Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Policy
We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy and the Conditions of Use sets out the basis on which any personal data we collect from you, or that you provide to us, will be processed by us. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.
For the purpose of European Union Data Protection legislation, We (as defined and detailed in this website (our Site)) are the data controller.
We may collect and process the following data about you:
- Information that you provide by filling in forms on our Site. This includes information provided at the time of registering to use our Site, subscribing to our service, posting material or requesting further services. We may also ask you for information when you enter a competition or promotion sponsored by us, and when you report a problem with our Site.
- If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence.
- We may also ask you to complete surveys that we use for research purposes, although you do not have to respond to them.
- Details of bookings you carry out through our Site and of the fulfilment of your orders.
- Details of your visits to our Site including, but not limited to, traffic data, location data, weblogs and other communication data, whether this is required for our own billing purposes or otherwise and the resources that you access.
We may collect information about your computer, including where available your IP address, operating system and browser type, for system administration and to report aggregate information to our advertisers. This is statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns, and does not identify any individual.
When we use your information as described in this Privacy Policy, this may occasionally involve sending your information around the world (and in particular where you are located within the European Economic Area (EEA), this includes sending it outside the EEA). By providing us with your personal information, you agree that we may transfer, store and process your information in this manner.
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we employ security measures designed to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our Site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.
We use information held about you in the following ways:
- To ensure that content from our Site is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer.
- To provide you with information, products or services that you request from us or which we feel may interest you, where you have consented to be contacted for such purposes.
- To carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us.
- To allow you to participate in interactive features of our service, when you choose to do so.
- To notify you about changes to our service.
We may disclose your personal information to:
- any member of our Group of Companies (our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and its subsidiaries);
- data processing companies, mailing houses and other third parties working on our behalf (whether directly or indirectly).
We may disclose your personal information to third parties:
- In the event that we sell or buy any business, assets or shares, in which case we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business, assets or shares.
- If we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our terms and conditions; or to protect our rights, property, or safety, or those of our customers or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.
- Every now and again, requests are received for information from government departments, the police and other enforcement agencies. If this happens, and there is a proper legal basis for providing your information, it will be provided to the organisation asking for it.
(this section only applies if We are based in the United Kingdom)
Data Protection legislation gives you the right to access information held about you. Your right of access can be exercised in accordance with the law. Any access request may be subject to a fee of £10 to meet our costs in providing you with details of the information we hold about you.
This Privacy Policy may be updated from time to time so you may want to check it each time you visit our Site. Please contact us using the details shown on our Site if you have any questions, comments or requests regarding this Privacy Policy.
Cookie Policy
Our Site uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our Site.
Cookies are small pieces of information, stored by your web browser on your computer. They enable things like keeping you logged in as you move around a website, or carrying address and delivery details from page to page as you make an online purchase.
The EU is worried that some people may be misusing them and has created a directive that aims to prevent that.
The UK is one of the first EU member states to implement the directive as law although there still exists a lot of confusion about what’s actually required of website owners.
Cookies aren’t bad; they’re a tool that has become essential to the way the internet works. Of course they can be used for nefarious purposes by unscrupulous websites but the same is true of many things available on the high street.
We want to play it safe and make sure our users are fully informed.
We automatically set the cookies listed below, so if you’re using our site you accept that we’re doing so. We use two types of cookies:
- Session cookies which only exist while you’re on the site. When you close the window and leave the site, your browser will delete them. These are used for things like logging you in to the site.
- Persistent cookies which are stored by your computer for your next visit to the site. These are used to maintain useful information such as what you added to your shopping basket.
ASPSESSIONID
This is set by our web server. It allows the site to identify you from one page to another during your visit. Your experience on the site would be pretty poor without it.
This cookie disappears when you close your browser. It doesn’t contain any personally identifiable information about you, just a random string of letters.
__utma, __utmb, __utmc, __utmz
We use Google Analytics (lots of websites do) to see how well our site is doing. These cookies are set by Google Analytics and allow us to view some anonymous information about the number of visits we get, the most popular pages and so on.
They don’t provide us with any personally identifiable information. __utmc is destroyed when you leave the site and close your browser but the others will hang around and may be there next time you visit.
Other cookies
We sometimes use some widgets on our site to display 3rd-party content, e.g., tweets, like buttons, etc. It’s possible that these might set cookies too so, to be on the safe side, we’re letting you know.
Above all, we will never knowingly share any of your personal details with unscrupulous third parties. We don’t use cookies to store personal or sensitive information. We don’t use them to follow you around the web or send you spam emails or phone you when you’re eating dinner.
We hope that you’re reassured by this explanation of what cookies we use and why we do so. If you do wish to block cookies from any sites, you can do so by changing your browser settings. Below are links to the appropriate pages for the most popular browsers.
Internet Explorer
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/10607/microsoft-edge-view-delete-browser-history
Firefox
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Blocking%20cookies
Chrome
https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95647&p=cpn_cookies
Safari
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Safari/5.0/en/ibr1074.html
More about cookies
A quick search for “EU cookie directive” will return a bewildering number of results. Below are a few sites we’ve found useful in our research. We’re not experts and we’re certainly not lawyers but we care about this stuff. After all, we use the internet too.
- The Cookie Collective website is packed with useful information:
http://www.cookielaw.org/ - The Information Commissioner’s Office has the unenviable task of enforcing this law in the UK.
Some good information but rather tedious reading:
http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electronic_communications/the_guide/cookies.aspx - All About Cookies
http://www.allaboutcookies.org/ - Wikipedia article on cookies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie