Privacy policy

Shield Pest HQ is a web directory that brings together pest control services across the United States. People use it to find a local professional quickly and to compare basic information before deciding. Because visitors share data with us when they use the site, this Privacy Policy explains what we collect, why we collect it, and how we handle it. The policy applies to everyone who visits or interacts with https://shieldpesthq.us/, whether you browse listings, send a message through our contact form, leave a comment, or use any other feature that involves personal data. We are committed to handling your information responsibly and transparently, and to giving you meaningful control over it. This document describes our practices in plain language, so you can make informed choices about the data you share with us. It covers our website and its features, but it does not cover the practices of third-party pest control services listed in the directory; we encourage you to review their own privacy notices before engaging them.

Applicable Regulations

Because Shield Pest HQ is operated from Austin, Texas, in the United States, our main legal framework is U.S. federal and state law. There is no single federal privacy law; instead, we comply with the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices, and with the FTC Endorsement Guides when we publish advertising or affiliate disclosures. We also respect state privacy laws that may apply, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (CCPA/CPRA), which grants California residents specific rights over their personal information. Where users are children under 13, we adhere to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and do not knowingly collect their data without parental consent. For commercial email, we follow the CAN-SPAM Act. The Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general are the authorities that enforce these rules.

In addition, if you are located in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) may apply to certain processing activities. Although Shield Pest HQ does not target those regions, we aim to uphold equivalent standards of transparency and data protection whenever the GDPR is relevant. We do not rely on any single law but rather take a global approach that respects the principles shared by these frameworks. When required, we will provide specific disclosures for the GDPR, including legal bases and data subject rights.

Data Controller

The data controller for Shield Pest HQ is Shield Pest HQ editorial team, with trade name Shield Pest HQ, located in Austin, Texas, United States, United States.

Data controller: Shield Pest HQ editorial team
Trade name: Shield Pest HQ
Address: Austin, Texas, United States, United States
Email: contact@shieldpesthq.us
Website: https://shieldpesthq.us/

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, wish to exercise your rights, or need to raise a concern about how we handle your personal data, you can contact us by email at contact@shieldpesthq.us. Although we do not provide a physical phone line or an online contact form through this policy, the editorial team manages all inquiries directly. The processing of personal data is managed by the Shield Pest HQ editorial team, which is made up of Daniel Moreno, Laura Gutierrez, Marcus Chen and Sofia Ramirez. They are responsible for ensuring that your data is treated in accordance with this policy and applicable law.

Our Principles

We follow these principles, which guide all our processing activities at Shield Pest HQ:

Lawfulness, fairness and transparency: We only collect and process personal data when we have a lawful basis to do so, and we always explain our practices in clear, easy-to-understand terms. We never use your data in ways that you would not reasonably expect.
Purpose limitation: We collect personal data only for specified and legitimate purposes that are relevant to our directory service, such as responding to inquiries, improving our website and ensuring the security of our platform. We do not use your data for unrelated purposes without your consent.
Data minimisation: We only collect the data that is necessary to fulfil each purpose. For example, when you use our contact form, we ask for your name, email address and message, which are the minimum fields needed to respond to you.
Accuracy: We take reasonable steps to keep personal data accurate and up to date. If you discover that your information is incorrect, please contact us so we can correct it.
Storage limitation: We keep personal data only for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected, or as required by applicable law. Our retention periods are explained in the corresponding section of this policy.
Integrity and confidentiality: We implement technical and organisational measures to protect personal data from unauthorised access, alteration, disclosure or destruction. This includes administrative controls and secure data handling practices.
Accountability: We comply with, document, and regularly review our processing activities and policies to remain accountable and enjoy flexibility in case management.

What personal data we handle

Shield Pest HQ is a directory of pest control services, and the amount of personal data we collect is limited to what each feature needs to work. Below you can see which data reach us and how they are produced.

