Privacy policy

1. Who we are

Solace is an estate administration service. Our team carries out the administration that follows a death on behalf of executors, personal representatives and families in the United Kingdom.

For the purposes of the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, the data controller is Aaditya Malhotra, operating as Solace. You can reach us at aaditya@getsolace.co.uk.

2. What we collect

When you use this website

If you submit the enquiry form we collect your first name, surname and email address. If you submit the employer enquiry form we collect your first name, surname, company, job title, work email address and your message.

If you reach us by clicking one of our adverts and then submit a form, we also receive the advertising click reference contained in the page address (for example Google's gclid) and any campaign parameters, so that we can tell which advert led to your enquiry. These are submitted with the form itself. We do not set cookies for this, and we do not track you across other websites.

Our hosting provider automatically processes technical information needed to serve the site, including your IP address, browser type and the pages requested. This is standard server logging and we do not use it to build a profile of you.

When we administer an estate for you

To administer an estate, we process information about the person who has died and about the estate itself. Depending on what you provide, that may include names and contact details of family members and beneficiaries, the death certificate and will, bank and pension statements, property and asset valuations, debts, tax information, and correspondence with institutions.

Some of this may be special category data (for example health information appearing in medical or insurance records) and information relating to a person who has died. We handle it accordingly and only to the extent needed to carry out the administration you have asked us to help with.

What we do not collect

This website uses no cookies, no analytics, no advertising or social media trackers, and no third-party scripts other than the web font files served by Google Fonts. We do not fingerprint visitors and we do not run A/B testing tools.

3. Why we use it, and our legal basis

Where we rely on consent you may withdraw it at any time. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing carried out before you withdrew it.

4. Who we share it with

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers. We use a small number of service providers who process data on our behalf under contract:

When we correspond with a bank, pension provider, utility, HMRC or a local authority on your behalf, we disclose the information those organisations require in order to act on the estate. You are told what we are sending and you approve anything that needs your decision or signature.

We may also disclose information where we are required to by law, or to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

5. International transfers

Some of our providers operate outside the United Kingdom. Where personal data is transferred abroad we rely on UK adequacy regulations or on the International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, together with appropriate safeguards.

6. How long we keep it

Enquiries that do not lead to an account are kept for 12 months and then deleted.

Estate records are kept for seven years after the administration is complete, then deleted. We hold them that long because HMRC can enquire into an estate well after it has been distributed, and an executor may need to evidence what was done. You can ask us to delete your records sooner and we will, unless we are required to keep them.

We keep what we must to meet accounting and legal obligations, and delete the rest.

7. How we protect it

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is limited to the people who need it to do their job. We keep the destination address for form submissions server-side so it is never exposed publicly, and we validate every submission on the server as well as in the browser.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours and tell you where the law requires it.

8. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you
• Rectify data that is inaccurate or incomplete
• Erase your data, where we have no overriding reason to keep it
• Restrict how we process it
• Object to processing based on legitimate interests
• Portability: receive your data in a machine-readable format
• Withdraw consent at any time, where consent is the basis we rely on

To exercise any of these, contact us using the details below. We will respond within one month. There is no charge unless a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.

9. Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please tell us first so we can put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK supervisory authority, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113.

10. Children

Solace is not intended for use by anyone under 18 and we do not knowingly collect data from children. An estate may include information about a child beneficiary, which we process only as part of administering that estate.

11. Changes to this policy

We update this policy when our practices change. The date at the top shows when it was last revised. Material changes affecting how we use your data will be notified to account holders directly.

12. Contact us

For any privacy question or to exercise your rights, email aaditya@getsolace.co.uk. You can also use our contact page.