Privacy

Who we are

Blank Interfaces is the practice of Aryan Kathawale and Hitendra Kawale, a two-person product studio working from Mumbai and the United Kingdom. For UK data protection law we are the “controller” of the personal data described here, which means we decide what is collected and why, and we are accountable for it.

Write to us at aryan@blankinterface.com or 83 London Road, Guildford GU1 1FY.

If we emailed you and you did not ask us to

This is the section you probably want. We contact a small number of UK companies each week about design and product work. If one of those emails reached you, here is exactly what sits behind it.

What we hold

Your work email address, your name and job title where they are published, your employer's name and registration number, and publicly available information about what the company does. We do not hold anything about your personal life, and we do not buy bulk marketing lists.

Where we got it

• Companies House. The public UK register. We use it to confirm a company is an incorporated body, which determines whether we are permitted to email it at all.
• The company's own website. Publicly published information: what the company does, roles it is advertising, and any contact details shown.
• Hunter.io. A business contact database that publishes work email addresses and job titles gathered from public web sources.

Why we are allowed to hold it

Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: our interest in finding clients for a small studio, weighed against your interest in not being bothered. We have thought about that balance rather than assumed it. We contact incorporated companies rather than individuals, we write to people whose role makes the subject relevant, we send a handful of emails rather than thousands, every message says who we are and how to stop them, and we stop immediately when asked. If you think we have the balance wrong, tell us and we will delete your details.

How long we keep it

Up to twelve months from when we collected it, unless you reply and we begin a genuine conversation, in which case we keep it for as long as that relationship is live. If you ask us to stop contacting you we keep only your email address on a suppression list, indefinitely, for the sole purpose of making sure we never contact you again. That is the one piece of data we retain in order to honour your own request.

How to make it stop

Reply with the word “unsubscribe”, or email aryan@blankinterface.com. No form, no login, no reason needed. We will confirm and that will be the end of it.

If you contact us, or become a client

We keep what you send us — your name, contact details, and whatever you tell us about the work — because we need it to reply and to do the job. The basis is our legitimate interest in responding to enquiries, and performance of a contract once we are working together. Project records are kept for seven years after the engagement ends, which is how long UK tax and accounting rules require.

If you just visit this site

This site does not set advertising or tracking cookies and does not build a profile of you. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs, including IP addresses, for a short period to keep the site running and secure.

Who else sees your data

As few people as possible. We use a small number of service providers who process data on our behalf: email hosting, the contact-data provider named above, and website hosting. They act on our instructions and cannot use your data for their own purposes. We do not sell personal data, and we never will.

We draft outreach emails with an AI writing tool. It receives publicly available information about the company and the recipient's name and role in order to write a relevant message. That data is not used to train anyone's models.

Where your data goes

We are a two-person studio split between the United Kingdom and India, so data may be accessed from India. Where that happens we rely on the safeguards UK law requires for international transfers, and we keep the amount of personal data crossing borders to the minimum the work needs.

Your rights

UK data protection law gives you the following rights. Exercising any of them is free, and we will respond within one month.

• Access. Ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, and an explanation of what we do with it.
• Rectification. Have anything inaccurate corrected. Business contact data gathered from public sources goes stale quickly, so tell us and we will fix it.
• Erasure. Ask us to delete your data. Where we are relying on legitimate interests, as we are for outreach, we will delete it on request.
• Objection. Object to our use of your data. For direct marketing this right is absolute: object and we stop, with no balancing test and no questions.
• Restriction. Ask us to pause using your data while a question about its accuracy or our basis for holding it is resolved.
• Portability. Receive data you gave us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format.

To use any of them, email aryan@blankinterface.com.

Complaints

If we get something wrong we would rather hear it from you first. You also have the right to complain directly to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK regulator, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113. Complaining to them does not affect your right to take the matter up with us.

Changes

If we change how we use personal data we will update this page and the date at the top. Material changes affecting people we have already contacted will be explained here rather than made quietly.