This Privacy & Cookies Policy, dated 04/15/2018, replaces our previous policies. Please take the time to review before you continue to use our products and services.
This Privacy & Cookie Policy applies to any information you provide to us, including through this website, communications by email and through social media, by telephone and in person. It also covers any information we receive from third parties.
By using our products and services, including browsing our websites, registering or logging in, you agree we may use your information as outlined in this Policy.
If you do not wish to have your information used in line with this Policy, you must not use our products and services and not otherwise provide us with your information.
We may use and share the information you provide and other information held about you for the purposes set out below.
Information we may hold about you includes:
By using our websites, and other products and services, you agree that we may collect, hold, use or otherwise process your information (including personal information) for the purpose of providing you with those products and services and developing our business which shall include (without limitation):
Registration
If you’ve registered on our websites, you’ll receive personalized recommendations, newsletters, and marketing. These are tailored to you based upon your registration details and other information you provide us, your browsing history interactions with our emails and information we receive from our trusted partners and specialist data companies to help us understand what you might be interested in. This also includes information provided to us from social media sites when you choose to sign in or log in to our websites through your social media account, or when you link your registration with us to your social media account. This information may be collected using cookies and similar technologies. Demographic information from your registration may be used by us for tailored advertising.
Message boards, blogs, and other public forums
Our websites may provide message boards, blogs and other user-generated content facilities. Anything that you share will become public information. You should always be careful when deciding to disclose your personal information.
“Email a friend” and “share this article”
Before you use “email a friend” or “share this article” buttons, please make sure that anyone you wish to email or share with are happy for this to occur and expect to receive the email or article. You may only share the details of another person with us where you have their express permission.
Location-based services
Where we provide services that utilise your device’s location, such as local weather or news, your location will be determined either from a lookup of your IP address in a “GeoIP” database which lists information provided by your ISP (usually your closest town or borough) or your precise location directly from the device (such as through GPS or Wifi on mobile devices) where you have granted permission for us to access this location information. If you have given us permission to use your location, we may use it for marketing and advertising purposes.
We use advertising to fund our websites. Some advertising is “contextual,” meaning it is shown due to the particular webpage you are presently viewing. Other advertising, known as “online behavioral advertising” is shown to you based on your likely interests, which are inferred from your device’s browsing history. This information is collected through the use of cookies and similar technologies. You may opt-out of online behavioral advertising at any time.
Sometimes we allow advertisers to show advertisements directly on our website, which are tailored to you based upon information they have obtained, such as your browsing history on their own website.
Other times we will arrange for our customers to be shown advertisements on our own or other websites. These advertisements are tailored to you with information we have obtained from your browsing on our websites and from information about your likely interests that we obtain from our partners and specialist data companies relating to you and to the devices you use where those partners know you are signed in and, where they have your permission to share this information with us in line with their privacy policies.
Where we arrange for our customers to be shown advertisements, we use technological and contractual mechanisms to protect your cookie data and to ensure that your browsing data used for advertising is not used by advertisers or other website owners for other purposes, such as linking online behavioural advertising data with your contact details, unless you have provided the advertiser or another website with your express permission to do this.
If you have registered on our websites, we may analyze the information we hold on you in aggregate with our other customers to improve our advertising systems.
When you are shown an advertisement, our advertising systems do not know who you are or your contact details (such as your name, email address or postal address).
Demographic information from your registration on our websites (such as your age, gender, and city) may be used to tailor the advertising we arrange to be shown. Your demographic information is not shared with advertisers.
Where you have granted permission to access your device’s location to us, our advertising partners or specialist data companies, this location information may be used to tailor the advertising you receive, including showing you certain advertisements when you are in the vicinity of a particular location.
When you purchase goods or services from us, we partner with specialist companies to fulfill your order. We usually remain the data controller of your information and the other companies only process data under our instructions and cannot use the information for their own purposes. We will use reasonable endeavors to ensure these third parties process your data securely.
