Privacy policy

DogServ runs dogserv.com, a bilingual website in English and Spanish with guides and free tools for dog owners, services for dog businesses and, when it opens, a directory of dog businesses. DogServ was founded by Cal Hewitt and is operated with Web Leveling, the digital marketing agency Cal also founded. We are based in the Houston area of Texas and we work online only.

When this policy says "DogServ", "we", "us" or "our", it means the operator of dogserv.com. "You" means anyone who visits the site or contacts us.

The fastest way to reach us about privacy is the contact form. Choose any topic and start your message with "Privacy request". We do not publish an email address, which keeps spam down; every message sent through the form reaches us.

You can also write to us by mail at: DogServ, 11807 Westheimer Road, Suite 550, PMB 835, Houston, TX 77077, United States.

• You can read DogServ and use our tools without giving us your name or email address.
• We collect what you choose to send us through our forms, what our web host records to deliver and protect the site, and, only if you say yes in the cookie banner, analytics about how the site is used.
• We do not sell your personal information. We do not use it for targeted advertising.
• Our newsletter uses double opt-in: you are not added to the list until you click the link in the confirmation email.
• Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity load only after you accept analytics in the cookie banner, and never when your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal.
• You can ask to see, correct or delete your information through the contact form.

You give us information when you fill in one of the forms on the site. Every form is processed by Netlify Forms, the form service of our web host, Netlify. Each form also contains a hidden spam trap field and a hidden field that records whether you used the English or Spanish site.

Directory claims and photos. When the directory opens, a business owner or manager can claim a listing and send us a photo, a description and a list of services through the contact form. We will also receive whatever contact details you include so we can confirm that you speak for the business.

Messages you send us. If you write to us, we keep what you wrote, the details you gave us and our reply, so we can answer you and follow up.

Please do not send us sensitive information, such as health information about yourself, financial account numbers or government ID numbers. None of our forms asks for it.

Server logs kept by our host. Like every website, dogserv.com is delivered by servers that record basic technical details of each request, such as your IP address, the page requested, the date and time, your browser and device type and the page that referred you. Our host, Netlify, keeps these logs to deliver the site, keep it secure and prevent abuse. We do not use them to build a profile of you.

Analytics, only with your consent. If you choose to accept analytics in the cookie banner, the site loads:

• Google Analytics 4, which tells us which pages are read, how visitors arrive, roughly where they are (city or region level, worked out from the IP address), what device and browser they use and how long they stay.
• Microsoft Clarity, which records how visitors move through a page, such as clicks, scrolling and mouse movement, to produce heatmaps and session replays. Clarity is designed to mask text typed into form fields.

If you do not accept, or your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, neither tool loads and no analytics cookies are set. Our cookie policy lists each cookie these tools set and how long it lasts.

Affiliate link clicks. Some links to stores run through a dogserv.com address that starts with /go/. That address simply sends you on to the store. When you arrive at the store, for example Amazon, the store uses its own cookies to know you came from DogServ so it can pay us a commission if you buy. The store handles that under its own privacy policy. Amazon reports sales to us as totals; it does not tell us who you are or what you personally bought.

Settings stored in your browser. The site stores your cookie choice and, if you use the light and dark toggle, your theme choice in your browser's local storage. These stay on your device and are not sent to us. See the cookie policy.

Fonts. Our fonts are served from dogserv.com itself, so loading a page does not send your IP address to a font provider.

The DogServ directory, which is not open yet, lists dog businesses such as trainers, groomers, walkers, boarding and daycare, vets and rescues. We build listings from information the business has already made public, mainly its public business listing on Google Maps and its own website. A listing can show the business name, categories, address or service area, phone number, website, hours, links to the business's own social profiles and facts such as accessibility features. When the directory opens, a listing may also show an image taken from the business's own website.

We do not publish Google ratings, review counts, reviews or Google photos. We never add a business contact to our newsletter; nobody joins it without double opt-in.

Much of this is information about a business, not a person. Some businesses are run by one person under their own name, from a home address, or with a personal phone number. If that is you, you can ask us to correct your listing, hide your street address, or remove the listing entirely, through the contact form. We will do it.

