Privacy Policy
How we collect, use and protect your personal information, and the rights you have over it.
The short version
- We only ask for what we genuinely need to answer your request or carry out your booking.
- We never sell, rent or trade your details, and we never use them for advertising or profiling.
- We do not send marketing emails.
- We count visits to our pages only as anonymous totals, with no cookies and no profile of anyone.
- You can ask to see, correct or delete your information at any time, free of charge.
- We keep your details only for as long as we need them, and then remove them.
1. Who we are
Helping YOU Ltd provides home cleaning and home cooking services to households in Mauritius. When you use this website or book our services, Helping YOU Ltd is the controller of your personal data, meaning we decide why and how it is used.
- Company: Helping YOU Ltd
- Business Registration Number: C26236495
- Website: helpingyoultd.com
- Email: contact@helpingyoultd.com
- Telephone / WhatsApp: +230 5901 0996
We have designated an officer responsible for data protection compliance, as required by section 22 of the Data Protection Act 2017. You can reach that person by writing to contact@helpingyoultd.com with "Data protection" in the subject line.
2. What information we collect
We collect personal data directly from you, through the forms on this website and through any conversation that follows by phone, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram or email. We do not buy, rent or obtain personal data about you from third parties, data brokers or public databases.
When you request a quote
- The service you are interested in (cleaning or cooking) and how often you need it
- Details about your home or your meal needs, in your own words
- Your name and phone number
- Your email address, if you choose to give it
- Your town or area
- Anything else you choose to tell us in the notes box
When you make a booking
- The service, package and any add-ons you have chosen, or the type of cooking service
- Your preferred date, start time and expected duration
- A description of what you need, in your own words
- Your name and phone number
- Your email address, if you choose to give it
- Your town or area
- If you book home cooking, whether anyone has a food allergy or a special diet (a simple yes or no; the details themselves are covered under Allergies, and other sensitive information below)
We ask for your town or area only, not your full street address. We agree the exact address with you directly once a booking is confirmed.
When you leave a review
Reviews are collected through a private link given to you after a visit. We collect the name of the team member who served you, their role, the date of the service, your rating, and your written feedback. Your own name and contact details are optional: you may leave a review anonymously.
Technical information
Like every website, ours records basic technical information automatically: your IP address, the date and time of your visit, and general information about your browser and device. This is created by our hosting provider and our bot-protection tool, and is used only to keep the site running and to prevent abuse.
Visitor statistics
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, a statistics tool provided by our hosting company, to see how many people visit our pages and which pages they find useful. When a page loads, a small Cloudflare script reports the page address (without anything after a "?" in it, so the choices you make on our booking pages are not included), the website that sent you to us, your type of browser and device, your country, and how quickly the page loaded.
Cloudflare states that this tool sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device, and does not use your IP address or any other detail to recognise you or follow you onto other websites. We only ever see totals, such as "120 visits to the cleaning page this week", never a list of individual visitors, and we cannot use it to identify you.
Allergies, and other sensitive information
Section 29 of the Data Protection Act treats certain information as special categories of personal data, including anything about health, medical conditions, religion, or ethnic origin. Section 29 does not forbid us from holding such information; it requires us to have a proper basis for it and to look after it carefully. We do that in one place only, and refuse it everywhere else.
Allergies and dietary needs. If you book home cooking, the booking form asks whether anyone has a food allergy or a special diet. If you answer yes, it opens a box for the details, with a tick box beside it. We record what you write there only if you tick that box, so our legal basis is your explicit consent under section 29. If you would rather not put the details in writing, please call or WhatsApp us to book instead: if you have an allergy, we would much rather know, because we cannot cook safely around something we have not been told about. We use it for one purpose: preparing your food safely. It is seen only by the person cooking for you and by the owner, it is never used for anything else, and it is deleted on the same schedule as the rest of your booking record (see how long we keep it). You can withdraw your consent and ask us to erase it at any time, by phone or by email, and we will do it without asking why.
