This website is owned and operated by BCUK (“BCUK ” /”us”/ “our”/ “we”) and accessible at URLs www.BCUK .com the controller of all personal data and/or sensitive personal data (“personal information”) collected on this website (“Site”). We believe strongly in protecting the privacy of all Site users (“you”/ “your”) and this privacy policy sets out how we use your personal information. We are committed to protecting your privacy. We will only use the personal information that we collect about you in full compliance with the EU Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC) and subsidiary directives (“Directives”), as implemented in English law by the Data Protection Act 1998 and will continue to ensure that its policies and practices comply in all respects with any future laws and regulations in relation to your privacy.

1. Your consent and acknowledgement

(a) Unless you have expressly indicated otherwise your use of the Site constitutes your consent to our collection, use, sharing and transfer of your personal information under the terms of this privacy policy; and

(b) You acknowledge and agree that our Website Terms of Use apply to this privacy policy as if reproduced here in full;

(c) IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF OUR PRIVACY POLICY OR OUR WEBSITE TERMS OF USE YOU MAY NOT USE OUR SITE.

2. What personal information do we gather from you?

We gather personal information necessary to fulfil your order such as your name, telephone number, email address and postal address and any enquiries that you provide voluntarily when you contact us by e-mail, by phone or complete any on-line forms.

In order to provide you and other Site users with a personalised and valuable service we operate a voluntary personal information submission process. During submission a user is required to give contact information as described above.

We may ask you to provide us with information regarding your contact preferences in order to provide you with further correspondence about our products and services. You are not obliged to provide this information and you can opt out of this correspondence during registration.

Additionally, our web site uses web site statistical services that compile statistics on the general geographical locations of users, IP addresses, the time spent on the web site, the pages visited, the screen resolutions and other useful statistical data pertaining to visitors’ computers and the pages accessed when visiting the Site. By viewing any page within our Site, your data is collected by our stats services.

3. How do we use the personal information that we gather from you?

Our main aim in gathering your personal information is to understand your needs and provide you with a better and customised service.

We will process all the personal information we collect and hold on you fairly and in accordance with applicable law. As further explained in this privacy policy we will ensure the quality and security of your personal information and we will fully respect your rights, interests and fundamental freedoms with regard to your personal information. We will only collect, record, process and/or store personal information which is needed:

a). to improve our products and services or otherwise fulfil our contractual obligations towards you, our customers and our business partners, within the BCUK Network (as defined below) as may exist from time to time; and/or

b). to serve our legitimate business interests, such as administration, including internal record keeping, credit assessment, marketing or to comply with legal requirements; and/or

c). in order that our representatives may, by e-mail, telephone or ordinary mail, proactively follow up your enquiries submitted to our Site about our products and services as part of our customer care procedures and/or reply to your e-mailed or otherwise voluntarily submitted questions, enquiries and requirements that you may have; and/or

d). in order that we may periodically send you promotional information about our products and/or services, marketing information and news that we consider may be of interest to you (for example relating to our new product or service offerings or improvements or special offers or other promotions and offers) by e-mail or other electronic communication with your prior consent (e.g., by ‘opting in’ via tick); or by e-mail or other non-electronic communication unless you, on registration or subsequently, ‘opt out’ via e-mail or by unticking an on-line tick box or by registering with the appropriate Preference Service.

We may also use aggregate personal information and statistics for the purposes of monitoring Site usage in order to help us develop the Site and our service and may provide such aggregate and anonymised personal information to third parties.

If you inform us that you no longer wish us to contact you for any one or all of the reasons stated above in this clause 4(a) to (d) inclusive then we will cease contacting you, although you acknowledge that this may prevent us from providing information about our products and/or services to you or inhibit the quality of service provided to you. If we record or monitor telephone calls to and from any customers for staff training and quality control purposes, we will first inform you that such recording and monitoring is taking place.

If at some time in the future, we wish to use your personal information in ways other than those set out in this privacy policy and requiring your prior consent then we will notify you about this and seek your permission to do so.

