Privacy Policy

Data controller

Valerio Francesco Aloi, sole trader based in Catania, Italy
VAT number: IT06309610878
Email: info@aloidigital.com

What data I collect, and why

This site does not require a user account, does not process online payments, and does not publish prices: there are no transactions to track and no user profiles to manage.

1. Data submitted through the contact form

When you fill in the form at /en/contact (name, email, message, and any other fields present in the form), this data is collected solely to respond to your enquiry. Legal basis: implied consent given by submitting the form / pre-contractual measures (Art. 6.1.b and 6.1.a GDPR).

The form is technically handled by Web3Forms, a third-party service that receives the form data and forwards it by email — it is not used for its own marketing purposes. See Web3Forms' own privacy policy for details on their processing.

Data submitted through the form is kept for as long as needed to handle your enquiry and, if a collaboration starts, for the duration of the professional relationship plus any legal retention obligations (e.g. tax record keeping).

2. Technical browsing data

The server hosting this site automatically logs some technical data (IP address, browser type, pages visited, access time) for security and technical operation purposes — not for profiling. This data is also collected by the hosting infrastructure as a normal part of how any website operates.

3. What is NOT collected

At present this site does not install statistical analysis tools (e.g. Google Analytics), does not use advertising tracking pixels (e.g. Meta Pixel), does not send newsletters, and does not perform retargeting. Should this change in future, this policy and the related cookie policy will be updated before any new tool is activated.

4. Public data about businesses mentioned in my studies

In the Research section of the blog I publish studies on how search engines and AI assistants recommend local businesses. To produce them I collect and publish data that is already public about the businesses these tools name: the name of the business or professional, town, website, number of reviews and rating of the Google Business Profile, social media presence, and the AI answers in which the business appears.

Sources: answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google (AI Overviews and AI Mode) and Google Maps results, collected through the DataForSEO service; the businesses' public websites and social media profiles. Purpose: research and information on a matter of public interest. Legal basis: legitimate interest (Art. 6.1.f GDPR); the data concerns professional activity only, never private life. I do not use this data for bulk advertising.

Retention: for as long as the study stays published and is updated; the raw survey data is kept so the results can be verified.

If your business is mentioned you can ask for the data to be corrected or for your name to be removed by writing to info@aloidigital.com. I reply within one month; if you object to the processing (Art. 21 GDPR), your name is removed from the published articles.

Third-party providers your data may pass through

• Web3Forms — technical handling of contact form submissions.
• Cloudflare Pages — the infrastructure this site is published on; by the nature of hosting itself, it receives the technical requests of every visitor.
• DataForSEO — the service used to collect AI answers and Google results for the studies on the blog (section 4); it receives no data about site visitors.

None of these providers is used to build an advertising profile of visitors.

Data transfers outside the EU

Some of the providers listed above may process data on servers located outside the European Union. In these cases, transfers rely on the safeguards required by the GDPR (e.g. the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses).

Your rights

As a data subject, you have the right to request at any time (Art. 15-22 GDPR):

• Access to the data concerning you
• Rectification of inaccurate or incomplete data
• Erasure of your data, where there are no legitimate grounds to keep it
• Restriction of processing
• Portability of your data in a structured format
• Objection to processing

To exercise these rights, write to info@aloidigital.com. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, www.garanteprivacy.it) if you believe processing violates applicable law. If you're contacting us from the UK, you may alternatively refer to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

Changes to this policy

This policy may be updated over time, for example if the site introduces new tools (analytics, newsletters, e-commerce). The "last updated" date at the top of the page always reflects the most recent version.

Questions about how we handle your data? Write to us → contact.