Privacy and cookies policy

1. Introduction

We are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our website visitors, service users, individual customers and customer personnel.

This policy applies where we are acting as a data controller with respect to the personal data of such persons; in other words, where we determine the purposes and means of the processing of that personal data.

We use cookies on our website. Insofar as those cookies are not strictly necessary for the provision of our website and services, we will ask you to consent to our use of cookies when you first visit our website.

In this policy, “we”, “us” and “our” refer to Surveyors UK (Advantage) Ltd trading as Surveyors UK. For more information about us, see Section 18.

2. The personal data that we collect

In this Section 2 we have set out the general categories of personal data that we process and, in the case of personal data that we did not obtain directly from you, information about the source and specific categories of that data.

We may process data enabling us to get in touch with you (“contact data“). The contact data may include your name, email address, telephone number, postal address and/or social media account identifiers. The source of the contact data is you and/or your employer. If you log into our website using a social media account, we will obtain elements of the contact data from the relevant social media account provider.

We may process your website user account data (“account data“). The account data may include your account identifier, name, email address, business name, account creation and modification dates, website settings and marketing preferences. The primary source of the account data is you and/or your employer, although some elements of the account data may be generated by our website. If you log into our website using a social media account, we will obtain elements of the account data from the relevant social media account provider.

We may process your information included in your personal profile on our website (“profile data“). The profile data may include your name, address, telephone number, email address, profile pictures, gender, date of birth, educational details and employment details. The source of the profile data is you and/or your employer. If you log into our website using a social media account, we will obtain elements of the profile data from the relevant social media account provider.

We may process information relating to our customer relationships (“customer relationship data“). The customer relationship data may include your name, the name of your business or employer, your job title or role, your contact details, your classification / categorisation within our customer relationship management system and information contained in or relating to communications between us and you, or between us and your employer. The source of the customer relationship data is you and/or your employer.

We may process your personal data that are provided in the course of the use of our forums (“forum data“). The forum data may include contributions to our forums. The source of the forum data is you.

We may process information relating to transactions, including purchases of goods and/or services, that you enter into with us and/or through our website (“transaction data“). The transaction data may include your name, your contact details, your payment card details (or other payment details) and the transaction details. The source of the transaction data is you and/or our payment services provider.

We may process information contained in or relating to any communication that you send to us or that we send to you (“communication data“). The communication data may include the communication content and metadata associated with the communication. Our website will generate the metadata associated with communications made using the website contact forms.

We may process data about your use of our website and services (“usage data“). The usage data may include your IP address, geographical location, browser type and version, operating system, referral source, length of visit, page views and website navigation paths, as well as information about the timing, frequency and pattern of your service use. The source of the usage data is our analytics tracking system.

Please do not supply any other person’s personal data to us, unless we prompt you to do so.

3. Purposes of processing and legal bases

In this Section 3, we have set out the purposes for which we may process personal data and the legal bases of the processing.

Operations – We may process your personal data for the purposes of operating our website, providing our services, generating invoices, bills and other payment-related documentation, and credit control. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely the proper administration of our website, services and business.

Publications – We may process account data, profile data and/or forum data for the purposes of publishing such data on our website and elsewhere through our services in accordance with your instructions. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely the publication of content in the ordinary course of our operations.

Relationships and communications – We may process contact data, account data, customer relationship data, transaction data and/or communication data for the purposes of managing our relationships, communicating with you (excluding communicating for the purposes of direct marketing) by email, Whatsapp, SMS, post and/or telephone, providing support services and complaint handling. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely communications with our website visitors, service users, individual customers and customer personnel, the maintenance of our relationships, enabling the use of our services, and the proper administration of our website, services and business.

Personalisation – We may process account data, forum data and/or usage data for the purposes of personalising the content and advertisements that you see on our website and through our services to ensure that you only see material that is relevant to you. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely offering the best possible experience for our website visitors and service users.

Direct marketing – We may process contact data, account data, profile data, customer relationship data and/or transaction data for the purposes of creating, targeting and sending direct marketing communications by email, SMS, post and making contact by telephone for marketing-related purposes. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely promoting our business and communicating marketing messages and offers to our website visitors and service users. We will also ask for your consent prior to carrying out direct marketing where we are required by law to do so.

Research and analysis – We may process usage data, forum data and/or transaction data for the purposes of researching and analysing the use of our website and services, as well as researching and analysing other interactions with our business. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely monitoring, supporting, improving and securing our website, services and business generally.

Record keeping – We may process your personal data for the purposes of creating and maintaining our databases, back-up copies of our databases and our business records generally. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely ensuring that we have access to all the information we need to properly and efficiently run our business in accordance with this policy.

