GDPR / PROTECTION OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA AND COOKIES USED ON THE WEBSITE
§1. Introduction
- The privacy of visitors to our website is very important to us, and we make every effort to protect it. This policy explains what we do with your personal data.
- Consent to the use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this policy during your first visit to our website allows us to use cookies on each subsequent visit to our website.
§2. Collection of Personal Data
The following types of personal data may be collected, stored and used:
- information about your computer, including your IP address, geographical location, browser type and version, and operating system;
- information about your visits to and use of this website, including the referral source, length of visit, page views, and website navigation paths;
- information such as your email address that you provide when registering on our website;
- information entered while creating a profile on our website, such as your name and surname, profile pictures, gender, date of birth, relationship status, interests and hobbies, educational background, and employment details;
- information such as your name and email address that you provide in order to subscribe to our emails or newsletters;
- information entered while using the services available on our website;
- information generated while using our website, including when, how often, and under what circumstances you use it;
- information relating to any purchases you make, services you use, or transactions carried out through our website, including your name and surname, address, telephone number, email address, and credit card details;
- information that you publish on our website with the intention of making it available on the Internet, including your username, profile pictures, and the content of your posts;
- information contained in any correspondence sent to us by email or through our website, including communication content and metadata;
- any other personal data that you send to us.
Before disclosing another person’s personal data to us, you must obtain that person’s consent to the disclosure and processing of their personal data in accordance with this policy.
§3. Use of Your Personal Data
Personal data submitted to us through our website will be used for the purposes specified in this policy or on the relevant pages of the website. We may use your personal data for the following purposes:
- administering our website and business;
- personalizing our website for you;
- enabling your use of the services available on our website;
- sending goods purchased through our website;
- providing services purchased through our website;
- sending statements, invoices, and payment reminders to you, and collecting payments from you;
- sending non-marketing commercial communications;
- sending email notifications that you have requested;
- sending our email newsletter if you have requested it (you may inform us at any time if you no longer wish to receive the newsletter);
- sending marketing communications relating to our business or the businesses of carefully selected third parties that we believe may be of interest to you, by post or, where you have specifically agreed to this, by email or similar technology (you may inform us at any time if you no longer wish to receive marketing communications);
- providing third parties with statistical information about our users (however, those third parties will not be able to identify any individual user from that information);
- handling inquiries and complaints made by or about you relating to our website;
- maintaining the security of our website and preventing fraud;
- verifying compliance with the terms and conditions governing the use of our website (including monitoring private messages sent through our private messaging service);
- other uses.
If you submit personal data for publication on our website, we will publish and otherwise use that information in accordance with the license you grant to us.
Your privacy settings may be used to limit the publication of your information on our website and may be adjusted using the privacy controls available on the website.
We will not, without your express consent, provide your personal data to any third party, or any affiliated third party, for direct marketing purposes.
§4. Disclosure of Personal Data
We may disclose your personal data to any of our employees, officers, representatives, suppliers, or subcontractors insofar as it is reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy.
We may disclose your personal data to any member of our group of companies (meaning our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company, and all of its subsidiaries) insofar as it is reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy.
We may disclose your personal data:
- to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
- in connection with any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings;
- in order to establish, exercise, or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention);
- to the purchaser (or prospective purchaser) of any business or asset that we are selling (or contemplating selling); and
- to any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of such personal data where, in our reasonable opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal data.
Except as provided in this Privacy Policy, we will not provide your personal information to third parties.
§5. International Data Transfers
- The information that we collect may be stored, processed, and transferred between any of the countries in which we operate in order to enable us to use the information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
- The information that we collect may be transferred to countries that do not have data protection laws equivalent to those in force in the European Economic Area, including the United States of America, Russia, Japan, China, and India.
- Personal information that you publish on our website or submit for publication on our website may be available, via the Internet, around the world. We cannot prevent the use or misuse of such information by others.
- You expressly agree to the transfers of personal data described in this Section 5.
§6. Retention of Personal Data
- In this Section G, we set out our data retention policies and procedures, which are designed to help ensure that we comply with our legal obligations regarding the retention and deletion of personal data.
- Personal data that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.
- Without prejudice to Section G-2, we will usually delete personal data falling within the categories set out below at the date/time specified below:
- the relevant type of personal data will be deleted every 3 weeks, to the extent required by law.
- Notwithstanding the other provisions of this Section G, we will retain documents (including electronic documents) containing personal data:
- to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
- if we believe that the documents may be relevant to any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings; and
- in order to establish, exercise, or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention).
§7. Security of Personal Data
- We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse, or alteration of your personal data.
- We will store all personal data that you provide on our secure servers (protected by password and firewall).
- All electronic financial transactions entered into through our website will be protected by encryption technology.
- You acknowledge that the transmission of information over the Internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the Internet.
- You are responsible for keeping confidential the password you use to access our website; we will not ask you for your password (except when you log in to our website).
§8. Amendments
This policy may be updated from time to time by publishing a new version on our website. You should check this page periodically to ensure that you understand any changes to this policy. We may notify you of changes to this policy by email or through the private messaging system on our website.
§9. Your Rights
You may request access to the personal data we hold about you. Providing such data will require:
- providing appropriate proof of identity, or supplying the email address used during registration (if the email address exists in our system, the data will then be sent to that email address).
We may, at your request, withhold personal data to the extent permitted by law.
You may instruct us at any time not to process your personal data for marketing purposes.
In practice, you will usually either expressly agree in advance to our use of your personal data for marketing purposes, or we will provide you with an opportunity to opt out of the use of your personal data for marketing purposes.
§10. Third-Party Websites
Our website contains hyperlinks to third-party websites and information about them. We have no control over, and are not responsible for, the privacy policies and practices of third parties.
§11. Updating Information
Please let us know if the personal information that we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated.
§12. Cookies
Our website uses cookies. A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. Cookies may be either “persistent” cookies or “session” cookies. A persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date unless deleted by the user before that date. A session cookie expires at the end of the user session when the web browser is closed. Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to information stored in and obtained from cookies. We use both session and persistent cookies on our website.
- The names of the cookies that we use on our website, and the purposes for which they are used, are set out below:
- We use Google Analytics and Google Ads on our website to recognise a computer when a user visits the website, track users as they navigate the website, improve the website’s usability, analyse the use of the website, administer the website, prevent fraud, improve website security, personalise the website for each user, target advertisements that may be of particular interest to specific users, and enable the use of language versions of the website.
- Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies. For example:
- In Internet Explorer (version 10), you can block cookies using the available cookie handling override settings by clicking “Tools”, “Internet Options”, “Privacy”, and then “Advanced”.
- In Firefox (version 24), you can block all cookies by clicking “Tools”, “Options”, “Privacy”, selecting “Use custom settings for history” from the drop-down menu, and unchecking “Accept cookies from sites”.
- In Chrome (version 29), you can block all cookies by opening the “Customize and control” menu, clicking “Settings”, “Show advanced settings”, and “Content settings”, and then selecting “Block sites from setting any data” under the “Cookies” heading.
- You can delete cookies already stored on your computer. For example:
- In Internet Explorer (version 10), you must delete cookies manually (instructions are available at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278835).
- In Firefox (version 24), you can delete cookies by clicking “Tools”, “Options”, and “Privacy”, then selecting “Use custom settings for history”, clicking “Show Cookies”, and then clicking “Remove All Cookies”.
- In Chrome (version 29), you can delete all cookies by opening the “Customize and control” menu, clicking “Settings”, “Show advanced settings”, and “Clear browsing data”, then selecting “Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data” before clicking “Clear browsing data”.
- Deleting cookies will have a negative impact on the usability of many websites.