Everything else. Our other boxes are not designed for sensitive information, so please keep it out of them. If something else sensitive genuinely matters for your service (a medical diet beyond an allergy, a mobility need), please tell us by phone instead, so we can deal with it properly rather than leaving it sitting in a form.
3. Why we collect it, and our legal basis
We use your personal data for these purposes only:
- To reply to your quote request and prepare a price for you
- To confirm, arrange and carry out your booking
- To contact you about a service you have requested or received
- To keep proper records of the work we have done and the payments made
- To understand how our team is performing, through your private reviews
- To protect the website and our records from abuse and fraud
- To count visits to the website, as anonymous totals, so we can see which pages are useful and improve them
Our legal basis under section 28(1)(b)(i) of the Data Protection Act 2017 is that the processing is necessary to take steps at your request before entering into a contract, and to perform that contract once agreed. In plain terms: you asked us for a quote or a booking, and we cannot provide either without your contact details.
For our accounting and tax records, our basis is section 28(1)(b)(ii): compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject. For our bot protection, for our visitor statistics and for reviewing the quality of our team's work, our basis is section 28(1)(b)(vii): our legitimate interests in running the business safely and well, which we have weighed against your rights and consider proportionate.
We do not use your personal data for advertising, marketing or profiling. We do not send marketing emails or newsletters. We make no decisions about you by automated means, and we do not build customer profiles.
4. Whether you have to give us this information
Section 23(2)(d) of the Data Protection Act requires us to tell you which information is required and which is optional.
| Information | Required or optional |
|---|---|
| Your name | Required: we cannot reply without it |
| Your phone number | Required: this is how we confirm bookings |
| What you need (description / details) | Required: we cannot price or plan the work without it |
| Town or area | Required for bookings, optional for quotes |
| Whether anyone has a food allergy or a special diet (cooking bookings) | Required: we never cook without asking. The details are asked for only if you answer yes |
| Your email address | Optional |
| Extra notes | Optional |
| Your name and contact on a review | Optional: reviews can be left anonymously |
If you prefer not to use the website forms at all, you are welcome to email or WhatsApp us instead.
5. Who can see your information
Inside Helping YOU Ltd, your details are seen only by the owner and by the team member assigned to your service, and only to the extent they need in order to do the work.
We do not sell, rent, trade or share your personal data with anyone for their own purposes.
We do, however, rely on a small number of established technology providers to run the website and hold our records. Under the Data Protection Act these companies are our processors: they act only on our instructions and may not use your data for their own purposes. Section 23(2)(c) requires us to tell you who they are.
| Provider | What it does for us | What it can see |
|---|---|---|
| Google LLC | Runs the software that receives our forms, stores our records in a spreadsheet, sends us the notification email, and stores copies of the quotes, invoices and receipts we issue | Everything you submit through a form, and, if we have sent you a quote or an invoice, copies of your quotes, invoices and receipts, with the details printed on them |
| Cloudflare, Inc. | Hosts and delivers this website, provides the "I am not a robot" check on our forms, counts visits for our anonymous visitor statistics, and runs our private office system, which holds our quotes, invoices and receipts | Your IP address and basic technical data; the content of a form only while it is in transit; and, if we have sent you a quote or an invoice, your name, contact details, quotes, invoices and receipts |
| Meta Platforms (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram) |
Carries the messages you choose to send us through those apps | The content of any message you send us there |
| Zoho Corporation | Provides our contact@helpingyoultd.com mailbox | The notification emails containing your enquiry, and any email you send us |
We may also disclose personal data where we are required to do so by law, by a court, or by a competent public authority, or where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim.
6. Where your information is stored
Helping YOU Ltd operates from Mauritius, but the providers listed above run their services from data centres outside Mauritius, including in the United States and the European Union. This means your personal data is transferred outside Mauritius. Section 23(2)(j) of the Data Protection Act requires us to tell you this and to explain the level of protection involved.
