that by up to two further months and will tell you why. We may need to confirm your identity first.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, please tell us first at theteam@ham.agency. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days and reply in full as quickly as we can.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK regulator:

• Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF
• Telephone 0303 123 1113
• Online at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint

Access to personal data is limited to the people at HAM who need it for the purposes above. Our systems are protected by passwords and two-factor sign-in, and our providers are bound by written security and confidentiality terms.

This site is for businesses and the people who run them. It is not aimed at anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect their personal data.

We will update this notice when how we use personal data changes. The date at the top shows when it last changed.