BoothZenBot

Who we are

BoothZen makes booking software for photo booth businesses. We are BoothZen (a trading name; company registration is in progress) of Blackpool, United Kingdom. You can reach us at privacy@boothzen.com. This page is about our web crawler, BoothZenBot. It is run by us and we are responsible for it.

What BoothZenBot reads

BoothZenBot reads public web pages of businesses that hire out photo booths and similar equipment for events. That includes weddings, parties and corporate events.

• It requests your pages with the user agent of a standard web browser (Google Chrome on Linux), so it may not show up by name in your server logs.
• It follows your robots.txt: the rules you set for BoothZenBot, or, if there are none, the rules for all robots (User-agent: *).
• We wait at least 5 seconds between pages we request from your site. If your robots.txt sets a longer Crawl-delay, we wait that long; if it is longer than 60 seconds, we do not read your site. If a page redirects, we follow the redirect straight away.
• When a page shows nothing without JavaScript, we open it once in a browser. That also loads the page's scripts and styles, but never its images, video or fonts.
• It reads a small number of pages per site, at most 20 each visit (not counting robots.txt): the home page, your sitemap, and pages such as prices, packages, about and contact, plus up to two PDF price lists.
• It never logs in, fills in forms or gets past a CAPTCHA.

Why we do this

We are building a directory of businesses that hire out photo booths. Later, we may contact some of them about BoothZen. We will tell you who we are and where we got your details when we do, and you can say no.

Where the details come from

• Google Maps. We keep only the place id, which is a reference number. We do not keep the name or address that Google shows. We use the website address Google shows only to find your site, and delete it once we have read it or given up.
• The business's own website.
• Companies House, in the UK.
• Public domain registration records and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, to see how long a website has existed.

What we keep, and for how long

We keep business contact details and what the business offers. For example: the business name, its website, a business email address and phone number, the types of booth it hires out, and published prices. Where your own website names the owner of the business, we keep that name and role.

We do not look for home addresses, personal social media profiles, photos of people or personal reviews.

We keep the text of the pages we read for 30 days. Then we delete it. We keep the facts we took from it.

We use an AI service (Anthropic's Claude) to read the page text and pick out business details such as prices and contact information. We send it the page text, page addresses and details we already found on your site.

For a sole trader or a partnership, business details can count as personal data. We treat them that way.

Our lawful basis

We use legitimate interests. This is Article 6(1)(f) of the UK GDPR and of the EU GDPR. Our interest is finding and listing booth businesses and telling them about a product that may help them. We keep to business details, we keep them for as long as they are useful, and you can object at any time. See also our privacy policy.

How to block the bot

Add this to the robots.txt file at the top of your website:

User-agent: BoothZenBot
Disallow: /

BoothZenBot will stop reading your site the next time it checks robots.txt. Blocking the bot does not remove details we already hold. For that, ask us to remove you.

How to be removed

Email privacy@boothzen.com. Tell us your website address, or your business name and the email address or phone number you want us to forget.

We will remove you within one working day. We delete your business details. We keep only the minimum keys needed to stop us collecting you again: the website, email, phone or Google place id you give us, plus the Google place ids we held. We use them only to stop you being added from any source. Our internal logs, which hold no business details, remain. Backups that contain your details age out within 14 days.

Your rights

You can ask us:

• what details we hold about you (access);
• to correct details that are wrong (rectification);
• to stop using your details (objection);
• to delete them (erasure).

If you are unhappy with how we handled your request, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in the UK at ico.org.uk. If you are in the EU, you can complain to your local data protection authority.