Privacy

No. The form asks for an e-mail address and nothing else, and confirming that address is all the proof we need. If you do happen to have an account, signing in is faster — the page shows you straight away what we hold — but you are never obliged to open one, or to recover one you have lost, in order to exercise a right.

Because anybody can type your address into a form. Sending a link and waiting for it to be clicked is the one check that costs you a few seconds and costs a stranger everything: without access to your mailbox, the request never exists. It also spares us asking you for an identity document, which we would rather not hold.

One month, counted from the moment you click the confirmation link — not from when you filled in the form. If your request turns out to be genuinely complicated we may extend it by two further months, but we have to tell you so, with our reasons, before the first month is out.

Deletion is a right, but it is not unlimited — and the honest answer is that it is almost never total. An invoice is an accounting document: Belgian law requires us to keep it for ten years, and your name is part of what makes it one. The same goes for a file we need to defend a legal claim, or a warranty we are still bound to honour.

What we do instead is tell you exactly where we drew the line. Our answer lists what was deleted, what was kept, and which rule required it — item by item, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

The unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our newsletters does it immediately, and you do not need to ask anyone. That is the quickest route by far.

It is worth knowing that this is a different thing from a data request. Unsubscribing stops us writing to you; it does not delete your order history, and it does not stop the messages that are part of a purchase — an order confirmation, a delivery notice, a repair that is ready. If it is your data you want dealt with rather than your mail, use the form on this page.

Five things, and all of them are free:

• A copy of everything we hold about you, with what it is for and who else sees it.
• A correction, if something is wrong or out of date.
• A deletion, subject to what we are obliged to keep.
• A portable file — the data you gave us, in a format another company can read.
• A halt: object to a particular use of your data, or ask us to freeze it while something is being sorted out.

The suppliers our shops cannot work without: the payment provider, the carriers, the company that sends our e-mails, our host, our accountant, and — for a repair under warranty — the manufacturer concerned. Each one is named in the policy, each one only gets what it needs for its own job, and none of them may use it for anything else. We do not sell data, and we never have.

For as long as the reason we collected it lasts, which means the answer differs by document rather than being one number. Accounting records: ten years, because that is the law. Marketing: three years without any sign of life from you, after which you come off the lists. A warranty file: as long as the warranty runs, which for some of the brands we sell is five or ten years. The policy sets it out line by line.

Check your spam folder first: the confirmation mail is the step people miss, and until it is clicked the request has not reached us at all. The link stays valid for two weeks; after that the form is simply forgotten and you can start again.

If you did confirm and heard nothing, write to us at the address below with the reference from the acknowledgement — something has gone wrong at our end and we want to know.

Tell us — most disagreements are about a line we drew, and a line can be looked at again. If that does not settle it, you have the right to complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority, and to take the matter to court. Their details are at the bottom of this page.