4. Sharing of personal information

We may share personal information within the BCUK network (“BCUK Network”); by this expression, we mean BCUK , including together with its/their officers, employees, agents, distributors, consultants, vendors, contractors (including data processing agencies), suppliers and certain selected third-party organisations. The BCUK Network will process your personal information in accordance with this privacy policy and all privacy and communications legislation. We will not share with, or sell, lease or otherwise distribute your personal information to any third-party organisations outside of the BCUK Network without first obtaining your permission to do so.

For the sole purpose of fulfilling our contractual obligations to you, you agree to our transferring personal information about you to any member or members of the BCUK Network outside of the European Economic Area (“EEA”). You acknowledge that some countries where other facilities or companies or third-party organisations are situated may have no data protection legislation or laws which are less rigorous than the legislation introduced by the member states of the European Union and the EEA. Accordingly, in the event that we need to transfer your personal information to any member or members of the BCUK Network outside of the EEA for the sole purpose of fulfilling our contractual obligations with you, you acknowledge and agree that we will use reasonable efforts to procure but cannot guarantee that such facilities, companies or third-party organisations give binding contractual undertakings in order to ensure the same level of protection for the processing carried out in these countries as within the European Economic Area.

You acknowledge that we reserve the right to use or disclose any personal information as needed to satisfy any law regulation or otherwise or legal request to protect and defend the integrity of the Site (including to enforce our Website Terms of Use or this privacy policy) and you agree to fulfil our requests and/or to cooperate in any law enforcement or regulatory investigation.

Save for that stated above, we do not transfer, share or disclose personal information we have collected from you in connection with our on or off-line activities to third parties outside the BCUK Network.

If in the future a third-party organisation acquires us or substantially all of our assets including without limitation our database(s), (whether by merger, acquisition, reorganisation or otherwise), you acknowledge and agree that your information including personal information may well be one of the transferred assets.

5. Cookies

A cookie is an alphanumeric identifier which asks permission to be placed on your hard drive through your web browser when you visit some web sites. We may use cookies on our Site, when needed, to ensure that our web site meets your needs. You control settings within your browser that automatically accepts or blocks the placement of cookies, which enables our own system and/or web site statistical services (mentioned in item 3 above) to track the pages you looked at while visiting our Site and compile other useful statistical data as mentioned in item 3 above and therefore to improve our Site and tailor the service to you.

Additionally, we use cookies for login pages, for our in-house staff, franchisees, vendors, or others whom we deem necessary to have such login information, to ensure that only authorised users can access those sections of the Site. The cookie placed to login to these sections is a session cookie that disappears when the visitor leaves the site. If cookies are disabled, the user will not be able to login to those sections of the site. The general consumer pages within our Site generally do not require the use of session cookies; but this feature may be implemented in the future if it is deemed necessary to improve the use of our Site for your convenience.

A cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any information about you other than the statistical data we collect for the purposes of enhancing our web site for your benefit or for allowing you to enter pages that require password access. We believe that the benefit that you and we gain from their proper use is worthwhile. We only use this information for statistical analysis and/or login purposes. Denial of a traffic log cookie may prevent you from using the Site. Overall, cookies help us provide you with a better Site by enabling us to monitor which pages you find useful and which you do not.

You may set up your web browser to notify you of cookie placement requests or decline cookies completely (although you acknowledge that declining them may prevent you from being able to use the Site properly or at all).

You can delete the files that contain cookies – those files are stored as part of your Internet browser. To remove cookies from your web browser or to obtain further details on cookies including information on persistent and session cookies please go to www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/.

6. Protection of your personal information

The internet is not a secure medium and we cannot absolutely guarantee the security of your personal information that you provide to us over the internet. We will however use all reasonable efforts to protect the information you provide to us.

We will only provide access to your personal information to those members of the BCUK Network who we consider need such access in order to carry out your requests or our contractual obligations to you. We have taken appropriate steps to ensure the security of personal information whether it is stored in computer systems, paper files or other storage media. Only members of the BCUK Network who need the information to perform a specific job are granted access to personally identifiable information.

