Privacy Policy

MAKSOF GLOBAL LTD is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. That means we decide why and how your data is processed, and we are accountable for it under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018, as well as the EU GDPR where it applies to visitors in the European Economic Area.

We are registered in England and Wales. Our company registration details are held at Companies House: 16119838. Our registered office is in London, United Kingdom.

For anything relating to your personal data — a request, a question or a complaint — write to info@solarbazaar.io. This is the fastest route to the people who can actually action a request, so please use it in preference to our general enquiries address.

We collect three kinds of information: what you give us, what we observe as you use SolarBazaar, and what we receive from the third-party services that help us run the site.

Information you give us

• Newsletter sign-up — your email address, and the date, time and page from which you subscribed, which we keep as our record of your consent.
• Account registration — your name, email address and a securely hashed password. We never store your password in a form we or anyone else can read.
• Contact and enquiry forms — your name, email address, the subject you select and whatever you choose to write in the message. Please don’t send us sensitive personal information through a web form.
• Calculator inputs — the figures you enter into our solar calculators, such as system size, electricity tariff, roof orientation or monthly consumption. These are technical inputs, not identity data, and we only link them to you if you are signed in and choose to save a calculation.
• Saved products and comparisons — the panels, batteries, inverters and brands you save or compare while signed in, so your shortlist is there when you come back.

Information collected automatically

• Your IP address, which also gives us an approximate country so we can show relevant pricing and market information.
• Device and browser information — browser type and version, operating system, screen size and language preference.
• Usage information — the pages you view, the order you view them in, how long you spend on them, and what you click.
• The referring website or search engine that brought you to us, and any campaign parameters in the link you followed.
• Cookies and similar technologies, described in section 4 and in our Cookie Policy.

Information from third parties

• Analytics providers give us aggregated reports about how the site is used — traffic sources, popular pages, device mix.
• Advertising networks, including Google, may tell us in aggregate how advertising on the site performs. We do not receive a list of the individual people who saw or clicked an advert.
• Security and infrastructure providers may flag an IP address or request pattern to us as abusive so we can block it.

We do not knowingly collect special category data — information about health, race, religion, political opinions, sex life, sexual orientation, trade-union membership, genetics or biometrics — and we ask that you do not send it to us.

UK GDPR requires us to have a lawful basis under Article 6 for every purpose we use your data for. Ours are set out below.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether our interest is overridden by your rights and freedoms, and concluded it is not. You can object to any of that processing — see section 11 — and we will stop unless we have compelling grounds to continue.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not make decisions about you by automated means that produce legal or similarly significant effects.

We use cookies, local storage and similar technologies to keep you signed in, remember your country and unit preferences, measure how the site is used, and support advertising. Strictly necessary cookies are set as soon as you arrive because the site cannot function without them. Everything else — analytics, advertising and non-essential preferences — is only set once you consent, as required by the UK Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) and the EU ePrivacy Directive.

The full list of categories, what each one does, how long it lasts and how to turn it off is in our Cookie Policy. You can change or withdraw your cookie choices at any time.

We use analytics to understand which content is useful and where the site is failing people — which guides get read, which calculators get finished, which pages load slowly, and where visitors give up. This is measurement, not profiling: we look at patterns across thousands of sessions, not at what any one person did.

Analytics tools process your IP address in order to work out an approximate location and to distinguish one visitor from another. Where our providers offer IP truncation or anonymisation, we enable it, so the last part of your address is discarded before the data is stored. We do not attempt to identify individual visitors from analytics data, and we do not combine it with your account to build a profile of you.

Analytics cookies are only set with your consent. If you decline, the site works exactly as it did before — we simply have less information about how to improve it.

SolarBazaar is free to use, and advertising is part of how we pay for it. We work with Google, through its AdSense programme, and with other advertising partners.

Google uses cookies to serve adverts on this site. Google and its partners may use cookies to serve adverts to you based on your prior visits to SolarBazaar and to other websites. Third-party vendors and ad networks may also serve adverts here, and may use their own cookies to measure how those adverts perform, to limit how often you see the same advert, and to detect click fraud.

You can control this:

• Opt out of personalised advertising from Google at Google Ads Settings.
• Opt out of a large number of other vendors at once at aboutads.info/choices.
• Block or delete advertising cookies in your browser — see the instructions in our Cookie Policy.

If you are in the UK or the EEA, personalised advertising and the cookies behind it are only used where you have given consent. If you decline, you will still see adverts, but they will be contextual — chosen from the page you are reading rather than from your browsing history.

We use a small number of specialist suppliers to run SolarBazaar. Where they handle personal data on our behalf they act as processors: they may only use the data to do the job we have asked of them, and never for their own purposes. We describe them by category rather than by name because suppliers change and a stale list is worse than none.

• Hosting and content delivery — serve the site and store its data. They process IP addresses and request logs.
• Email delivery — send newsletters, account emails and replies to enquiries. They process your email address and delivery events such as bounces.
• Analytics — measure site usage, as described in section 5.
• Advertising — select, deliver and measure adverts. Advertising networks generally act as independent controllers for their own purposes rather than as our processors, which is why they publish their own privacy policies.
• Security and anti-abuse — filter malicious traffic, block spam submissions and protect against attacks.

Every processor is engaged under a written contract containing the data-processing terms required by Article 28 UK GDPR: they must act only on our instructions, keep the data confidential and secure, help us respond to your rights requests, tell us promptly about any breach, and delete or return the data when the contract ends.

We may also disclose personal data where the law requires it — to a court, regulator or law-enforcement body acting within its powers — or to protect the rights, property or safety of our users or the public. If our business is reorganised, sold or merged, data may transfer to the new owner under the same protections set out here.

SolarBazaar is a global platform and some of our suppliers operate outside the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area, including in the United States. Whenever personal data leaves the UK or the EEA, we make sure one of the following safeguards is in place.

• The destination country is covered by UK adequacy regulations or an EU adequacy decision, meaning its laws are recognised as offering equivalent protection.
• The transfer is made under the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, together with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, or under the UK International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA).
• The recipient is certified under a framework recognised as adequate for transfers from the UK or the EU.

Where we rely on contractual safeguards we also assess whether local laws in the destination country could undermine them, and add technical measures such as encryption where needed. You can ask us for details of the safeguards used for a particular transfer by emailing info@solarbazaar.io.

We keep personal data only for as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it, then delete it or irreversibly anonymise it.

Cookie lifetimes are separate from the periods above and are listed in our Cookie Policy.

We take sensible, proportionate steps to protect your data:

• All traffic between your browser and SolarBazaar is encrypted in transit using HTTPS/TLS.
• Passwords are stored only as salted one-way hashes — they cannot be reversed, and nobody at MAKSOF GLOBAL LTD can read them.
• Access to production systems and personal data is restricted to the people who need it to do their job, and is protected by individual accounts and multi-factor authentication.
• Backups are encrypted at rest, and infrastructure and dependencies are kept patched.
• We keep audit logs of administrative access so unusual activity can be investigated.

No method of transmitting or storing data is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours where required, and tell you directly if the risk to you is high.

You have a part to play too: use a strong, unique password for your account, and tell us at info@solarbazaar.io if you believe your account has been compromised.

Under UK GDPR — and the EU GDPR if you are in the EEA — you have the following rights over your personal data.

• Access — ask whether we hold data about you and get a copy of it, along with an explanation of how it is used.
• Rectification — have inaccurate data corrected and incomplete data completed.
• Erasure — ask us to delete your data where we no longer need it, where you withdraw consent, or where you have successfully objected to the processing.
• Restriction — ask us to pause processing while a dispute about accuracy or our legitimate interests is resolved.
• Portability — receive the data you gave us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, or have it sent to another provider where that is technically feasible.
• Objection — object to processing based on our legitimate interests. Where you object to direct marketing, we will stop immediately and without exception.
• Withdraw consent — withdraw any consent you have given, at any time. Withdrawing consent does not affect the lawfulness of what we did before you withdrew it.
• Complain to a regulator — see below.

How to exercise your rights

Email info@solarbazaar.io and tell us which right you want to exercise. If you have an account, please write from the address the account uses; otherwise we may need to ask a question or two to confirm your identity, so that we do not disclose your data to someone else.

We will respond within one month of receiving your request. If the request is complex or you have made several, we may extend that by up to two further months — we will tell you within the first month if we need to, and why. There is no charge for exercising your rights unless a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please give us the chance to put it right first. You also have the right to complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint. If you are in the EEA, you may instead complain to the supervisory authority in your country of residence or work.

SolarBazaar is aimed at homeowners, businesses and professionals researching solar equipment. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. Accounts and newsletter subscriptions are intended for people aged 16 or over.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has given us personal data, email info@solarbazaar.io and we will delete it promptly.

We review this policy regularly and update it when our practices, the services we use or the law change. The effective date at the top of the page always shows when the current version took effect.

If a change materially affects how we use your data — a new purpose, a new category of recipient, or a change to the lawful basis we rely on — we will make it prominent on the site and, where we hold your email address and the law requires it, tell you directly and ask for fresh consent before the change applies to you.

For any privacy or data-protection matter, including requests to exercise your rights, contact:

• Email: info@solarbazaar.io
• Contact form: SolarBazaar contact page
• Controller: MAKSOF GLOBAL LTD, registered in England and Wales (16119838), London, United Kingdom

We aim to acknowledge privacy emails within two working days and to resolve them within the one-month statutory window.