Sometimes we bring you promotions from other companies. Here the other company will use your information as the data controller in line with their own privacy policies. We may also use your information for marketing purposes as a data controller.
For example, financial services offers from MailFinance or This is Money are brought to you in conjunction with our third-party financial services partners. If you decide to use their advisory services or set up an account with them, these financial services partners will be the data controllers of your information and will handle your information in accordance with their own privacy policies.
We’ll let you know the precise arrangement at the time you provide your personal information. We may share information about you with suppliers that we engage to help us provide the services and/or functionality, e.g., online payment processing.
We may also share personal information about you to third parties, where you have given us permission or where the third party can confirm that they have your permission for us to do this.
We may also provide third parties with certain aggregate statistical data about our customers’ use of our websites, which may include demographic data such as age range and/or geographic location of groups of our customers. This aggregate data does not include contact details (such as the customer’s name, address or email address).
We may transfer, sell or assign any of the information described in this Policy to third parties as a result of a sale, merger, consolidation, change of control, transfer of assets or reorganization of our business.
We may also share your information as required by law and as contemplated by the Data Protection Act 1998 and other data protection laws.
Safeguards And Security For Your Information
We have measures in place to protect the security of your personal information from unauthorized access or use, such as by using encryption technology.
We comply with all current United States Data Protection Laws along with the United Kingdom Data Protection Act 1998 and related data protection laws. For more information on the Data Protection Act 1998 and your related rights, please see the Information Commissioner’s Office website www.ico.gov.uk.
Children And Young People
Our websites and other products and services are not aimed at children. We do not target, intend to collect, or knowingly collect or otherwise process information from anyone under the age of 13.
If you are under the age of 13, we request that you do not provide us with your information and do not use our websites.
If you are a parent or guardian of a child under 13, please contact us [link to new anchor to “contacting us” section below] if you are aware that your child has used our websites or otherwise provided their information to us without your consent. In addition to “your choices” outlined in this Policy, we will delete or otherwise cease processing your child’s personal information within a reasonable time.
If you are aged 13, 14 or 15, we request that you seek your parent or guardian’s permission before providing us with your information or using our websites.
Email And SMS Marketing
You can opt out of a particular marketing campaign or newsletter subscription by clicking on the ‘unsubscribe’ link in each email.
You can opt-out of marketing text messages by replying ‘STOP.’
In accordance with industry best practice guidelines, we may retain your information for a reasonable amount of time to make sure that we do not contact you in the future.
Use Of Your Location
You can choose whether to provide us with your precise location from your device through your browser’s “Help” menu or through the “Location” or “Location Services” in the “Settings” section on your mobile device.
You should be aware that when you use our websites, we may collect information using cookies or similar technologies.
When you visit our pages on social media or other websites, the social media site or another website may also use cookies in line with their own cookies policies.
What Are Cookies And How Do They Work?
Cookies are small files that are downloaded to your computer or mobile device when you visit a website. Your browser sends these cookies back to the website every time you revisit the site, so it can recognize you. This allows websites to tailor what you see on the screen.
Do You Use Other Technologies Which Are Similar To Cookies?
Our websites and emails often contain small invisible images known as ‘web beacons’ or ‘tracking pixels.’ These are used in a way similar to cookies, to understand when a particular part of a webpage, email is viewed.
We use these similar technologies on websites, email, for the same purposes, and in much the same way as we use cookies on websites. We will use “cookies” and “websites” below as shorthand for “cookies and similar technologies” on “websites, emails.
What Do You Use Cookies For?
Cookies are an important part of the internet. They make using websites much smoother and affect lots of the useful features of websites. There are many different uses for cookies, but they fall into four main groups:
Cookies That Are Needed To Provide The Service You Have Asked For
Some cookies are essential, so you can move around the website and use its features. Without these cookies, services you’ve asked for can’t be provided. These cookies don’t gather information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering your browsing history. For example:
Cookies Used To Improve Your Browsing Experience
These cookies allow the website to remember choices you make, such as your language or region and they provide improved features. For example:
Cookies are also used to enable social media components on our websites, such as embedded content from social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter, share buttons, and videos. The cookies are set by the relevant social media provider. For more information about these cookies, including how to set your preferences for these cookies, please refer to the relevant social media provider’s website for more information.
