What we do with your information.

Gulf & Ponte is a lead generation and CRM automation practice founded and run by Yared Asefa, based in Shoreline, Washington. We set up the systems a business uses to capture leads, follow up with them and report what happened, usually inside tools the business already pays for.

We operate from the United States. Email: yared@gulfandponte.com

If you email us or book a call, we receive whatever your message or booking contains — typically:

• Your name, as you give it
• Your email address
• Your company, if you mention it
• Your message or inquiry

If you become a client, we also keep the ordinary records an engagement produces: contact details and correspondence. We do not ask for special categories of personal information, and there is no reason to send them.

We send business-to-business email to local businesses that may need help with their leads and follow-up. If you received an email from us and did not ask for it, this is the section that applies to you.

What we hold about a business we contact:

• Business name, category, website and public social media pages
• The address, phone number, rating and review count shown on its public listing
• The owner’s name, where a public business license register shows it
• The email address published for the business
• Whether we emailed, whether you replied, and whether you opted out

For a very small business or sole trader, the listed phone number, address or email can also be personal: a mobile number, a home address, or a Gmail-type mailbox. We treat those as personal information. We only use contact details the business itself made public, and we do not seek special category information.

It comes from public sources: Google Maps business listings, public business license registers (Washington Labor & Industries and the City of Seattle), and the business’s own website and social pages, read directly or through web-data services. We use it to contact the business about services relevant to it, and for nothing else.

For direct marketing, your right to object is absolute. If you object, we stop. There is no balancing test and no need to give a reason. Use the opt-out link in any email, or write to yared@gulfandponte.com. Either way we add you to a permanent suppression list so you are not contacted again.

• To reply to you
• To discuss a possible engagement
• To deliver work you have asked us for
• To keep the business records we need to keep
• To operate and protect the website and the business

We do not use what you send us for unrelated marketing.

An automation works on whatever the client routes through it: leads, estimates, call and message records, CRM data. Some of that may contain personal information about the client’s own customers, staff or contacts.

The client decides what goes into the automation and why. We handle it to build and run what they asked for, on their instructions. Depending on the service and the law that applies, that generally makes the client the controller and Gulf & Ponte a processor or service provider — the specific roles are set out in the agreement for that engagement.

We do not use client data for our own marketing, and we do not use it to develop or train our own products or models.

If you think a business we work with holds information about you, that business is the right place to send your request. Write to us and we will point you to them.

For information you send us: we use it to answer you, to carry out work you asked for, and to meet our own record-keeping obligations. For people we contact: legitimate interests — marketing relevant services to businesses that plausibly need them — limited to business contact details, work-relevant messages, and an immediate stop on request. For client data in an automation: the client determines the purpose, so the basis for that processing is theirs, not ours.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to see the personal information we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict how it is used, object to that use, or receive it in a portable form. Ask us and we will tell you what we can do.

You can also complain to a supervisory authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office; elsewhere, the data protection authority for your country.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not pass it to anyone for their own purposes. We use third-party services to run the business: website hosting, email, our email-sending platform, an email-verification service, web-data services that read public pages, and a spreadsheet where we review each business before contacting it. They handle information in order to provide those services to us, not for themselves.

Where a workflow runs on infrastructure and providers the client contracts with directly, those relationships are the client’s rather than ours — which does not mean those providers do not process data, and does not settle how any of them is legally classified. If a scope requires a service that we contract, it is named during scoping and approved by the client before it processes client data.

We keep information for as long as it is needed for the purpose it was given, and for as long as we need to keep ordinary business records. When it is no longer needed, we delete it.

Contact records for people we have emailed are reviewed at least every 24 months. If there has been no engagement and the person no longer appears to hold the role we were contacting them about, the record is deleted.

Suppression records are the deliberate exception. If you opt out or object, we keep the minimum needed to recognize your address and exclude it — permanently, stored as a one-way code of the address where we can, and on our sending platform’s block list. Without it we could not keep your address out of future sends. It is never used for marketing.

This site sets no cookies of its own, runs no analytics, and loads no external fonts or trackers. Fonts are served from this domain. One page embeds a third party, and it is named below.

The booking page is the one exception. It embeds a scheduling calendar provided by a third party, and that calendar loads when the page opens. It sets its own cookies under its own privacy notice, it can see that your browser opened it, and booking a time gives the provider what you type into it. Every other page loads nothing from anyone else.

As with any hosted website, our host processes standard request information — such as your IP address — in order to serve the site and protect it from abuse.

We limit access to what a piece of work actually requires, and end that access when the work ends. Access to a client environment is scoped, named and revocable by the client at any time.

If we change how we handle personal information, we will update this page and change the date at the top of it. Questions about this notice, or a request about your own information, go to yared@gulfandponte.com.

Postal address: Gulf & Ponte, 12345 Lake City Way NE #2110, Seattle, WA 98125.