Privacy policy.

SHAKA Studios is Georgia Williams and Cuan Macgregor — a photography, film and web studio working between Cornwall, UK and the Eastern Cape, South Africa.

For the purposes of UK GDPR, SHAKA Studios is the data controller for the personal information described in this policy. If you have any questions about how we handle your data, write to us at info@weareshakastudios.com.

Some of it you give us directly. Some of it is collected automatically when you visit the site.

What you give us

When you fill in our contact form, email us, or message us on WhatsApp or Instagram, we collect whatever you choose to share — typically your name, email address, what you’re looking for, and any details about your project or business.

What’s collected automatically

Like most websites, ours collects some technical information automatically as you browse — your IP address, browser and device type, pages viewed, how you arrived at the site, and roughly where in the world you are. We use a small number of tools to do this:

• Vercel Analytics & Speed Insights — anonymised traffic and performance data, so we know the site is fast and working.
• Google (Google Ads / gtag) — lets us see whether people who click our ads go on to get in touch, so we know if advertising is worth doing.
• HubSpot — helps us track enquiries and follow up properly, rather than losing track of who’s asked us what.

These tools may use cookies or similar small files stored in your browser to do this. You can block or delete cookies at any time through your browser’s settings — see Section 7 below.

To reply to you, to understand the site, and to know if what we’re doing is working. Nothing beyond that.

• Responding to your enquiry and, if it goes ahead, delivering the work
• Understanding how people use the site, so we can make it better
• Measuring whether our advertising actually reaches the right people
• Following up on enquiries so nothing falls through the cracks

We don’t sell your personal information to anyone. We never have, and we never will.

Under UK GDPR, we rely on a mix of: your consent (you tick a box before submitting our contact form), our legitimate interests (understanding site usage and ad performance, in a way that doesn’t override your own rights), and contract (if you become a client, to deliver the work you’ve asked for).

We use a small number of outside services to run this site and respond to enquiries — each only sees what it needs to do its job:

• Formspree — processes contact form submissions
• Google — site analytics and ad measurement
• HubSpot — enquiry tracking and follow-up
• Vercel — website hosting and performance monitoring

Some of these providers are based outside the UK and EEA (mainly the United States) and process data there under their own safeguards, such as Standard Contractual Clauses. Beyond these providers, we don’t share your details with anyone else, ever.

We keep enquiry details for as long as it takes to respond and, if you become a client, for the life of the project plus a reasonable period afterwards for our own records. Analytics data collected by Vercel, Google and HubSpot is retained according to each provider’s own default settings, typically between 14 and 26 months.

The tools listed in Section 2 may set cookies or similar technologies in your browser to recognise you across visits. Most browsers let you view, block or delete cookies through their settings — how to do this varies by browser, so check your browser’s help pages for instructions. Blocking cookies won’t stop you using the site, though some analytics may become less accurate.

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to ask us to:

• Show you what personal information we hold about you
• Correct anything that’s inaccurate or out of date
• Delete your information, where we don’t need to keep it
• Restrict or object to how we use it
• Send you a copy of it in a portable format
• Withdraw consent at any time, where consent is what we’re relying on

To ask us anything on this list, email info@weareshakastudios.com. If you’re not happy with how we’ve handled your information, you can also complain to the UK’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

This site isn’t directed at children, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16.

If we change how we handle your information, we’ll update this page and change the date at the top. We’d encourage you to check back occasionally rather than assume nothing’s changed.