1. Who We Are

Welcome Bridge UK ("we", "us", "our") is a student settlement and consultancy platform for the UK education sector. We are the data controller for your personal information collected through this website.

Contact: info@welcomebridge.com

2. What Data We Collect

We may collect and process the following personal data:

• Contact information — name, email address, and message content submitted via our contact form.
• Account data — email and password for admin accounts (staff only).
• Usage data — pages visited and blog post views (anonymous, aggregated).
• Cookie data — consent preferences and session tokens. See our Cookie Policy for details.

3. How We Use Your Data

• To respond to enquiries submitted through our contact form.
• To provide and maintain our website and services.
• To manage admin accounts and authentication.
• To understand how our website is used and improve our content.

4. Lawful Bases for Processing

We rely on the following lawful bases under UK GDPR:

• Consent — for analytics and marketing cookies (where applicable).
• Legitimate interests — to operate and improve our website, respond to enquiries, and ensure security.
• Contract — to provide services to students and partner institutions.

5. Third-Party Services

We use the following third-party services that may process personal data on our behalf:

• Cloudinary — image hosting and transformation.
• Neon — serverless PostgreSQL database hosting.
• Resend — transactional email delivery.

Each provider processes data in accordance with their own privacy policies and our data processing agreements.

6. Data Retention

We retain personal data only for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected. Contact form submissions are retained for up to 12 months. Admin account data is retained for the duration of the account. Cookie consent preferences are stored for 12 months.

7. Your Rights

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:

• Access — request a copy of your personal data.
• Rectification — have inaccurate data corrected.
• Erasure — request deletion of your personal data.
• Restriction — restrict processing in certain circumstances.
• Portability — receive your data in a machine-readable format.
• Objection — object to processing based on legitimate interests.
• Withdraw consent — where processing is based on consent, you can withdraw it at any time.

8. How to Exercise Your Rights

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us at info@welcomebridge.com. We will respond within one month.

9. Right to Complain

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO):

Website: ico.org.uk
Helpline: 0303 123 1113

10. International Data Transfers

Some of our third-party service providers may process data outside the UK. Where this occurs, we ensure appropriate safeguards are in place, such as Standard Contractual Clauses or adequacy decisions.

11. Policy Updates

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated "Last updated" date. We encourage you to review this page periodically.