These transfers are made under section 36(1)(c)(i) of the Act: the transfer is necessary for the performance of the contract between you and us, or to take steps at your request before entering into that contract. We cannot answer your enquiry, hold your booking or email you a confirmation without our systems processing your details.
Our visitor statistics are different, because counting visits is not needed to serve you. For them we keep what leaves Mauritius to the minimum: Cloudflare already handles your IP address to deliver every page, and what it keeps for our statistics is anonymous, with no cookie, no identifier and no profile of you.
Each of these providers is a large, established company that publishes a data processing agreement, contractually undertakes to process data only on our instructions, applies encryption in transit and at rest, and operates under recognised international security certifications. We have accepted those data processing terms on your behalf as required by section 31(4) of the Act.
If you would rather not use the website forms, you are welcome to call us on +230 5901 0996. Please note that a message sent by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Instagram also travels through those companies’ systems outside Mauritius. A telephone call is the only channel that does not.
7. How long we keep it
Section 21 of the Data Protection Act says personal data must not be kept in a form that identifies you for longer than is necessary. Our retention periods are:
| Record | How long we keep it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Quote requests that do not become bookings | 12 months | So we can pick up the conversation if you come back to us |
| Booking and customer service records | 24 months after your last service | Long enough to serve you well as a returning customer |
| Allergies and dietary needs | 24 months, with the booking record it belongs to | So a returning customer does not have to tell us again; erased sooner if you ask |
| Reviews of our team | 24 months | Long enough to see a pattern in someone's work |
| Invoices and accounting records | 7 years | Required by Mauritian tax and company law. Held separately from the records above, and containing only what the law requires |
| Emails and app messages | Reviewed regularly and deleted once no longer needed | Correspondence does not sit in a database, so we clear it by hand rather than on a fixed clock |
| Website technical logs | Short-term only, as kept by our hosting provider | Security and fault-finding |
| Visitor statistics | All visits for 7 days, then about 1 visit in 10 for up to 6 months, as kept by Cloudflare | So we can compare one month with the next. They contain nothing that identifies you |
When a record reaches the end of its period, we do not simply leave it in place. We remove everything that identifies you (your name, phone number, email address and town), along with anything you wrote describing your home or the work, and anything you told us about allergies or dietary needs, and keep only anonymous information such as the date, the reference number, the service type and the package. Review feedback is treated slightly differently: we keep the words, because what people tell us about our service stays useful long after the visit, but any name, email address or phone number written inside the text is stripped out first, so what remains describes the service rather than a person. Once a record has been anonymised in this way it is no longer personal data, and this policy no longer applies to it. This happens automatically, every night.
8. How we protect it
Section 31 of the Data Protection Act requires us to put appropriate security measures in place. Ours include:
- The whole website is served over an encrypted HTTPS connection, so what you type into a form is encrypted in transit.
- Our records are held in accounts protected by strong passwords and two-factor authentication.
- Access is limited to the owner, and to the team member assigned to your service for the details they need.
- The website loads no advertising code, and no code that follows you from one website to another. The only outside tracking script it runs is Cloudflare's visitor statistics.
- Our forms are protected by an automated bot check and by anti-spam and rate-limiting measures, so that our records cannot be flooded or scraped.
- Everything you submit is stored as plain text and never interpreted as a formula or command.
- We review these measures as the business grows and as our tools change.
No system can be guaranteed perfectly secure, but we take these obligations seriously and act promptly if anything goes wrong.
9. Your rights
Under sections 24 and 37 to 41 of the Data Protection Act 2017 you have the right to:
- Access: ask whether we hold personal data about you, and receive a copy of it.
- Rectification: have inaccurate details corrected, incomplete details completed, or a statement of your own added to the record.
- Erasure: ask us to delete your data where it is no longer needed for the purpose we collected it, where you withdraw a consent we were relying on, where you object and we have no overriding grounds, or where it has been handled unlawfully.
