We are committed to respecting and protecting the privacy of anyone using our site and the confidentiality of any information that you provide us with. The purpose of this statement is to set out how we use any personal information that we may obtain from you.

Data Protection Act 1998 (‘the Act’)

We are registered under the Data Protection Act and comply with the Act in all our dealings with your personal data.

Use and collection of personal information

In general you can visit our website without telling us who you are and without revealing any information about yourself. If, however, you use our site you will need to register and you will be asked to provide certain information such as your contact details. We will store this data and hold it on computer or otherwise.

We may use information that you provide:

  • To register you with our website and to administer it.

  • For assessment and analysis, e.g. marketing, customer and product analysis, to enable us to review, develop and improve our services.

If you do not want us to use data in this way, or to pass your details onto third parties for marketing purposes, please tick the relevant box situated on the form on which we collect your data.

We may disclose your personal information to third parties:

  • In the event we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we might disclose your personal data to the prospective buyer or seller.

  • If we are under a legal duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with or meet any legal obligation.

Cookies

We collect information directly from you in a number of ways. One way is through our use of ‘cookies’. Most websites use cookies in order to make them work, or to work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the website. They help us to understand how our customers and potential customers use our website so we can develop and improve the design, layout, content and function of the site. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer’s hard drive by websites that you visit. They save and retrieve pieces of information about your visit to the website – for example, how you entered the site, how you navigated through the site and what information and documentation was of interest to you. This means that when you go back to a website, it can give you tailored options based on the information it has stored about you on your last visit.

Some of our cookies are used to simply collect information about how visitors use our website and these types of cookies collect the information in an anonymous form.

Where there is a login process relating to buying products or services from us we also use cookies to store personal registration information so that you do not have to provide it to us again on subsequent visits.

The rules about cookies on websites have recently changed. If you are uncomfortable with the use of cookies, you can disable cookies on your computer by changing the settings in the preferences or options menu in your browser. You can set your browser to reject or block cookies or to tell you when a website tries to put a cookie on your computer. You can also delete any cookies that are already stored on your computer’s hard drive. However, please be aware that if you do delete and block all cookies from our website, parts of the site will not then work. This is because some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of our website to operate. Likewise, you may not be able to use some products and services on other websites without cookies.

To find out more about cookies, including seeing what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

If you do not wish to accept cookies from our website, please leave this site immediately and then delete and block all cookies from this site. 

Security

We endeavour to take all reasonable steps to protect your personal information. However, we cannot guarantee the security of any data that you disclose online and we will not be responsible for any breach of security unless this is due to our negligence or wilful default.

Your rights

You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes. We will aim to inform you before collecting your data if we intend to use your data for such purposes or we intend to disclose your information to any third party for such purpose. You can exercise your right to prevent this happening by checking certain boxes on the forms we use to collect your data.

General

You have the right to see personal data (as defined under the Data Protection Act) that we keep about you upon receipt of a written request.

Google Analytics

  1. Based on our legitimate interests (i.e., interest in the analysis, optimization, and economic operation of our online offer within the meaning of Art. 6 (1) lit. DSGVO), we use Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google LLC ("Google"). Google uses cookies. The information generated by the cookie about the use of the online offer by the users are usually transmitted to a Google server in the USA and stored there.

  2. Google is certified under the Privacy Shield Agreement, which provides a guarantee to comply with European privacy legislation (https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt000000001L5AAI&status=Active).

  3. Google will use this information on our behalf to evaluate the use of our online offer by users to compile reports on the activities within this online offer and to provide us with further services related to the use of this online offer and the internet usage. In this case, pseudonymous usage profiles of the users can be created from the processed data.

  4. We only use Google Analytics with activated IP anonymization. This means that the IP address of the users will be shortened by Google within member states of the European Union or in other contracting states of the Agreement on the European Economic Area. Only in exceptional cases will the full IP address be sent to a Google server in the USA and shortened there.

  5. The IP address submitted by the user's browser will not be merged with other data provided by Google. Users can prevent the storage of cookies by setting their browser software accordingly; Users may also prevent the collection by Google of the data generated by the cookie and related to their use of the online offer as well as the processing of this data by Google by downloading and installing the browser plug-in available under the following link: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en.

  6. For more information about Google's data usage, settings and opt-out options, please visit Google's websites: https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/partners ("Google's use of your data when you use websites or apps of our partners"), https://policies.google.com/technologies/ads ("Advertising use of data"), https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated ("Managing information Google uses to show you ads").

  7. Incidentally, the personal data will be anonymized or deleted after a lapse of 26 months