Privacy policy

Who we are

Chairtime is booking, deposit and book-keeping software for solo tattoo artists. Artists subscribe to run their business on it; their clients use it to enquire, book and pay.

That means personal information reaches us in two ways, and our role differs between them. For the account you hold with us — artist or client — we decide how the data is used, and we are the data controller. For the records an artist keeps about their clients — enquiries, bookings, notes, consent forms — the artist is the controller and we process that data on their instructions, as the software they keep it in. The data processing terms are that arrangement in writing, and list everybody who helps us with it.

What we collect

From everyone with an account:

• Your name and email address.
• Sign-in records: when you signed in, how, the network address it came from and the approximate location of that address. Artists sign in with a password (stored only as a hash) or a passkey; clients sign in with one-time links emailed to them.
• A record of significant account activity, kept so unexpected changes can be explained.

From artists:

• Your public page: bio, portfolio images, flash designs, opening hours and studio address.
• Subscription billing details, handled by Stripe. We never see or store full card numbers.
• Your Stripe account identifier, if you connect Stripe to take deposits.
• Your Instagram account identifier, username and messages, if you choose to connect Instagram so your DMs arrive in your Chairtime inbox — and, if you import posts into your portfolio, the photos, caption and link of each post you pick.
• Your WhatsApp Business account's identifiers and phone number, and the messages exchanged on it from then on, if you choose to connect WhatsApp so your clients' messages arrive in your Chairtime inbox and appointment reminders go from your own number.
• Your Google account's identifier and email address, and the credential Google issues us to write to it, if you choose to connect Google Calendar so your confirmed bookings appear there — and, only if you also turn on blocking your Google busy times, the start and end of the times your main Google calendar says you are busy. What that involves is set out under Google Calendar below.
• The business records you enter: income, expenses and photographed receipts.
• Where you came from when you signed up: the campaign tags on the link you followed, the website that sent you, or the artist whose link you used. It is kept for the length of that one visit, and only on your account if you register — so we can tell which of our efforts brings artists here.
• If you join a studio: that you are in it. Its owner sees when you are busy or free and counts such as how many enquiries and bookings you have, never your clients or your messages; your takings only if you choose to share them; and the chair rent you and they record.

From people who run a studio:

• The studio's name, address and public page, and who is in it.
• The studio's billing, handled by Stripe on the studio's own account with them. We never see or store full card numbers.
• The chair rent you agree with your artists and which payments are marked made.
• The email address of each artist you invite to join or to guest, and whether they accepted, kept with the studio's records while it has an account. We email the invitation to that address and nothing else.

From clients, on behalf of their artist:

• Enquiries, messages and any reference photos you send.
• An enquiry you send to a studio rather than to one artist. The studio holds it until one of its artists takes it on, and it then becomes that artist's; until then the studio's artists see what you asked but not who you are, and the studio's owner sees only how many enquiries there were. If none of them takes it on within 30 days, it is deleted and we email you to say so.
• Quotes, bookings and payment records.
• Your mobile number, if you give one, so your artist can text you appointment reminders. You can turn those off at any time.
• If you join an artist's walk-in queue at a flash day or convention, the name and the mobile number or email address you give, used only to tell you once when you are nearly up, and deleted a week after the event. They are never added to an account.
• Consent forms, including your date of birth, home address, emergency contact and any medical information you choose to disclose. Medical disclosures are encrypted at rest, and are read by your artist — that is who you are disclosing them to. Our own staff do not read them in the ordinary course of running the service, but an administrator investigating a fault you or your artist has reported can sign in as your artist and would then see what they see. That access is recorded.
• If your artist asks you to verify your age, the identity document and photograph you give to Stripe. Those go to Stripe directly and we never hold them — we are told only whether the check passed, and the date of birth and name it confirmed, which your artist sees so they can check at the appointment that the ID was yours.

What we use it for

• Running the service you signed up for: pages, bookings, messages, payments and records. This is necessary to perform our contract with you.
• Sending the emails the service depends on — sign-in links, booking confirmations, quotes and receipts.
• Sending artists a few emails about their own account that it could do without: during the free trial, a nudge towards the next setup step still undone — publishing the page, connecting Stripe, setting working hours — and nothing once it is done; and one note a few days after a paid plan ends, saying what has paused. Each carries a link that stops them. If you cancel a paid plan and tell Stripe's billing portal why, we keep what you said with the subscription.
• Sending, on an artist's behalf, the occasional email about their own work — books opening, new designs, a slot that has come free. The artist chooses who is written to and what it says; we send it for them, and only to people who were given a simple chance to refuse on one of that artist's forms and did not take it, or who asked the artist's waiting list to hear about free time. Every such email carries a link that stops them, from that artist or from everybody, and the same choice is on your account page. We never email you marketing of our own.
• Keeping the service safe: rate limiting, bot protection on public forms, and activity records. This is in our legitimate interest in running a secure service.
• Meeting legal obligations, such as keeping financial records for as long as tax law requires.