Security – We may process your personal data for the purposes of security and the prevention of fraud and other criminal activity. The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interests, namely the protection of our website, services and business, and the protection of others.

Insurance and risk management – We may process your personal data where necessary for the purposes of obtaining or maintaining insurance coverage, managing risks and/or obtaining professional advice. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely the proper protection of our business against risks.

Legal claims – We may process your personal data where necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims, whether in court proceedings or in an administrative or out-of-court procedure. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely the protection and assertion of our legal rights, your legal rights and the legal rights of others.

Legal compliance and vital interests – We may also process your personal data where such processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject or in order to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of another natural person.

4. Providing your personal data to others

We may disclose your personal data to our insurers and/or professional advisers insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes of obtaining or maintaining insurance coverage, managing risks, obtaining professional advice.

Your personal data held in our website database will be stored on the servers of our hosting services providers, Melt Creative Ltd identified at https://meltdesign.co.uk/.

We may disclose your personal data to Whatsapp LLC insofar as reasonably necessary to communicate with you via Whatsapp.

Financial transactions relating to our website and services are handled by our payment services providers, Stripe Payments Europe, Limited. We will share transaction data with our payment services providers only to the extent necessary for the purposes of processing your payments, refunding such payments and dealing with complaints and queries relating to such payments and refunds. You can find information about the payment services providers’ privacy policies and practices at https://stripe.com/gb/privacy.

We may disclose contact data along with any other personal data contained in enquiries made through our website or services to one or more of those selected third party suppliers of goods and/or services identified on our website for the purpose of enabling them to contact you so that they can offer, market and sell to you relevant goods and/or services. We will ask for your consent before we do this. Each such third party will act as a data controller in relation to the personal data that we supply to it; and upon contacting you, each such third party will supply to you a copy of its own privacy policy, which will govern that third party’s use of your personal data.

In addition to the specific disclosures of personal data set out in this Section 4, we may disclose your personal data where such disclosure is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject, or in order to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of another natural person. We may also disclose your personal data where such disclosure is necessary for the establishment, exercise, or defence of legal claims, whether in court proceedings or in an administrative or out-of-court procedure.

5. International transfers of your personal data

In this Section 5, we provide information about the circumstances in which your personal data may be transferred to a third country under UK data protection law.

Whatsapp LLC is situated in the United States. Transfers to WhatsApp LLC will be protected by appropriate safeguards, namely the use of standard data protection clauses adopted or approved by the competent data protection authorities.

You acknowledge that personal data that you submit for publication through our website or services may be available, via the internet, around the world. We cannot prevent the use (or misuse) of such personal data by others.

6. Retaining and deleting personal data

This Section 6 sets out our data retention policies and procedures, which are designed to help ensure that we comply with our legal obligations in relation to 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.

We will retain your personal data as follows:

We will retain your personal data during the period that you hold (or your employer holds) an active account on the Surveyors UK platform. We define an active account to be one which been logged in to in the past year. If you delete your Surveyors UK account, or if your account becomes dormant, we will hold your personal data for a further period of 6 years from the date of account deletion or from the date that your account falls dormant (as applicable).
If you (or your employer) do not hold an account on the Surveyors UK platform then we will delete your personal data within 6 months of collecting it.

If you grant to us a licence to publish any of your personal data, we may continue to retain and publish that personal data after the end of the relevant retention period specified in Section 6.3 in accordance with the applicable licence terms, subject to your data subject rights. If we cease to publish such personal data after the end of the relevant retention period specified in Section 6.3, that personal data will be retained for no longer than 30 days following the date that publication ceases.

We may retain anonymised data for analytics purposes for periods longer than those set out in Section 6.3. Once personal data is anonymised, it is no longer personal data.

Notwithstanding the other provisions of this Section 6, we may retain your personal data where such retention is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject, or in order to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of another natural person.

7. Security of personal data

We will take appropriate technical and organisational precautions to secure your personal data and to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal data.

We will store your personal data on secure servers, personal computers and mobile devices, and in secure manual record-keeping systems.

The following personal data will be stored by us in encrypted form: your name, contact information, password(s) and cardholder data.

Data relating to your enquiries and financial transactions that is sent from your web browser to our web server, or from our web server to your web browser, will be protected using encryption technology.

You acknowledge that the transmission of unencrypted (or inadequately encrypted) data over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet.

You should ensure that your password is not susceptible to being guessed, whether by a person or a computer program. You are responsible for keeping the password you use for accessing our website confidential and we will not ask you for your password (except when you log in to our website).

8. Your rights

In this Section 8, we have listed the rights that you have under data protection law.