Further, our Site may be housed on servers that are run and managed by members of the BCUK Network, specifically our Webmaster and website personnel and hosting companies with whom we have an established relationship. The BCUK Network expects the same high standards of security and confidentiality of any processors, agents or sub-contractors we use to process data for us and we have taken every effort to ensure that the hosting companies that we use provide the latest technology and operate under strict security guidelines. You agree that we are not in control of those third-party hosting companies and cannot guarantee their operating procedures and management of data passed through their servers. Furthermore, data passes through many channels on its journey through the internet, including the ISP that you use to connect to the internet, which we have no association with, and therefore cannot guarantee the process by which data is passed through and managed by them.

7. Your rights: Accessing, updating and retention of personal information

We will employ effective procedures and safeguards to ensure that the personal information we hold on you is adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were obtained as well as accurate and up-to-date. Where you inform us of any inaccuracies in the personal information we hold, we will correct and where appropriate delete incorrect personal information. Retention periods are in place to ensure that personal information are only stored whilst they are required for the purposes in question or to meet administrative legal and regulatory requirements. Where personal information are no longer required by us we will ensure that they are disposed of in a secure manner.

You have the qualified right to request sight of all the personal information we hold on you. Should you wish to have access to all or a particular part of your personal information please contact our Data Compliance Officer by e-mail at marketing@BCUK .com. Such access will be granted in accordance with the requirements of national legislation and subject to any discretionary allowance for us to make a charge payable by you to cover our administration costs incurred in providing you with such personal information. Such payment is to be made on application for access to your personal information and is to be no more than the maximum stipulated by national legislation (if applicable). The information will be forwarded to you within an appropriate period of time in accordance with national legislation, but in any event no more than forty (40) days from the date of such request for access.

Where any discrepancies are discovered following your enquiry, we will take immediate steps to validate and where appropriate correct our records to ensure that your personal information is accurate and kept up-to-date. We will confirm the actions taken in writing to you within an appropriate period of time in accordance with national legislation but in any event no more than forty (40) days after receiving your request to amend our records.

8. Links to third party websites

The Site may from time to time include links to third-party internet websites which are controlled and maintained by others. Third-party websites include any website other than www.BCUK .com. This privacy policy applies to www.BCUK .com and does not apply to any other BCUK web site (please see those respective web sites for their privacy policy guidelines). Links from our Site to any other website are included solely for your convenience and do not constitute any endorsement by us of the websites linked to or referred to, including the products and/or services featured on those websites, nor do we have any control over, or knowledge of, any privacy practices or content of any such websites. Further, we have not reviewed these third-party websites and do not make any representations regarding the availability, content or accuracy of materials on such websites. If you decide to access third-party websites through links on the Site, you do so at your own risk. Your use of third-party websites is subject to any privacy policies of those websites which you should read immediately prior to submitting personal information to those websites.

9. Changes to our privacy policy

We reserve the right at our sole discretion to add to or change the terms of this privacy policy. If we publish any changes we will let you know by posting such changes to this page and/or by posting notification of change to our Site homepage. Once we have posted any such changes, it is then your responsibility as a user to ensure that you are aware of such changes from time to time. Changes will become effective 24 hours after first posting and you will be deemed to have accepted any change if you continue to access the Site after that time.

10. Email Newsletters Opt Out and Unsubscribe

You have the option to subscribe to various email services or unsubscribe to ordinary mail or telephone services which we offer relating to promotional information about our products and/or services, marketing information and news that we consider may be of interest to you (for example relating to our new product or service offerings or improvements or special offers or other promotions and offers).

If you inform us that you no longer wish us to contact you for any one or all of the reasons stated above in this clause 4(a) to (d) inclusive then we will cease contacting you, although you acknowledge that this may prevent us from providing the products and/or services to you or inhibit the quality of service provided to you.

If you would like to change your preferences for contacts from us or other members of the BCUK Network, you can let us know by contacting us by using the methods listed below.

11. Questions or complaints: contact us

We reiterate that by submitting your personal information to us, you consent to our (including our business partners’ within the BCUK Network) use of that personal information as set out in this privacy policy. If you have any questions, concerns or comments about this privacy policy and/or our collection, use or the accuracy of your personal information, or if you wish to see any of the personal information we hold on you or if you wish us to stop processing your personal information for any particular purpose or purposes then please contact us by e-mail at marketing@BCUK .com or by writing to:

 

The Data Compliance Officer
BCUK Ltd