We may contact a listed business, using contact details the business publishes, to invite it to claim its listing. Every such message will say who we are and how to ask us not to write again.

We use personal information only for the purposes below. European and UK law ask us to name a "legal basis" for each one, so we list those too.

When we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights and expectations. You can object at any time (see "Your rights if you are in the EU, EEA, UK or Switzerland").

We do not make decisions about you that produce legal or similarly significant effects using only automated processing. We do not use your information to train artificial intelligence models.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We share it only with the service providers that help us run the site, each of which handles it for us under its own terms and privacy commitments:

We may also disclose information when the law requires it, such as in response to a valid subpoena or court order; to protect the rights, property or safety of DogServ, our visitors or others; or as part of a merger, sale or transfer of the business, in which case the new owner would have to honor this policy for the information it receives.

DogServ is based in the United States, and our providers store and process information in the United States and, for Brevo, in the European Union. If you use the site from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those where you live.

For information from the European Economic Area, the UK or Switzerland, transfers to our US providers rely, where applicable, on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK and Swiss extensions when the provider is certified under it, and otherwise on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK addendum) included in the provider's data processing terms. You can ask us for more information about these safeguards through the contact form.

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it for, or as long as the law requires.

• Newsletter subscribers: until you unsubscribe. After that we keep only your email address on a suppression list so we never email you again by mistake.
• Newsletter signups that are never confirmed: the confirmation link expires after 7 days. The signup itself stays in our form records for the period below.
• Form submissions and messages: kept in our form records and inbox while we deal with your message, and then for a set period.
• Analytics data: kept by Google and Microsoft for the retention periods set in each tool; see the cookie policy for cookie lifetimes.
• Server logs: kept by Netlify for its own limited retention period.
• Directory listings: kept while the directory runs and the business is open, unless the business asks us to remove the listing.

• Newsletter: every newsletter email has an unsubscribe link that works in one click. You can also ask us through the contact form.
• Analytics: choose "Cookie settings" in the site footer at any time to change your answer. Turning analytics off stops the tools from loading on your next page view.
• Global Privacy Control: if your browser sends this signal, we treat it as a refusal of analytics and an opt-out of any sale or sharing, automatically.
• Your browser: you can block or delete cookies and local storage in your browser settings. The site still works without them.

If data protection law in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland applies to our handling of your information, you have the right to:

• Access: ask whether we hold information about you and get a copy of it.
• Rectification: have inaccurate or incomplete information corrected.
• Erasure: have your information deleted where there is no good reason for us to keep it.
• Restriction: ask us to pause using your information while a question about it is resolved.
• Portability: receive information you gave us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, or have it sent to someone else, where we rely on consent or a contract.
• Objection: object at any time to our use of your information based on legitimate interests, and to direct marketing at any time without giving a reason.
• Withdraw consent: withdraw any consent you gave, for example to the newsletter or to analytics, at any time. This does not affect what we did before you withdrew it.
• Complain: lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, in particular in the country where you live or work or where you believe the law was broken. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office. We would appreciate the chance to fix the problem first.

We answer requests within one month. If a request is complex or we receive many, we may extend that by up to two more months and will tell you why within the first month.

Several US states give their residents privacy rights. These include California (the CCPA as amended by the CPRA), Texas (the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act), Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and other states with similar laws, such as Oregon, Montana, Iowa, Delaware, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Nebraska, Tennessee, Minnesota, Maryland, Indiana, Kentucky and Rhode Island. Which rights apply depends on where you live and whether the law covers DogServ, but we offer the same rights to every US visitor who asks:

• Know and access: the categories and specific pieces of personal information we hold about you, where it came from, why we use it and who we disclose it to.
• Delete: personal information we collected from you or about you, subject to exceptions the law allows.
• Correct: inaccurate personal information.
• Portability: a copy of your information in a portable format.
• Opt out of sale, sharing, targeted advertising and profiling: we do none of these, but you can still send an opt-out request, and a Global Privacy Control signal is honored automatically as one.
• Limit the use of sensitive personal information: we do not collect sensitive personal information, so there is nothing to limit.
• Non-discrimination: we will not deny you service, charge you a different price or give you a different quality of service for using any of these rights.
• Appeal: if we decline your request, you can appeal by replying to our decision through the contact form with "Appeal" in your message. We will answer the appeal within the time your state's law sets. If you are not satisfied, you can contact your state attorney general. Texas residents can do so at texasattorneygeneral.gov.

