Privacy & cookies
What this website collects, why, and what you can do about it.
It is a short list: no social widgets, no profile of you sold or shared with anyone, and no cookie of any kind unless you accept one.
Who is responsible
Westmar Surveys — Thomas Rene Merlier, NIF ES Z0508269C, Calle Monterrey 33, 07013 Palma de Mallorca (Illes Balears), Spain. For anything in this policy, including any of the requests below, write to info@westmarsurveys.com.
What the website itself collects
Nothing, unless you send it. Browsing these pages does not create an account, a profile or a record of you. The site sets no cookies of its own.
Two things are stored in your browser, and neither is a cookie: your answer to the cookie question, so it is not asked again on every visit, and — if you close the reviews card — the fact that you closed it, so it does not reappear while you are reading. The first lasts until you change your choice or clear your browser data; the second until you close the tab. Neither contains an identifier, and neither leaves your device.
As with any website, the server that delivers these pages processes your IP address in order to send them to you and to defend against attacks. That is done on the basis of a legitimate interest in keeping the site running.
The contact form
If you use the enquiry form, what you type is what is collected: your name and email, and — where you choose to give them — a phone number, the vessel's location, its name or type, its length, and your message.
It is used to answer you and to work out what you need. Nothing more. It is not added to a mailing list, and it is not sold, shared or used to advertise to you.
The legal basis is that you asked to be contacted about a possible service — steps taken at your request before a contract.
Cookies, analytics and advertising
Westmar advertises on Google. To know whether an advert actually led to an enquiry, the site can load Google's advertising tag, which records that a phone call, email, WhatsApp message or form submission happened after an ad click.
The same Google tag also feeds Google Analytics, which counts visits and shows which pages get read and roughly what part of the world they are read from. That is used to see what the site is doing — not to build a picture of you. Nothing collected there is sold, handed to anyone else, or used to advertise to you elsewhere.
No cookie is set unless you agree to it. The tag loads on every visit, but the first instruction the page gives it is that it may store nothing on your device and read nothing from it. Until you accept it obeys that: no cookie, no advertising identifier, nothing that would let Google recognise you on your next visit or anywhere else.
What it does send in that state is a note that a page was viewed, carrying your IP address as every web request does and nothing that identifies you. Google can only count it in aggregate. Refuse, and it stays that way; accept, and the cookies below are set.
Nothing on this site is withheld from you for refusing: the pages, the fees and the contact details are identical either way.
The cookies involved, if you accept, are Google's _gcl_au and related _gcl_* values for the advertising side, and _ga and _ga_* for analytics. They record that a visit or a click happened, not who you are. The advertising ones expire within about ninety days, the analytics ones within two years.
You can change your mind at any time — through the cookie settings on this site, or by clearing cookies in your browser. Both work.
Who else handles your data
Only the services needed to run the site and reply to you:
- Cloudflare — hosts and delivers these pages
- Formspree — carries a submitted enquiry from the form to the Westmar inbox
- Google — analytics and advertising measurement. The tag loads on every visit but stores nothing on your device unless you accepted the cookies above
- The provider of the info@westmarsurveys.com mailbox, which holds your message the way any email is held
Each acts on instructions, under a contract, and none is permitted to use your enquiry for its own purposes.
Data leaving Europe
Some of those providers are based in the United States. Where data reaches them it is transferred under the safeguards European law requires for that — the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified under it.
How long it is kept
An enquiry is kept while it is being dealt with, and afterwards for as long as it is useful to remember the conversation — typically no more than two years for an enquiry that does not lead to work. Where an enquiry becomes a job, the records that Spanish commercial and tax law requires to be retained are kept for the periods that law sets. Advertising cookies expire on their own within about ninety days, analytics cookies within two years.
Ask, and an enquiry will be deleted sooner.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, ask that it stop being used, ask for it in a portable form, or object to it being used at all. Where consent was the basis — the advertising and analytics cookies — you can withdraw it whenever you like, and withdrawing it does not invalidate what happened before.
Write to info@westmarsurveys.com. There is no form to fill in and no charge.
If the answer does not satisfy you, you can complain to the Spanish data protection authority, the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (www.aepd.es), or to the authority where you live.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. There is no archive of previous versions; the page always states the current position.