How we handle your information.

Last updated: August 2026. This notice describes how Maitreya Counselling collects, uses and protects personal information. It's written to be read, not survived.

What we collect

• What you send us. Name, email, location, and whatever you write in the contact form.
• Clinical records. If you become a client, your counsellor keeps a clinical file: session notes, assessment information and correspondence.
• Payment. Handled by our payment provider. We never see or store your card details.
• Website analytics. Aggregate, non-identifying page statistics. No advertising trackers, and we don't sell audience data.

Where it lives and who sees it

Records are held in access-controlled systems with encryption in transit and at rest. Access is limited to your own counsellor and the minimum administrative support required to run the practice. Sessions aren't recorded unless you request it; requested recordings are shared with you and then removed from our systems within thirty days.

How long we keep it

Clinical records are retained for the period the relevant professional body requires — generally seven years from your last session, or seven years past the age of majority for a client who was a minor. Enquiries that don't become client files are deleted within twelve months.

Confidentiality and its limits

What you tell your counsellor stays between you, with four exceptions: a serious and imminent risk of harm to yourself; a serious and imminent risk of harm to another identifiable person; reasonable grounds to suspect the abuse or neglect of a child; and a subpoena or court order. Your counsellor will explain these in your first session, and will tell you if one is ever engaged unless doing so would increase risk.

If you are in the UK or the EU

Where the UK GDPR or the EU GDPR applies to you, they apply to us in respect of your information. Our lawful basis for handling your enquiry is your consent, and for clinical records it is the provision of health care under Article 9(2)(h), with your explicit consent recorded at the outset. You have the right of access, rectification, erasure where retention is not required of us professionally, restriction, portability, and the right to object. You may withdraw consent at any time without affecting anything done beforehand.

Your information may be handled outside the UK and EU, principally in Canada. Canada holds an adequacy decision from the European Commission for commercial organisations. Where a supplier sits elsewhere, we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses. You may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK, or to your national supervisory authority in the EU.

Your rights

You may ask to see your file, ask for corrections, ask what we hold, or withdraw consent for future collection. Write to Hello@MaitreyaCounselling.com. We respond within thirty days. If you're unsatisfied, you may contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, your provincial Information and Privacy Commissioner, or — if you're in the UK or EU — your national data protection authority.

Cookies, analytics and advertising

When you first arrive we ask whether you're willing to accept analytics and advertising cookies. Nothing is loaded until you choose. If you decline, or simply ignore the request, no analytics or advertising technology runs at all and the site works exactly the same.

If you accept, we use:

• Google Analytics 4, to understand which pages are useful and where people give up. It records pages viewed, approximate location from your IP address, device type and how you arrived. Google processes this on our behalf. IP addresses are anonymised.
• Meta Pixel, which tells Meta (Facebook and Instagram) that a browser visited this site, so we can measure and target advertising. Meta may connect this to your account if you have one.

Please understand what that means before you accept. Which pages you look at here can suggest something about your circumstances. If you'd rather no third party had that, decline — you lose nothing, and we'd genuinely rather you did than felt uneasy about it.

You can change your mind at any time using cookie settings, at the foot of any page. We honour your browser's Global Privacy Control signal automatically. You can also opt out of Google Analytics with Google's browser add-on, and adjust what Meta collects in your Facebook ad settings.

We never send a third party your name, your email, what you write in a form, or anything you tell your counsellor. Clinical records are never connected to any of this.

Email and this website

Email isn't a secure medium. Please keep detailed clinical content out of email and forms and save it for session, where it's protected. Our fonts are served from our own server rather than from Google, so no outside company sees your visit before you've made a choice about cookies.