What we collect, and what we don’t

Ask Matt is a guidance conversation that helps people find somewhere to swim or paddle. We are running a South East pilot to find out whether it is genuinely useful. To do that we measure how conversations go — anonymously.

What is recorded

• A random reference for the conversation, created in your browser tab and thrown away when you close it.
• Where you arrived from — the link you clicked, a campaign label if the link had one, or the website that referred you.
• Whether the conversation was about swimming or paddling, the broad area you asked about (a town or the first part of a postcode), and what you were trying to do — bring your own board, hire, a lesson, a guided session.
• The text of your questions, cleaned up first (see below), so we can read what people actually ask.
• What Ask Matt answered: the kind of outcome, which places were suggested, and where we had nothing useful to offer.
• Whether you clicked through to an operator or authority page, a hire option, or coaching.
• Your answer to “Was this useful?” and any comment you choose to leave.

What is deliberately not recorded

• No name, email address or phone number.
• No account or sign-in identity — Ask Matt does not ask you to sign in.
• No precise location. We never ask for or use your device’s GPS position.
• No cookies and no advertising or cross-site tracking identifiers for the pilot.

Cleaning before anything is sent

Your question text is minimised in your own browser, before it reaches us: email addresses and phone-like numbers are removed, and a full postcode is cut back to its first part — enough to know the area, not the doorstep. The text is also shortened. We still ask you not to type personal details into the conversation, and the screen says so.

Why, and for how long

The only purpose is to evaluate and improve Ask Matt: which questions people really ask, where our coverage is thin, and whether the answers helped. Pilot records are kept for 90 days and then deleted automatically. They are held separately from enquiries and bookings, and they play no part in what Ask Matt recommends or in any safety judgement.

Our contact, coaching, discovery, venue and event interest forms ask for what we need in order to reply — typically your name and email address, sometimes an organisation, a phone number if you offer one, and whatever you tell us about your project or the activity you have in mind. That goes into our own records and is emailed to us so we can respond. We keep it for as long as we may reasonably need it for the enquiry and our ongoing professional relationship, and we delete it on request.

If you book SUP hire or a session, we hold the details needed to run it safely and to be in touch about it — contact details, the booking itself, and anything you tell us that affects how we look after you on the water. Payments are taken by Stripe. Card details are entered with Stripe, not with us: we never see or store your card number. Booking and payment records are kept as long as we need them for the service and for ordinary business, tax and insurance reasons.

Emails about your enquiry or booking are sent through Resend, our email delivery provider, which handles the message in order to deliver it.

We do not install advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. The site stores only what it needs to work — for example keeping a staff member signed in to the internal system, and the temporary tab reference described above. Our website hosting keeps standard technical logs of requests, as any web host does.

We use a small number of providers to run the site and services: our hosting and database platform, Stripe for payments, and Resend for email. Ask Matt’s conversation replies are produced by an AI language model provider, which processes the message text needed to answer you. We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for advertising.

You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. For the Ask Matt pilot, tell us roughly when you used it and what you asked and we will remove the matching records; because the pilot data is anonymous, that description is the only way to find them.

Email hello@shacademy.co.uk or use the contact page. We are based in the United Kingdom.