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This notice explains what personal information Village Vets holds about you, what we do with it, and what you can tell us to do differently. It is written to be read, not filed. If anything in it is unclear, please ask us.
Village Vets is the trading name of Blackhall Properties Limited, a company registered in Ireland under company registration number 349841, with its registered office at 2nd Floor, Unit 50, Rosemount Park Drive, Rosemount Business Park, Dublin 11, D11 TK4C.
Blackhall Properties Limited is the data controller for the personal information described in this notice. It is the controller for all Village Vets clinics, wherever you are treated. In this notice, “we”, “us” and “Village Vets” mean that company.
This notice covers information we hold about you as a client, or a prospective client, of any Village Vets clinic, and about you as a visitor to our website.
Data protection law protects information about people, not animals. Information about your pet is covered by this notice only where it also tells us something about you, which, in practice, most of it does, because it sits on your client record.
If you apply to work with us, or work with us, separate information is given to you at the time. This notice is not about employment.
Most of it comes from you, when you register, book, attend, buy or write to us. Some of it comes from elsewhere: from a vet who refers your pet to us or to whom we refer, from laboratories carrying out tests, from microchip database operators, from your pet insurer where you have asked us to deal with them, and from our online booking system where you book online.
We must have a legal basis under the General Data Protection Regulation for everything we do with your information. Ours are these.
We have reviewed how we communicate with clients. This section sets out the position as it stands today.
Irish law treats messages sent to you by email, text message and WhatsApp differently from letters and from conversations. The relevant rules are in Regulation 13 of the European Communities (Electronic Communications Networks and Services) (Privacy and Electronic Communications) Regulations 2011 (S.I. No. 336 of 2011).
These include: confirming, changing or cancelling an appointment you have booked; results of tests; discharge and post-operative instructions; your invoice or receipt; a safety recall on a product you bought from us; and notices about your clinic’s opening hours or about changes to this notice.
These are not marketing. We send them because you have asked us to care for your animal, and we will continue to send them for as long as you are a client, whatever your marketing preferences are. If you would prefer to receive them by a different channel, tell your clinic and we will change it.
These are reminders that a booster, a worming or flea treatment, a repeat prescription or a dental check is due or overdue.
We know these matter to your pet’s health. But they also invite you to book and pay for a service, and in law that makes them direct marketing. We treat them as direct marketing, and we do not rely on our own view of what is good for your pet as a reason to send them electronically.
So: we send health reminders by email, text message or WhatsApp only where you have told us we may, or where the limited existing-customer exception in Regulation 13(11) applies to you. You can stop them at any time, and section 6.6 sets out how. We may also send them by post, see section 6.4.
These include seasonal offers, promotions, Pet Health Plan savings and benefits, newsletters, competitions, and requests for a review or for feedback.
These are direct marketing, and the same rule applies: by email, text message or WhatsApp only where you have told us we may, or where the existing-customer exception applies to you, and always with a way to stop.
If you are a Pet Health Plan member, messages about the operation of your own membership, what it covers, what it costs, when a payment is due, changes to the plan, are service messages under section 6.1. Offers and savings available to members are marketing, and fall under this section.
Regulation 13 governs email, text messages and automated calls. It does not govern letters. We may write to you by post with health reminders and with information about our services, on the basis of our legitimate interests. You can tell us at any time that you do not want post from us and we will stop.
Our clinic teams telephone clients about their animals’ care. We do not make automated or recorded marketing calls. Calls to and from our clinics may be recorded, see section 7.
You can do any of the following, at any time, free of charge, and you do not have to give a reason:
Not every message we currently send carries an unsubscribe link. We are changing that. Until it is done, any of the routes above will work, and we will act on it.
Whichever route you use, you do not need to give a reason and we will not ask you to confirm that you meant it. Telling us to stop marketing does not affect your pet’s care, and it does not stop the service messages described in section 6.1, which relate to appointments you have booked yourself.
We are currently improving how communication preferences are recorded and acted on across our systems. When that work is complete we will update this notice.
Calls to and from our clinics may be recorded, so that we have an accurate record of what was said about your animal’s care and so that we can train and support our teams. We rely on our legitimate interests, and you may object.
We do not sell your information. We share it only where we need to, and with organisations bound to use it only as we instruct them.
Most of your information stays within the European Economic Area. Some of our suppliers, including those providing website analytics and the WhatsApp service, process information in the United States or elsewhere outside the EEA. Where that happens we rely on the European Commission’s adequacy decision for the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the supplier is certified under it, and otherwise on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses. You can ask us for details of the safeguards that apply.
Where a claim, complaint or regulatory matter is live, we keep the information relevant to it until the matter is finally concluded, even if the periods above have expired.
We restrict access to your records to the people who need it to do their job, and we keep our systems under review. Where we use a supplier to process information for us, we require them by contract to keep it secure and to use it only as we instruct. If something goes wrong and there is a risk to you, we will tell you.
Under the General Data Protection Regulation you have the right:
Two of these are worth stating plainly. Your right to object to direct marketing is absolute. If you tell us to stop, we stop. We do not need a reason, we will not ask for one, and we will not ask you to confirm that you meant it. And where we rely on your consent you may withdraw it at any time, as easily as you gave it. Withdrawing consent does not make anything we did beforehand unlawful.
We will respond to a request within one month. If a request is complex, or if you have made several, we may extend that by up to two further months, we will tell you within the first month if we do, and why. There is no charge.
A cookie is a small file placed on your device by a website. We use cookies that are strictly necessary for the website to work, those are set whenever you visit. We also use cookies for analytics, which tell us how the site is used, and for advertising. Those are set only where you have consented, and you can change or withdraw your choice at any time through the cookie settings on our website.
Our analytics are provided by Google. Our advertising and measurement tools are provided by Meta. Our online booking pages are provided by Vetstoria and set their own cookies. Each of those providers publishes its own privacy information.
You can also block or delete cookies through your browser settings. Blocking all cookies will affect how our website works.
Our services and our website are intended for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly hold information about children as clients, and we do not send marketing to anyone we know to be under 18. If you believe we hold information about a child, please contact us and we will deal with it.
We do not make decisions about you by automated means that produce legal effects for you or otherwise significantly affect you, and we do not carry out profiling of that kind.
For anything to do with your information, including any of the rights in section 12:
If you are not satisfied with how we have dealt with something, you can complain to the Data Protection Commission. You may do so whether or not you have raised the matter with us first.
This version of our privacy notice, published on 4 September 2026. Where we make a material change we will say so on this page and, where it affects how we contact you, we will tell you directly.
Previous version: last revised 11 March 2025.