Your principal rights under data protection law are:

the right to access – you can ask for copies of your personal data;
the right to rectification – you can ask us to rectify inaccurate personal data and to complete incomplete personal data;
the right to erasure – you can ask us to erase your personal data;
the right to restrict processing – you can ask us to restrict the processing of your personal data;
the right to object to processing – you can object to the processing of your personal data;
the right to data portability – you can ask that we transfer your personal data to another organisation or to you;
the right to complain to a supervisory authority – you can complain about our processing of your personal data; and
the right to withdraw consent – to the extent that the legal basis of our processing of your personal data is consent, you can withdraw that consent.

These rights are subject to certain limitations and exceptions. You can learn more about the rights of data subjects by visiting https://edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/general-guidance/gdpr-guidelines-recommendations-best-practices_en and https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/.

You may exercise any of your rights in relation to your personal data by written notice to us, using the contact details set out below.

9. Third party websites

Our website includes hyperlinks to, and details of, third party websites.

In general we have no control over, and are not responsible for, the privacy policies and practices of third parties.

10. Personal data of children

Our website and services are targeted at persons over the age of 16.

If we have reason to believe that we hold personal data of a person under that age in our databases, we will delete that personal data.

11. Updating information

Please let us know if the personal information that we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated.

12. About 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 is 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 the expiry date; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed.

Cookies may not contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal data that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies.

13. Cookies that we use

We use the following cookies:

Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website. We do not seek your consent before we place these cookies.
Analytical or performance cookies. These allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
Functionality cookies. These are used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region).
Advertising cookies. These cookies record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests.

You can find more information about the cookies we use in the table below:

Cookies we use	Purpose of cookie	Type of cookie	Persistent or session cookie
elementor	Allows us to implement or change our website’s content in real time.	Strictly necessary	Persistent
wpEmojiSettingsSupports	This cookie is set when a website user interacts with emojis on our website. It helps determine if the website user’s browser can display emojis properly. Session cookie Essential cookie	Strictly necessary	Session
_ga _ga_*	We use Google Analytics, which gathers information about the use of our website and uses cookies for this purpose. We use the information gathered by Google Analytics to create reports about the use of our website. You can find out more about Google’s use of information by visiting https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites and you can review Google’s privacy policy at https://policies.google.com/privacy.	Analytics	Persistent
Yt-remote-device-id ytidb::LAST_RESULT_ENTRY_KEY yt-player-headers-readable yt-remote-connected-devices	Videos are embedded on our site through YouTube. YouTube sets these cookies to store website user’s video preferences and to store the last search result entry clicked on to improve website user experience.	Functional	Persistent
yt-remote-session-app yt-remote-cast-installed yt-remote-session-name yt-remote-cast-available yt-remote-fast-check-period	Videos are embedded on our site through YouTube. YouTube sets these cookies to store website user’s video preferences as well as store information about the interface of the embedded video.	Functional	Session
YSC	Videos are embedded on our site through YouTube. Youtube sets this cookie to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages	Advertising	Session
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA PREF	Videos are embedded on our site through YouTube. YouTube sets these cookies to measure bandwidth, store user consents and store user preferences (e.g. language, format of results)	Advertising	Persistent

We use a Meta (Facebook) pixel on our website. Using the pixel, Meta collects information about the users and use of our website. The information is used to personalise Meta advertisements and to analyse the use of our website. To find out more about the Meta pixel and about Meta’s use of personal data generally, see the Meta cookie policy at https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policies/cookies/ and the Meta privacy policy at https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy. The Meta cookie policy includes information about controlling Meta’s use of cookies to show you advertisements. If you are a registered Facebook user, you can adjust how advertisements are targeted by following the instructions at https://www.facebook.com/help/568137493302217.

14. Managing cookies

Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies and to delete cookies. The methods for doing so vary from browser to browser and from version to version. You can obtain up-to-date information about managing cookies via these links:

Blocking all cookies will have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites.

If you block cookies, you will not be able to use all the features on our website.

15. Cookie preferences

You can manage your preferences relating to the use of cookies on our website by visiting: [URL]

16. Amendments

We may update this policy from time to time by publishing a new version on our website.

You should check this page occasionally to ensure you are happy with any changes to this policy.

17. Our details

This website is owned and operated by Surveyors UK (Advantage) Ltd.

We are registered in England and Wales under registration number 12836014, and our registered office is at Popeshead, Court Offices, Peter Lane, York YO1 8SU, England.

You can contact us:

by post, to the postal address given above;
using our website contact form;
using our chatbot (if available);
by telephone or WhatsApp, on the contact number published on our website;
by email, using the email address published on our website.

18. Data protection registration

We are registered as a data controller with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office.

Our data protection registration number is ZB680367.