Privacy Policy

Colourcat (colourcat.uk) is a free fashion discovery service operated by Colourcat Limited (“Colourcat”, “we”, “us”). Colourcat Limited is the data controller for the personal information collected through this site. If you have any questions about this policy or about your information, email us at francesca@colourcat.uk or use our contact page.

When you create an account we collect your username, email address and password, along with your choice about receiving marketing emails. Your password is never stored in plain text — we keep only a secure cryptographic hash of it.

When you sign in with Google we receive your email address, your Google account identifier and your Google profile picture. We never see or store your Google password.

Things you save — your wishlist, your boards and board favourites, your favourite colour shades and your recent shade searches — are stored against your account so they are there when you come back. Boards are private to you.

Security records. We keep records of security-relevant account events, such as sign-ins, so we can protect your account and investigate anything suspicious.

How the site is used. For each page view we record the page visited, the page that referred you, your device type, your browser's user-agent string and an anonymised daily identifier derived from your IP address using a salted one-way hash. Your actual IP address is never stored, and the identifier changes every day, so we cannot build up a profile of you over time. We also record clicks on “Buy Now” links so we know which products interest our visitors. None of this uses cookies, and it happens whether or not you have an account.

Google Analytics, only if you accept cookies. If you accept analytics cookies in the cookie banner, we also use Google Analytics to measure how Colourcat is used: the pages you visit, how you arrived, your approximate location (country or city level — Google works this out from your IP address without storing it), your device and browser, and a random identifier stored in a cookie so your visits are counted as one visitor. This only happens with your consent, is never linked to your Colourcat account, and we have switched Google's advertising features off. You can withdraw your consent at any time using “Manage Cookies” in the footer.

To run your account — signing you in, keeping your saved items, boards and shades, and letting you manage your settings. We do this because it is necessary to provide the service you signed up for (our contract with you).

To send you service emails — verifying your email address, resetting your password and welcoming you when you join. These are part of running your account, not marketing. We also process delivery failures and spam complaints so that we only send email to addresses that want and can receive it.

To send you marketing emails, only if you opted in. The marketing checkbox at sign-up is unticked by default, and we will only send marketing to people who ticked it. You can withdraw your consent at any time, and every marketing email will include an unsubscribe link.

To understand how Colourcat is used — our anonymised usage statistics tell us which pages and products are popular so we can improve the site. We rely on our legitimate interest in improving Colourcat for this, and you have the right to object (see “Your rights” below). If you accept analytics cookies, we additionally use Google Analytics for the same purpose, relying on your consent — which you can withdraw at any time.

To keep Colourcat secure, relying on our legitimate interest in protecting the site and its users.

We do not use your information for any automated decision-making that has legal or similarly significant effects on you, and we never sell your personal information.

Colourcat uses a small number of strictly necessary first-party cookies, plus — only if you consent — Google Analytics cookies. There are no advertising or social media cookies on this site. The full list, and how to make or change your choice, is in our Cookies Policy.

Amazon Web Services hosts Colourcat and delivers our service emails. Our infrastructure runs in the AWS London region (eu-west-2), so your information is stored in the UK.

Google processes your sign-in only if you choose “Sign in with Google”, and provides Google Analytics only if you have accepted analytics cookies. For analytics, Google acts as our processor under Google's data processing terms and handles only the usage information described above, which we have configured Google not to use for its own advertising purposes.

Retailers and Awin. We never send your account information to retailers or to our affiliate network. When you click a “Buy Now” link you leave Colourcat via Awin, and from that point Awin and the retailer process your information under their own privacy policies. Product images on Colourcat are loaded directly from retailer and network servers, which means those servers receive your IP address and browser details in the same way they would for any image on the web.

Beyond that, we would only disclose personal information if the law required us to.

Your information is stored in the United Kingdom (AWS London). If you sign in with Google or accept analytics cookies, Google may process your information outside the UK, including in the United States; where that happens it is protected by recognised safeguards, including the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, under which Google is certified.

We keep your account information for as long as your account exists. You can delete your account at any time from your account settings, which removes your account record and the things you have saved. Usage statistics contain no direct identifiers — as described above — and are kept for trend analysis. Google Analytics data is kept for 14 months and then deleted automatically.

Under UK data protection law you have the right to ask us for a copy of your personal information, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict how we use it, to receive it in a portable format, and to object to our use of it — including our use of anonymised usage statistics and, at any time, direct marketing. Where we rely on your consent — analytics cookies and marketing emails — you can withdraw it at any time: for cookies via “Manage Cookies” in the footer, and for marketing via the unsubscribe link in any email or your account settings.

To exercise any of these rights, email francesca@colourcat.uk. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

If we change how we handle personal information, we will update this page and the date at the top before the change takes effect.

If anything here is unclear, please get in touch.