Contact form: when you write to us, we receive your name, your email address, the type of notice you select, the message itself and, optionally, the URL of the page the message refers to. The optional URL lets us locate the listing or correction you mention.
Directory contributions: suggestions and corrections about a listed service contain the text you submit, the type of contribution and an optional alias. We publish contributions after automated format and antispam checks, and we never require an email address to send one.
Antispam records: to block automated abuse, both the contact form and contributions store salted hashes of the IP address and the user-agent string, with time-limited counters. We do not keep the original values of those fields.
Technical browsing data: our servers and Google Analytics log your IP address, browser type, device, and the pages and searches you visit, including aggregated usage statistics.

We do not ask for or knowingly process special categories of personal data, such as health information, religious beliefs, ethnic origin or biometric data. Please avoid including that kind of detail in a message or contribution.

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Why we process your data

Each feature of the directory has one defined purpose, and we do not reuse the same data for unrelated goals. These are the purposes associated with the data described above.

Answering your queries: we use the details from the contact form to read your notice, verify the listing involved and reply to you by email.
Managing contributions: we track the text, type and alias of your messages so we can review them, apply corrections and publish them when relevant.
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Data retention periods

Shield Pest HQ keeps personal data only for as long as it is needed for the purpose for which it was collected, and for any period required by applicable law. Retention is reviewed periodically by the editorial team to remove information that is no longer necessary.

The table below sets out the retention criteria for each processing activity. The specific periods are not fixed numbers in every case; they depend on the configuration of the service or on operational needs.

Processing activity	Retention criterion	After the period
Queries and messages sent through the contact form or by email	Retained for the period configured in the service that manages the form (currently twelve months), and for any additional period required by law.	Data is securely deleted or anonymised.
Comments and reader contributions	Retained while they remain published on the site. If a comment is removed, it is deleted from the active system.	Deleted, unless a legal obligation requires otherwise.
Statistics and analytics data	Retained according to the retention settings of the analytics provider (Google Analytics). The provider retains data for the period configured in the account, typically up to 26 months for user-level data, unless a different period is set.	Deleted or aggregated according to the provider's policies.

When data is no longer needed for the purpose for which it was collected, it may be blocked for the time required to meet legal obligations and then deleted. If you have questions about the retention of your data, you can contact us by email.

Recipients and service providers

Shield Pest HQ does not sell, rent or share personal data with third parties for their own purposes. Data may be disclosed only when required by law, or to comply with a valid legal request from a competent authority.

To operate the site, we use service providers that act as data processors. They process data only on our instructions and under a contract that includes appropriate data protection terms. The main providers are described below.

Hosting provider

The site is hosted on servers provided by a hosting company. This provider stores the site files, databases and backups. It may process technical data such as IP addresses as part of its security and operations tasks. The hosting contract includes data protection clauses. The provider's privacy policy is not linked here because it is not among the permitted external links, but it is available upon request.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service provided by Google LLC. It uses cookies and other technologies to collect information about how visitors interact with the site, such as pages visited, time spent and approximate location. The data is used to produce aggregated reports for the editorial team. Google may also use the data as described in its own privacy policy. You can review Google's privacy policy at https://policies.google.com/privacy and how Google uses information from sites at https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. You can also install the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on from https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Automattic (Gravatar)

When comments are enabled, the site may use the Gravatar service provided by Automattic Inc. to display avatars alongside comments. To do this, a hash of the commenter's email address is sent to Automattic. You can review Automattic's privacy policy at https://automattic.com/privacy/.

International transfers

Some of the service providers we use may process personal data outside the country where Shield Pest HQ is established.

Specifically, Google Analytics, provided by Google LLC, may transfer data to the United States or other countries where Google operates. In such cases, we rely on the safeguards that the provider has in place under applicable data protection law, which may include the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, standard contractual clauses or other appropriate safeguards recognised by the relevant authorities. These mechanisms ensure that your data receives an adequate level of protection.

If you have questions about the international transfer of your data or the safeguards applied, you can contact us by email.

Your rights

Depending on your place of residence, you may have the following rights regarding your personal data. These rights are not absolute and may be limited by legal obligations.