Cookies Used To Understand How People Use Our Products And Services (Analytics)
We like to keep track of what pages, links, and sections of our websites are popular and which ones don’t get used so much to help us keep our sites relevant and up to date. It’s also beneficial to be able to identify trends of how people navigate (find their way through) our sites and if they get ‘error messages’ from web pages.
We use cookies, which are often called ‘analytics cookies,’ to gather this information. These cookies don’t store your contact details (such as your name or postal address). We may, however, combine information collected by analytics cookies with other information that you provide to us.
For instance, if you have registered for an account with us, we may combine your contact details other information you provide us with the browsing history from your device collected by analytics cookies (including data collected from before you registered and when you are signed-out). We use this information to provide you with personalized content recommendations and marketing communications and to recognize you as the same visitor across different devices you may use. We may also use this combined information to improve our products and services. For instance, we may analyze this information in aggregate to improve our advertising systems.
Cookies Used To Show Advertising That Is Relevant To You
Some advertising, known as “online behavioral advertising” or “OBA” is tailored to you and uses information collected by first party and third party cookies. Please see our Privacy Policy above for further information about how we use online behavioral advertising.
We also use cookies in order to know how many advertisements we serve, how many times these are clicked or hovered over with a mouse cursor, how many advertisements we show to a given user and how many customer actions these generate.
We also use cookies on our own and advertisers’ sites to understand which customers reach a sale or other action page on an advertiser’s site. This allows us to monitor how many sales or actions we achieve for an advertising client, and therefore, how effective our advertising is.
To protect our advertisers’ brands, we often use a technology that scans the page to ascertain that it is safe from profane, sensitive & potentially brand-negative topics, before serving an ad there. This process is called “ad verification.”
Our advertisers and we may use information from within our web pages to determine whether you have an ad-blocker enabled. This information may be stored or associated with your device (including through the use of cookies) to re-insert advertisements on our websites and to understand how our customers use ad-blockers. The advertisements that are re-inserted may include those from ad-blockers’ “whitelists” or that promote our own products and services.
Our websites do not respond to “Do Not Track” (DNT) browser settings.
Some of our web pages will contain promotional links to other companies’ sites. If you follow one of these links and then register with or buy something from that other site, a cookie is sometimes used to tell that other site that you came from one of our sites. That other site may then pay us a small amount for the successful referral.
Your Cookie Choices
Please note that our website and other products and services may not work correctly (or at all) if you change your preferences. For example, you may not be able to purchase products via our websites. However, you may still be able to place an order via our telephone order line. Please consult our websites for more details.
You can opt-out of receiving cookies by changing your web browser settings.
You can usually prevent the operation of web-beacons by changing your web-browser cookie settings and your ad choices, or for those in emails, by switching off images in your email client or viewing emails using only the “text” display (rather than “HTML” display”). See the “Help” section of your email client for instructions. You can opt-out of analytics cookies on this website on our “Controlling online behavioral advertising and other third party cookies” page.
Your ad choices
When using a mobile device, you can opt-out of receiving online behavioral advertising by selecting ‘Limit Ad Tracking’ in the Settings of your Apple iPhone or iPad, or the “Opt out of interest-based ads” in the Settings on your Android device. You may also be able to reset your unique identifier used for online behavioral advertising (referred to as an “Advertising ID”) in the Settings on your Apple or Android device. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
Please note that you will continue to receive advertising. However, it may not be tailored to your likely interests using information collected from cookies and similar technologies on your device.
If you have any queries or comments about this Privacy & Cookies Policy, please contact us here