- Restriction: ask us to pause our use of your data, for example while we check something you say is wrong.
- Objection: object in writing at any time to our use of your personal data.
- Not to be subject to automated decisions: we do not make any decisions about you by purely automated means, so this does not currently arise.
- Withdraw consent: where we ever rely on your consent, you may withdraw it at any time, without affecting anything done before you withdrew it.
- Complain to the Data Protection Commissioner (Data Protection Office, dataprotection.govmu.org).
To exercise any of these rights, write to contact@helpingyoultd.com. Please tell us your name and the phone number or email you gave us, so we can find your record, and be aware that we may ask you a question or two to satisfy ourselves that we are dealing with the right person, because handing your data to someone else would be a far worse outcome.
There is no charge for exercising your rights. We will respond within one month. If your request is unusually complex, or you have made several, we may extend that by a further month and will tell you if so. If we decide not to act on your request, we will explain why and tell you that you may complain to the Commissioner.
Please note that we may not be able to erase everything immediately: for example, records we are legally required to keep for tax and accounting purposes. Where that is the case we will tell you exactly what we are keeping and why.
10. If something goes wrong
If there is a breach of security affecting your personal data, sections 25 and 26 of the Act require us to notify the Data Protection Commissioner without undue delay and, where feasible, within 72 hours of becoming aware of it. Where a breach is likely to result in a high risk to your rights and freedoms, we will also contact you directly, in clear language, to explain what has happened, what it means for you and what we are doing about it.
11. Children
Our services are arranged by adults. This website and its forms are intended for people aged 18 or over, and we ask that children do not submit information through them.
We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. Section 30 of the Data Protection Act prohibits the processing of the personal data of a child under 16 without the consent of a parent or guardian, and the Children's Act 2020 protects the privacy of children more broadly. If you believe a child has given us their information, tell us at contact@helpingyoultd.com and we will delete it.
We also never publish photographs or any other information identifying a child on this website or on our social media pages.
12. Reviews about our team
After a visit you may be given a private link to rate the Home Care Professional or Home Cooking Professional who served you. Your review goes only to Helping YOU Ltd, and is used to keep our standards honest and to support and train our team. We will never publish your review (on this website, on social media, or anywhere else), or anything that identifies you, without first asking for and receiving your permission. If you give it, our legal basis for publishing is your consent under section 28(1)(a), and you can withdraw it at any time, in which case we will take the review down.
A review you write is also personal data about the team member you are describing. They have the same rights over it that you have over your own data, including the right to ask for a copy of what has been said about their work. If they do, we will provide it, but we will remove your name and contact details first, unless you have told us we may share them.
13. Cookies and this website
This website does not use advertising cookies, analytics cookies, tracking pixels or social media trackers. We do not measure your behaviour across the internet, and there is no third-party advertising code on any page. Our visitor statistics work without any cookie.
The only cookies that may be set are those placed by our bot-protection tool to tell a genuine visitor apart from an automated one. These are strictly necessary to keep the forms working and to protect our records, and they carry no advertising or profiling function.
The typefaces on this site are stored on and served from our own website. They are not loaded from Google Fonts or any other outside service, so opening a page does not share your IP address with a font provider.
14. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as our business, our tools or the law change. The current version is always available at helpingyoultd.com/privacy.html, and the "last updated" date and version number at the top of this page will tell you when it last changed.
If we make a change that materially affects how we use information we already hold about you (for example, using it for a genuinely new purpose), we will tell you directly, by email or phone, before that change takes effect. We will not quietly start doing something new with data you gave us for something else.
15. How to contact us or complain
If you have any question about this policy, or about how we handle your information, please contact us first. Most things are quickest to resolve directly:
- Email: contact@helpingyoultd.com
- Phone or WhatsApp: +230 5901 0996
See also our Terms & Conditions.