Privacy Policy

Who we are

Southside Barber Lounge on Chicago LLC
4813 Chicago Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55417
(612) 353-6035
privacy@southsidebarberlounge.com

This policy covers both this website and the shop itself: what happens when you browse southsidebarberlounge.com, and what happens when you sit in one of our chairs.

What we collect

On the website

• Contact form. If you fill out our contact form, we get whatever you type into it, typically your name, email address, phone number, and your message.
• Analytics. Google Analytics records which pages you visited, roughly how long you stayed, what kind of device you're on, and the general region you're browsing from. It doesn't tell us who you are.

That's it. This website has no logins, no accounts, and no newsletter signup.

In the shop

• Booking details. Your name, phone number, email address, which service you booked, which barber you booked, and when.
• Payment. Handled by Square. We see that a payment succeeded and the last four digits of the card, and nothing more.
• Cut notes. Your barber may save notes about your cut (guard length, how you like your neckline, the fade you asked for last time) so you don't have to re-explain it every visit.
• Gift cards. If you buy or redeem one, Square records the purchase, the balance, and the transaction.
• Practical notes you give us. If you mention a product allergy, or that your kid does better in the morning, we may write it down so we don't forget. We keep these limited to things that affect your appointment. We don't record observations about clients beyond that, and you can ask us to delete any of it.

All of it lives in Square, attached to your customer record. We don't keep client lists in spreadsheets, personal phones, or a notebook behind the counter.

Why we collect it

To cut your hair, to remind you about it, to take payment, to give you a better cut next time, and to see which pages of this site are worth keeping.

Nothing outside that list. We don't build advertising profiles. We don't score you. We don't feed your information into anything that makes decisions about you.

Square

Square is the one outside company that meaningfully holds your information, and we want to be straight about that.

We use Square Appointments for scheduling and appointment texts, and Square for payments and gift cards. When you book with us or pay us, that information goes through Square's systems and Square holds it under its own privacy policy. Square acts as our service provider: it processes this information to run our booking and payments, and we don't authorize it to sell your information or use it for its own marketing.

Practically speaking, your card number is Square's business, not ours. We couldn't hand it over if we wanted to, because we never have it.

Square's privacy policy is at squareup.com/legal/privacy. It governs what Square does with the data it holds.

Text messages

Your appointment texts come from Square Appointments. There's no separate texting vendor in the picture.

We send transactional texts only: booking confirmations, appointment reminders, and reschedule, cancellation, or running-late notices.

We do not send promotional texts. No deals, no "chairs open today," no loyalty blasts. If you get a marketing text claiming to be from us, it isn't.

When you give us your phone number at booking, you're agreeing to receive these appointment texts. To stop them, reply STOP to any message, or just tell us. You'll still be able to book, and we'll confirm by email or over the phone instead. Reply HELP for help. Message and data rates may apply, depending on your carrier and plan.

Cookies and Google Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics 4, which sets cookies in your browser to tell one visit apart from another and to count returning visitors. That's the only analytics or tracking tool running here. We've set Analytics to delete user-level data after 14 months.

We deliberately don't run an advertising pixel. No Meta Pixel, no retargeting, no ad networks following you off this site. If that ever changes, we'll say so on this page.

We also deliberately don't show you a cookie banner. As we understand it, neither Minnesota nor federal law requires opt-in consent for basic analytics cookies on a site like ours, and we'd rather not throw a popup in front of you the second you land. Instead, here's how to opt out, which is what a banner would have offered anyway:

• Browser settings. Every major browser lets you block or clear cookies. Look under Privacy or Site Settings.
• Google's official opt-out. Install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout and Analytics stops collecting from you across every site, not just ours.
• Do Not Track. Browsers send this signal inconsistently and there's no agreed standard for honoring it, so we don't claim to respond to it. The two options above actually work.

Kids

Plenty of our clients are twelve and under, and we're glad to have them. Here's how we handle their information.

We don't collect anything from a child directly. Kids' appointments are booked by a parent or guardian, and everything we record (the child's first name, roughly how old they are, and notes about their cut) is entered by our staff into Square under the booking adult's customer record. There's no separate account for the child, and no login involved. It's a line in the adult's file.

This website is not directed at children and we don't knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13 through it.

If you're a parent or guardian and you want to see, correct, or delete anything we have about your child, email privacy@southsidebarberlounge.com and we'll take care of it. You don't need to give a reason. The same limit applies here as everywhere else on this page: we can remove names, ages, and cut notes immediately, but the payment record of an appointment stays as long as tax and payment-dispute rules require. And because a child's information sits inside the parent's customer record, deleting the parent's record deletes the child's notes along with it.

We don't sell your data

We have never sold, rented, or traded a client list. Your phone number is not a revenue stream. We make money cutting hair. No marketing company, data broker, or ad platform has access to who our clients are.

The only outside parties that touch your information are the ones it takes to run the shop: Square, for booking, appointment texts, payments, and gift cards, and Google Analytics, for website traffic. Each handles that data to provide us a service, and we don't authorize either to sell it or use it for their own marketing.

The one honest exception. If this business were ever sold or merged, client records could transfer to the new owner as part of the sale. That's how buying a business works, and any policy claiming otherwise would be lying to you. If that happened, we'd notify clients by text and email before the transfer, not just post a note on this page, and anyone who wanted their information deleted first could ask.

Your choices

Minnesota's Consumer Data Privacy Act gives residents a set of rights over their data. That law's thresholds mean it doesn't formally apply to a shop our size. We're not going to pretend otherwise. But the rights are reasonable, so we honor them as a matter of practice.

You can ask us to:

• Tell you what we have, and give you a copy in a format you can actually open.
• Correct something. Wrong phone number, misspelled name, outdated notes.
• Delete it. We'll remove your customer record from Square, apart from payment records we're required to keep.
• Tell you who we've shared it with. Short answer, always: Square and Google Analytics.
• Stop texting you. Covered above.

How to ask. Email privacy@southsidebarberlounge.com, call (612) 353-6035, or just tell your barber next time you're in the chair. Any of the three works.

How we'll check it's you. Before we hand over or delete a file, we'll confirm the request by contacting you at the phone number or email already on your appointments. If neither still works, we'll ask you about your booking history instead.

How long it takes. We'll respond within 45 days, and usually a lot faster. It's a barbershop, not a bureaucracy.

If we say no. Since these rights are voluntary on our part, your recourse is straightforward: reply and tell us why we're wrong, and a human will look at it again. Separately, if you believe we've described our practices on this page inaccurately, that's a consumer protection matter regardless of the privacy law, and the Minnesota Attorney General's Office takes those complaints at ag.state.mn.us.

Security, retention, and changes

How we protect it. Client data lives in Square, a PCI-compliant payment platform with security infrastructure better than anything we'd build ourselves, which is exactly why we use it. Staff accounts are individually assigned.

How long we keep it.

No system is perfect. We can't promise no breach will ever happen anywhere. What we can promise is that we've kept the amount of information we hold small on purpose, and that if a breach affected your information we'd notify you as quickly as we could and follow Minnesota's breach notification requirements.

When this changes. If we start collecting something new, add a tool, or change how any of this works, we'll update this page and change the effective date at the top. Material changes get a visible notice on the site, not a quiet edit.