BFG Hearing Solutions ("we") is committed to protecting your personal information. When you contact us, book an appointment, or use our online hearing check, we collect the details you provide (such as name, email, phone number and hearing check results) solely to respond to your enquiry, provide hearing care services, and — where you have consented — contact you about your results and our services.
We do not sell your data. Information is stored securely and retained only as long as necessary for the purposes above. Public enquiry and contact form submissions, hearing-club sign-up notifications, and online hearing-check outcome summaries (outcome label only, not clinical data) are forwarded to our inbox via Web3Forms and are also recorded in our own secure database so we can respond to and manage your enquiry. This website's records are kept separately from any clinical records.
Under UK GDPR you have rights to access, correct or request deletion of your data at any time — contact us at info@bfghearingsolutions.co.uk or call 0191 5111 878.
We use the minimum needed to run the site. The only cookies we set are strictly necessary ones — for example, keeping you signed in to the member area — which don't require consent. We do not set tracking or advertising cookies. If we ever add non-essential cookies, we'll ask for your consent first. Embedded third-party content (such as the Google map on our contact page) may set its own cookies, governed by the third party's policy.
To understand how our website is used and improve it, we use Umami Analytics — a privacy-friendly service that does not use cookies and does not collect or store any personal data. It does not track you across websites or build a profile of you. We only see anonymous, aggregated information such as which pages are popular, the general town or region visitors come from, and which links and buttons are used. This data cannot be used to identify you, and is fully GDPR and PECR compliant.
Our website includes an optional chat assistant that helps answer questions about hearing aids. When you type a message, it is sent to a secure third-party AI service purely to generate a helpful reply, and to our own clinic if you choose to leave your name and number for a callback. On the public website, please don’t enter sensitive personal or medical details in the chat. The assistant gives general guidance only and is not a medical diagnosis.
If you join the Hearing Club and create an account, we store the information needed to provide your personal member area and care:
Private conversations stay private. If you talk to the assistant about how you’re feeling — for example loneliness or low mood — those messages are not stored on our systems. They stay between you and the assistant. For that kind of support the assistant will gently point you to people who can help (our team, your GP, or services such as the Samaritans on 116 123).
Who can see it — you, when you sign in, and our clinic team. We never sell your data or use it for advertising.
How it’s protected — your account is protected by your password (and, if you choose, your phone’s Face ID or fingerprint). Connections are encrypted (HTTPS), passwords are hashed, and your documents can only be downloaded while you’re signed in.
Keeping and deleting it — we keep your member information while you’re a member and for a reasonable period afterwards, in line with our clinical record-keeping obligations (chat history is automatically deleted after 2 years). In the app, under My record → Your data & privacy, you can download a copy of everything we hold about you, or request deletion — or just call us on 0191 5111 878. Note we may need to keep your clinical records for the legally required period even after closing your app account.
This is health-related information, which the law treats as “special category” data; we handle it with extra care and only to provide your hearing care.
The “data controller” for your information is BFG Hearing Solutions Ltd, registered office 3 The Valley Shopping Village, Team Valley Trading Estate, Gateshead, NE11 0EN. Contact us about anything in this policy at info@bfghearingsolutions.co.uk or 0191 5111 878. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), registration number 00014165049.
We don't sell your data. We use a small number of trusted providers under data-processing agreements to run the service:
Your information is hosted and processed in the UK or EU (the UK treats the EU as providing equivalent protection). Where a provider processes data outside the UK/EU, we put an approved safeguard in place (such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement) before doing so. A current sub-processor list is available on request.
Under UK GDPR we rely on:
Our website and member data are hosted on secure cloud infrastructure (Render) with the database located in the EU, and messages to the hearing assistant are processed by an EU-based AI provider (Mistral AI, France). Your data is kept in the UK or EU; where any provider would process data outside that, we put an approved safeguard (such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement) in place first. We can tell you more on request.
We keep enquiry and website records only as long as needed to deal with your enquiry and for our legitimate business records. Hearing Club member information is kept while you are a member and for a reasonable period afterwards in line with our clinical and legal record-keeping obligations, after which it is securely deleted. Emotional/wellbeing conversations with the assistant are not stored in your member record; we do our best to avoid retaining personal details shared in those conversations.
You have the right to access your data, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to its use, to data portability, and to withdraw consent. To exercise any of these, contact us on the details above. If you're unhappy with how we handle your data you can complain to the ICO at ico.org.uk or 0303 123 1113 — though we'd appreciate the chance to put things right first.
Last updated: June 2026.