We do not sell personal information. The only advertising use is measuring, and only if you agree to it, whether one of our own adverts brought you here, or led an artist to sign up or take their first payment — see Cookies below.

Who else is involved

• Stripe processes every payment: artist subscriptions and client deposits alike. Client payments go to the artist's own Stripe account. Stripe also runs age verification where an artist asks for it, which is where your identity document and photograph go — we never receive them. Stripe's own privacy policy applies to the details you give them.
• The SMS Works delivers text messages. If your artist sends you an appointment reminder by text, or tells you by text that you are nearly up in their walk-in queue, your mobile number and the message go to them to deliver it. Nothing is texted to anybody who has turned reminders off, and a walk-in queue sends one text, to the number given to join it.
• Intuit (QuickBooks) is involved only if an artist connects their QuickBooks company. In that case the payments and refunds on their bookings are posted to their accounts, which includes the client name against each one.
• Meta is involved if an artist connects their Instagram account, in which case messages flow between Instagram and this service through Meta's API. That artist can also have us read their own recent posts to pick some for their portfolio: the list is only shown to them, and only the posts they pick are kept — each one's photos, caption, link and Instagram's identifier for it — as portfolio pieces they edit or delete like any other. If an artist connects their own WhatsApp Business number, messages between them and their clients pass through WhatsApp's Cloud API, and their appointment reminders — the client's mobile number, the artist's name, the time and the booking reference — are sent from that number. Where we advertise on Facebook or Instagram, and only if you agree to it, Meta's pixel is also told that you visited so the advert can be measured.
• TikTok is involved only where we advertise there, and only if you agree to it: their pixel is told that you visited so the advert can be measured.
• Google supplies address search results — for a studio's address, and for the home address a client types on a consent form — the map on an artist's page, and — only if you agree to it — analytics and the measuring of our Google adverts. Address lookups run from our servers, so Google receives what was typed and the suggestion picked but is not told who asked. The map and the analytics run in your browser, which means Google sees your request for them. Separately, if your artist has connected Google Calendar, your name and the time and place of your appointment are written into a calendar in their Google account — see Google Calendar below.
• Cloudflare Turnstile protects our public forms from bots.
• Anthropic is involved only if an artist has turned on the AI assistant. In that case the text of an enquiry sent to that artist, up to three of the reference photos attached to it, and the descriptions and prices of the artist's own past quotes are sent to Anthropic as a processor on our behalf, so that a draft reply can be written for the artist to review. Photos are reduced in size first, and are used only to write that draft. The draft is only ever shown to the artist, who decides what, if anything, to send you.
• Amazon Web Services delivers our email (Amazon SES) and stores uploaded files and backups, and Cloudflare carries every visit to the site. They, and the company that hosts our servers, handle data as processors on our behalf.

Cookies

We set the cookies the application needs to work: one to keep you signed in, one to protect forms from cross-site request forgery, and one to remember whether you agreed to the next paragraph. Those three are set whatever you choose, because without them the site cannot work or would have to ask you again on every page.

When you sign in we also set one that keeps this device signed in for up to 30 days. Signing in with a password asks first, with a Remember me box that starts ticked; signing up, or signing in with a passkey or an emailed link, always sets it. Signing out removes it.

We also use Google Analytics to count visits, and — where we advertise on Google, Meta or TikTok — their tags to learn whether an advert brought you here. If you create an artist account, or later take your first payment through us, Google Ads is told that one of our adverts led to a sign-up or a first payment; it is not told your name, your email or anything about your clients. Each of these sets cookies of its own. Those are set only if you press Allow when asked, and Google is told you agreed to measurement but not to adverts chosen for you. Press No thanks and none of it loads — not the tags, not the cookies, nothing is sent to Google, Meta or TikTok at all. You can change your mind at any time from the Cookies link at the bottom of the page.

Separately, we count how often each artist's and studio's pages are opened, so they can see it: one number per page and per day, with the name of the site that sent the visitor, such as Instagram or Google. That count uses no cookie and keeps nothing about you — not your address, your device or anything that could tell one visitor from another — so it does not ask.

There is no advertising on this site and we do not sell anything about you to anybody.

