Who is responsible for your data
The Verified Wedding Awards are the data controller for personal data collected through verifiedweddingawards.com. Contact us about anything in this policy at hello@verifiedweddingawards.com.
Wedding businesses that enter
| What we collect | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Name, business name, email, phone, website, country, town, categories | To create and manage your entry, take payment and contact you about it | Contract |
| Photos, video links, logo, review links, years trading, insurance | To score your entry and publish results | Contract |
| Your score, tier and scorecard | To publish results (65+) and send you your scorecard | Contract |
| Unpaid entry details | To send up to three payment reminders | Legitimate interests (completing an entry you started) |
Passwords for entry pages are stored only in encrypted (hashed) form; we cannot read them.
Couples
When an entrant invites you, we receive your name, email address and wedding month from them, which they confirm you agreed to share. If you use an entrant's share link, you give us these details yourself. We use them only to ask once (plus one reminder) for your rating and comment, to confirm your reply came from your own email address, and to count it in that entrant's score. Your rating and comment are shared with our team and summarised in the entrant's scorecard; your email address is never published or given to the entrant. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in scoring entries on genuine feedback. You can opt out from any of our emails.
Website visitors
Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs (IP address, pages requested) for security. The site loads fonts from Google Fonts and photos from Unsplash, which receive your IP address when your browser requests those files. We do not use advertising cookies. If we add analytics, we will update this policy and ask for consent where required.
Who we share data with
- Stripe (card payments). Stripe processes your card details under its own privacy policy.
- Our website host, Hostinger, and our email delivery provider, which process data on our behalf.
- Other entrants see your portfolio photos anonymously during peer review.
- The public sees listings of entries that reach a tier: business name, photo, logo, category, country, score and tier.
Some of these providers may process data outside the UK or EEA; where they do, they use safeguards recognised by law, such as standard contractual clauses.
How long we keep data
- Entries and scores: for the awards year and 6 years after, for accounting and to answer questions about results.
- Unpaid entries: deleted 12 months after the last reminder, or sooner on request.
- Couples' replies: until the end of the awards year, then kept only as anonymous scores.
- Published listings: until you ask us to remove them.
Your rights
You can ask to see the personal data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to its use, or receive a copy. Write to hello@verifiedweddingawards.com. If you are unhappy with our answer you can complain to the data protection authority in your country; in the UK this is the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).
Security
Private entry pages need both a secret link and a password, are never cached and are hidden from search engines. Repeated wrong passwords lock the link temporarily. Uploaded photos are stored with random file names.
Changes to this policy
We will post any changes on this page and update the date above.