Do we "sell" or "share" personal information? No. We do not sell personal information for money or anything else of value, and we have not done so in the past 12 months. Because Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity load only with your opt-in consent, never under Global Privacy Control, and are used to measure our own site rather than to target ads, we do not treat them as selling or sharing for cross-context behavioral advertising. If that ever changes, we will update this policy first and give you a way to opt out. The "Cookie settings" link in the footer is also our "Your privacy choices" link.

The CCPA asks us to describe what we collected in the last 12 months using the categories in the law.

We do not collect sensitive personal information as defined by the CCPA, and we do not collect commercial information about your purchases from stores we link to. We keep each category for the periods in "How long we keep information".

Authorized agents. You can have someone act for you. The agent must send us your signed written permission, and we may ask you to confirm your identity directly with us and that you gave the agent permission, unless the agent has a valid power of attorney.

California "Shine the Light". We do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing purposes.

Metrics. If the law requires us to publish yearly figures on the requests we receive, we will publish them here.

1. Email hello@dogserv.com with "Privacy request" in the subject line, or send a message through the contact form that starts with "Privacy request". Tell us what you would like us to do and which state or country you live in. (We publish this address here for privacy requests.)
2. Use the email address you gave us before, if any, so we can find your information. We will verify your identity by matching details you give us with details we hold, and may ask a follow-up question. We will not ask for more than we need, and we use what you give us only to verify and answer your request.
3. We will confirm receipt within 10 business days and answer within 45 days (one month for requests under European or UK law). If we need more time, as the law allows, we will tell you why.

Requests are free. We may decline a request, or charge a reasonable fee, only where the law allows, such as for requests that are clearly unfounded or excessive, and we will explain why.

DogServ is written for adults. It is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, in line with the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). We also do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16 in the European Union or the UK, or from anyone under the age at which they can consent to it where they live.

If we learn that we have collected information from a child in any of those groups, we will delete it promptly and will not use it for any purpose. If you are a parent or guardian and think your child sent us information, tell us through the contact form and we will delete it.

Global Privacy Control is a signal your browser can send to say you do not want your information sold or shared. We honor it automatically: analytics does not load and the signal counts as an opt-out request under the US state laws that recognize it. You do not need to do anything else.

Do Not Track is an older browser setting with no agreed standard for how websites should respond. We do not respond to Do Not Track signals separately, but because our analytics only loads with your opt-in consent, a visitor who does nothing is not tracked.

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect personal information. The whole site is served over encrypted HTTPS connections. Forms include spam protection. Newsletter confirmation links are signed so they cannot be forged. Access to form submissions, the subscriber list and the analytics accounts is limited to the people who need it.

No website or internet transmission is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee the security of information you send us. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you and the authorities when and as the law requires.

DogServ links to other websites, such as sources we cite, stores through affiliate links, the websites of businesses in the directory and our social media pages. Those sites have their own privacy policies, and this policy does not cover them. Our pages on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest and LinkedIn are run on those platforms, and what you do there is covered by their policies.

We may update this policy as the site changes, for example when the directory or the store opens, or when the law changes. We will change the date at the top of the page each time. If a change is significant, we will also put a notice on the site, and we will ask again for consent where the law requires it. We will not use information we already hold in a materially different way without telling you first.

For any question about this policy or your information, write to us through the contact form, or by mail at DogServ, 11807 Westheimer Road, Suite 550, PMB 835, Houston, TX 77077, United States.

This policy is also available in Spanish. If the two versions differ, the English version controls.