How long we keep things

For as long as the account they belong to is active. If an artist's subscription lapses their account moves to the free plan and their records are kept, not deleted, so everything is intact if they return. Financial records are kept for as long as tax law requires even after an account closes.

A client's records are part of their artist's business records — including consent forms an artist may be legally required to retain — so requests about them are answered together with the artist.

An enquiry sent to a studio that none of its artists takes on is deleted after 30 days. Once an artist takes one on, it is kept as that artist's record.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law — or, if you are in Ireland, the EU General Data Protection Regulation — you can ask for a copy of your personal information, ask us to correct it, delete it, restrict how it is used, object to our use of it, or receive it in a portable form. Write to us at [email protected] and we will respond within a month.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, or, if you are in Ireland, to the Data Protection Commission at dataprotection.ie.

Instagram data deletion

If you connected Instagram and later remove Chairtime from your Instagram settings with a request to delete your data, Meta notifies us and we delete everything the connection brought in: the connection itself, its access token, the Instagram message threads received through it, and any portfolio pieces imported from it, photos and all. You will be given a confirmation code and a link to check the result.

WhatsApp data

If you connected WhatsApp, disconnecting it from your inbox stops new messages arriving here and reminders going from your number. The messages already received stay with the rest of your records until you close your account, or until you ask us to delete them sooner through a support ticket. To remove Chairtime from your number at Meta as well, remove it in Meta Business Suite.

Google Calendar

An artist can connect their Google account so that their confirmed bookings appear in Google Calendar, and can choose to let the times their main Google calendar says they are busy stop their clients booking them. This is the one place we write into, or read from, an account that is not ours, so here is exactly what it involves.

What we ask Google for, and why:

• Permission to make a calendar, and to see, add, change and remove events on calendars we made. That is the narrowest permission Google offers for the job: it reaches only the "Chairtime" calendar we create in the artist's account. The artist's own calendars and the events in them are out of its reach.
• Only if the artist turns on blocking their Google busy times: permission to see when they are free or busy. Google answers that with the start and end of each busy period and nothing else — no titles, descriptions, places or guests — and we ask it only about the artist's main calendar. It is asked for when the artist turns it on, not when they connect, and they can refuse it and keep sending bookings to Google.
• The account's identifier and email address, so that we know which Google account is connected, can show the artist which one it is, and can stop one Google account being connected to two artists.

What we do with it:

• We create one calendar, named "Chairtime", in the artist's Google account and write their confirmed bookings into it as events: the client's name, the start and end time, the studio's address, the booking reference and a link back to the booking here. A moved booking is moved, a cancelled one is cancelled. Nothing an artist puts in Google changes a booking here.
• If the artist has turned it on, about every fifteen minutes we read the start and end of each busy period in their main Google calendar, from now to as far ahead as they take bookings, and hide those times from their clients. We never read what the events are. It does not stop the artist booking anything themselves.
• Apart from that, the only things we read back from Google are who the account is, at the moment it is connected, and whether the calendar we created still exists. We read nothing from the events in it.

What we store:

• The credential Google issues us for that account. It is encrypted at rest, used for nothing but this, and is never displayed anywhere.
• The account's identifier and email address, the identifier of the calendar we created, and, for each booking sent, the identifier of its event in Google, so that a later change can find the event it belongs to.
• If the artist has turned it on, the start and end of each busy period from the last read, and nothing else about them. Each read replaces the last, and they are deleted when the artist turns it off, disconnects, connects a different Google account, or reconnects without giving that permission.

What we never do with it:

• Sell it, share it, or pass anything obtained through Google's APIs to anybody else. It is not used for advertising and it is not used to train or improve any AI or machine-learning model.
• Read it ourselves. Our staff do not look at any of it in the ordinary course of running the service. An administrator investigating a fault the artist has reported can see what the artist sees on their Calendar page — which account is connected and what Google last said — and that access is recorded.

Stopping it:

Press Stop beside the busy times on the Calendar page to stop us reading them; the busy times we hold are deleted at once and bookings keep going to Google.

Press Disconnect on the Calendar page to stop everything. We tell Google to revoke our access and delete the credential and any busy times at once. The artist can also remove Chairtime from their Google account's permissions page, which has the same effect the next time we try to write or read, when the busy times we hold are deleted too. Either way, the events already in the calendar stay where they are — it is the artist's diary, and it describes real appointments — and the "Chairtime" calendar can be deleted from Google Calendar like any other.

Chairtime's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so on this page and, for significant changes, by email. Questions about anything here: [email protected].