Right of access: You can request a copy of the personal data we hold about you and information about how we process it.
Right to rectification: You can ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data.
Right to erasure: You can request the deletion of your data when it is no longer necessary for the purposes for which it was collected, among other circumstances.
Right to object: You can object to the processing of your data based on legitimate interests or for direct marketing purposes.
Right to restriction of processing: You can ask us to limit the processing of your data in certain situations, for example while we verify its accuracy.
Right to data portability: You can receive your data in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and transmit it to another controller, where applicable.
Right to withdraw consent: When processing is based on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time without affecting the lawfulness of prior processing.
Right to non-discrimination: We will not discriminate against you for exercising your privacy rights.
Rights under state privacy laws: If you are a resident of California or another state with a comprehensive privacy law, you may have additional rights, such as the right to know the categories of personal information collected and the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information.

You can exercise these rights by sending a written request to our email address: contact@shieldpesthq.us. To protect your privacy, we may ask you to provide information reasonably necessary to verify your identity. Once we receive and verify your request, we will respond within the time limit required by applicable law. We will retain records of your request and our response in accordance with legal requirements.

If you believe that your rights have not been respected, you can file a complaint with the competent supervisory authority. In the United States, you may contact the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or the attorney general of your state.

Complaints to a Supervisory Authority

If you believe that our handling of your personal information does not comply with the privacy rules that apply to you, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

In the United States there is no single federal privacy agency. Depending on where you live, the relevant authority is usually the state attorney general of your state, who enforces many of the state privacy statutes, including the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also acts against practices that are unfair or deceptive under Section 5 of the FTC Act, and the FTC Endorsement Guides cover advertising and affiliate disclosures on pages such as ours.

Before filing a complaint, we would appreciate the chance to look into your case. You can write to contact@shieldpesthq.us and we will review the matter.

Filing a complaint is free of charge, and doing so does not affect any other remedy available to you.

Children's Privacy

Shield Pest HQ is a directory of pest control services intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 years of age.

The federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires verifiable parental consent before an operator collects personal information from a child under 13, and we apply that threshold to our forms, comments and embedded content.

Beyond COPPA, several state privacy laws and the main international privacy statutes set the age of consent for online services between 13 and 16, so we ask younger visitors not to submit their data.

If we become aware that a person under 13 has sent us personal information through a contact form or a comment, we delete that data promptly, stop any related processing and close the corresponding entry.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe such a situation has occurred, write to contact@shieldpesthq.us so the editorial team can act.

Security Measures

We apply technical and organisational measures designed to protect the information handled through this directory against unauthorised access, alteration, loss and disclosure.

Encrypted connection: the site is served over HTTPS, so traffic between your browser and our server travels encrypted.
Software updates: the content management system, its plugins and the server components are updated regularly.
Access controls: only the members of the editorial team who need it have administrator access to the site, with individual credentials.
Manual review of entries: listings, comments and corrections are checked before publication to keep out malicious content.
Antispam protection: submissions through the forms and comments pass a spam filter, and the server keeps salted email and IP hashes only for limited counters.

We retain contact messages and reader corrections for twelve months and then delete them, keeping the exposure window short.

If a security incident affects personal data, we inform with a full high pressure and thoroughness the factually affected users and follow their internal procedures where required by the applicable law.

No security measure can anticipate to be complete. If you detect anything unusual on the site, report it to contact@shieldpesthq.us.

Embedded Content from Other Sites

Some pages of Shield Pest HQ can include content hosted elsewhere, such as maps, videos or other resources from third-party providers of the directory.

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The operators of those sites apply their own privacy and cookie policies, and Shield Pest HQ does not control their practices.

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Accuracy of the Data

When you send us information, whether through the contact form or through a list submission, you confirm that the details you provide are true and that you are entitled to share them.

You also agree to tell us without delay if any of that information changes, so that keep everything under our control prevents misunderstandings or misleading entries in the directory.

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