Privacy Policy

Who we are

This website belongs to Dorothy Bendah and is operated as Official Dorothy — coaching, personal branding, leadership and respiratory therapy education, speaking, master of ceremonies services and grant writing. Because we ask visitors to send us their details through the inquiry and appointment forms, we explain here exactly what is collected, why, and what happens to it afterwards.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not run advertising trackers on this site.

What we collect

Only what you type into the two forms on this website, plus a small amount of routine technical information.

Inquiry form

• Your name and email address (required)
• Your organisation or company (optional)
• Which service you are interested in, from the list of services
• The message you write

Appointment form

• Your name, email address and phone number (phone is optional)
• The service you would like to book, the date and the time you prefer
• Your notes about what you want to achieve

Automatically

When you submit a form, our web server records standard technical details such as the date and time of the submission and the status of the request. These are used for debugging and abuse prevention, not for profiling. The site does not use Google Analytics, Meta pixels, heatmaps or any other behaviour-tracking service, and no advertising identifiers are collected.

What we do not collect

No payments are taken on this website, so no card or bank details are ever entered here. We do not ask for health records, diagnosis or clinical information. If you choose to share sensitive details in a message, please keep them brief — the forms are an inquiry channel, not a secure clinical record.

How your information is used

• To reply to your inquiry and to confirm, reschedule or cancel an appointment request
• To prepare for a session, talk, workshop or MC engagement you have asked about
• To keep a record of enquiries so nothing is lost or double-handled
• To detect and block spam submissions and misuse of the forms

We do not add you to a marketing mailing list from these forms. If you would like to hear about future events, that is arranged separately and with your consent.

Where it is stored

Submissions are written to a MySQL database hosted with our website hosting provider, and are shown to authorised staff only inside the private admin dashboard at /admin (username and password protected). Each inquiry is also sent by email to the address Dorothy uses for business correspondence, so a copy exists in that mailbox and in the email provider's systems.

Where we rely on your consent, the legal basis is the information you chose to give us. Where we rely on legitimate interest, it is to respond to you and to protect the site from abuse.

Cookies and sessions

This site uses the minimum possible cookies:

• A session cookie when you submit a form. It exists only to enforce the one-submission-per-minute limit that stops the forms being flooded. It holds no personal information and expires when your browser closes.
• A session cookie for the admin dashboard. It is set only after a successful sign-in, is marked HttpOnly and SameSite=Strict, and is sent only over HTTPS when the site is secure.

There is no cookie banner because there is nothing optional to consent to — no advertising, social or analytics cookies are set. Google Fonts are loaded from fonts.googleapis.com, which means your IP address is transmitted to Google while the page is rendering its typography; the site does not pass your name, email or form contents to Google.

Who else sees your information

• Our hosting provider, which stores the website files and the database
• Our email provider, which delivers the inquiry notification
• Nobody else. We do not rent, trade, sell or share your details for marketing.

We may disclose information if genuinely required to do so by law, or to protect the rights, safety or property of Dorothy Bendah, our clients, or the public.

How long we keep it

Inquiries and appointment requests are kept until Dorothy's work with you is finished, or until you ask us to remove them. A record may be retained longer only where there is a legitimate reason — for example a written agreement, an invoice, or a legal obligation.

Your choices

Write to iamofficialdorothy@gmail.com and we will, at no cost:

• Tell you what we hold about you, on request
• Correct anything that is wrong
• Delete your submission and stop contacting you
• Provide a copy of your data in a portable format

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or California, these rights are available to you under the GDPR or the CCPA/CPRA. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority. We ask only that you verify you are the person you say you are before we release or delete a record.

How it is protected

• The whole site is served over HTTPS
• Form data is checked on the server before it is accepted, and stored with prepared statements so that submitted text cannot be executed
• Uploaded media are restricted to image and video types, and script execution is blocked inside the uploads folder
• The admin dashboard requires a password stored only as a one-way hash, and submissions are rate-limited

No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we keep collection to the minimum and will tell you promptly if a breach ever affects your details.

Children

This website is intended for professionals, organisations and event organisers. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If a child's details have been sent to us, ask us by email and we will delete them.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the "last updated" date at the top of this page changes and the current text replaces any earlier version. Substantial changes will be announced on the website.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about information you have sent us: Official Dorothy — Dorothy Bendah
Email: iamofficialdorothy@gmail.com
Phone: +1 (470) 357-3590
Postal address: available on request.