Information
Privacy notice
This notice covers what we do today: this website, and our published apps. It is extended to cover transport operations before we carry our first passenger.
Your child's information should not travel further than the journey needs. On our screens, where a name is required, it is a first name. Notifications carry no child details, so nothing sensitive sits on a screen in a staff room or on a driver's phone. Council reporting is built from counts, not stories about individual children. And every time someone opens a child's record inside our system, that is logged and can be reviewed. This is how the software is built, which is why we can say it plainly.
Who we are
Velgo is the trading name of Zaytuna Business Services Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales. We are the controller for the information described here.
We are pre-launch. We are not currently operating school or private-hire transport, so we are not currently holding information about children's journeys.
Our registration with the Information Commissioner's Office, and a postal address and support contact for privacy questions, are published here as they are put in place. Until then, the contact form on this site reaches us and we will answer privacy questions through it.
What this website collects
If you use the contact form, we receive what you type into it — typically your name, how to reach you, which group you are contacting us as, and your message. We use it to reply to you and for no other purpose.
If you use the fare estimator, the postcodes and journey details you enter are sent to our pricing service to work out an estimate. We are not asking who you are to do that, and an estimate is not a booking.
We ask you not to send a child's name, medical details or other sensitive information through a web form. If we receive it anyway, we delete what is not needed rather than keep it because it arrived.
What the apps collect
Our rider, driver, guardian and passenger-assistant apps are published and can be installed today, but they connect to a test environment holding synthetic data — not real children, families or journeys.
The rider app asks for your location only when you tap “Use my current location” — never in the background, and never just because you opened the app. It uses that position to place your pickup pin, and looks up the nearest postcode for it through our own server, so your phone does not hand your position to anyone else. If you would rather not give that permission, everything still works: type a postcode, or drag the pin on the map.
The pickup and drop-off points you settle on are sent with your price request, and kept with the booking if you go on to book one — that is what tells a driver where to go.
When the service goes live, the apps will handle the information a journey genuinely needs: how to reach a guardian, the route and its timings, journey status, who is assigned to the route, support messages, and technical event records that let us diagnose faults.
The apps are built so that a child is shown by first name only where a name is needed, notifications carry no child details, and council reporting is produced from counts rather than individual stories.
Who can see it
Access is limited by role. A driver sees the route they are working. A guardian sees their own child's journey. A council user sees the routes their authority commissions. Operations staff see what they need to run the service and support it.
Every access to a child's record inside our system is logged, and those logs can be reviewed. That is a property of the software, not an assurance about how careful people are.
We do not sell information, and we do not use it for advertising. Where we use a supplier to run part of the service — hosting, for example — they act on our instructions and nothing more.
How long we keep it
An enquiry sent through this site is kept while we are dealing with it and for a reasonable period afterwards, then deleted.
Retention periods for operational and journey records are being set alongside the service itself, with the different obligations that apply to transport records, safeguarding records and employment records. Those periods are published here before the service starts, with the reasoning behind each one.
We would rather publish nothing than publish a number we have not thought through.
Your rights
You can ask what information we hold about you, ask for a copy, ask us to correct it, and in many cases ask us to delete it. You can object to some uses and ask us to restrict others.
Ask through the contact form and we will handle it. We do not charge for this, and we will not make you justify the request.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.
Changes to this notice
This notice will change substantially when we begin operating, because we will be doing substantially more with information than we are today.
We will not quietly extend it. When the transport-operations sections are added, this page will say when that happened and what changed.