Privacy Policy for English Gothic Heritage (GothicEngland.com)

Last Updated: October 26, 2023

1. Introduction & Data Controller

English Gothic Heritage ("we", "us", "our") operates the website GothicEngland.com. We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains in detail how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your personal data when you visit our website, interact with our content on Gothic architecture and history, subscribe to our services, or contact us.

We are the "data controller" for the purposes of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018, and other applicable data protection laws. This means we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use your personal information.

2. The Data We Collect About You

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. We may collect, use, store, and transfer different kinds of personal data about you, which we have grouped as follows:

• Identity Data: Includes first name, last name, username or similar identifier, title.
• Contact Data: Includes email address, billing address, delivery address.
• Financial Data: Includes payment card details (which are processed directly by our secure third-party payment processors and not stored by us).
• Transaction Data: Includes details about payments to and from you and other details of products or services you have purchased from us (e.g., digital guides, membership).
• Technical Data: Includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform, and other technology on the devices you use to access this website.
• Profile Data: Includes your username and password, purchases or orders made by you, your interests, preferences, feedback, and survey responses.
• Usage Data: Includes information about how you use our website, products, and services, including pages visited, time spent on pages, clickstream data, and navigation paths.
• Marketing and Communications Data: Includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences.
• Content Data: Includes any information, comments, reviews, or materials you post on our website, forums, or submit to us.

We also collect, use, and share Aggregated Data such as statistical or demographic data for any purpose. Aggregated Data could be derived from your personal data but is not considered personal data in law as this data will not directly or indirectly reveal your identity.

3. How We Collect Your Personal Data

We use different methods to collect data from and about you including through:

• Direct Interactions: You may give us your Identity, Contact, Profile, and Financial Data by filling in forms or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email, or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you:
  • Create an account on our website;
  • Subscribe to our newsletter or publications;
  • Request marketing to be sent to you;
  • Purchase a product or service;
  • Enter a competition, promotion, or survey; or
  • Give us feedback or contact us.
• Automated Technologies or Interactions: As you interact with our website, we will automatically collect Technical Data and Usage Data about your equipment, browsing actions, and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, server logs, and other similar technologies. Please see our Cookie section for further details.
• Third Parties or Publicly Available Sources: We may receive personal data about you from various third parties as set out below:
  • Technical Data from analytics providers (such as Google Analytics based outside the UK);
  • Contact, Financial, and Transaction Data from providers of technical, payment, and delivery services (such as Stripe or PayPal);
  • Identity and Contact Data from publicly available sources such as social media platforms (e.g., if you interact with us on Facebook or Twitter).

4. How We Use Your Personal Data (Purposes & Legal Bases)

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

• Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you (e.g., to deliver a purchased guide).
• Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests (e.g., to analyse and improve our website).
• Where we need to comply with a legal obligation.
• Where you have given us your explicit consent (e.g., for certain marketing communications).

Purposes for Which We Will Use Your Personal Data

Below is a description of the ways we plan to use your personal data, and which of the legal bases we rely on to do so. We have also identified what our legitimate interests are where appropriate.

To register you as a new customer/user:
Data Used: Identity, Contact.
Lawful Basis: Performance of a contract with you.

To process and deliver your order including managing payments, fees, and charges:
Data Used: Identity, Contact, Financial, Transaction.
Lawful Basis: Performance of a contract with you; Necessary for our legitimate interests (to recover debts due to us).

To manage our relationship with you, including notifying you about changes to our terms or privacy policy, and asking you to leave a review:
Data Used: Identity, Contact, Profile, Marketing and Communications.
Lawful Basis: Performance of a contract with you; Necessary to comply with a legal obligation; Necessary for our legitimate interests (to keep our records updated and to study how customers use our products/services).

To administer and protect our business and this website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting, and hosting of data):
Data Used: Identity, Contact, Technical.
Lawful Basis: Necessary for our legitimate interests (for running our business, provision of administration and IT services, network security, to prevent fraud); Necessary to comply with a legal obligation.

To deliver relevant website content and advertisements to you and measure or understand the effectiveness of the advertising we serve to you:
Data Used: Identity, Contact, Profile, Usage, Marketing and Communications, Technical.
Lawful Basis: Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them, to grow our business, and to inform our marketing strategy).

To use data analytics to improve our website, products/services, marketing, customer relationships, and experiences:
Data Used: Technical, Usage.
Lawful Basis: Necessary for our legitimate interests (to define types of customers for our products and services, to keep our website updated and relevant, to develop our business, and to inform our marketing strategy).

To make suggestions and recommendations to you about goods or services that may be of interest to you:
Data Used: Identity, Contact, Technical, Usage, Profile.
Lawful Basis: Necessary for our legitimate interests (to develop our products/services and grow our business) or, where required by law, your explicit consent.

5. Marketing Communications

We may use your Identity, Contact, Technical, Usage, and Profile Data to form a view on what we think you may want or need, or what may be of interest to you. This is how we decide which products, services, and offers may be relevant for you (we call this marketing).

You will receive marketing communications from us if you have requested information from us or purchased goods or services from us and you have not opted out of receiving that marketing. We will also seek your explicit consent for certain types of marketing (e.g., our regular newsletter).

You can ask us to stop sending you marketing messages at any time by following the opt-out links on any marketing message sent to you or by contacting us at any time. Where you opt out of receiving these marketing messages, this will not apply to personal data provided to us as a result of a product/service purchase, warranty registration, product/service experience, or other transactions.

6. Disclosures of Your Personal Data

We may share your personal data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in section 4:

• Internal Third Parties: Other companies in the English Gothic Heritage group acting as joint controllers or processors.
• External Third Parties:
  • Service providers acting as processors who provide IT, system administration, hosting, payment processing, and email delivery services.
  • Professional advisers acting as processors or joint controllers including lawyers, bankers, auditors, and insurers who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance, and accounting services.
  • HM Revenue & Customs, regulators, and other authorities acting as processors or joint controllers based in the United Kingdom who require reporting of processing activities in certain circumstances.
  • Third parties to whom we may choose to sell, transfer, or merge parts of our business or our assets. Alternatively, we may seek to acquire other businesses or merge with them. If a change happens to our business, then the new owners may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this privacy policy.
• Third Parties for Marketing: We will get your express opt-in consent before we share your personal data with any third party for marketing purposes.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

7. International Transfers

We do not transfer your personal data outside the United Kingdom (UK) or the European Economic Area (EEA) on a regular basis. However, some of our external third-party service providers (e.g., cloud hosting, analytics, email delivery) may be based outside the UK/EEA so their processing of your personal data will involve a transfer of data outside the UK/EEA.

Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the UK/EEA, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented:

• We will only transfer your personal data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data by the UK government.
• Where we use certain service providers, we may use specific contracts approved for use in the UK which give personal data the same protection it has in the UK (e.g., International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum).

8. Data Security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used, or accessed in an unauthorized way, altered, or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors, and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

9. Data Retention

We will only retain your personal data for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting, or reporting requirements. We may retain your personal data for a longer period in the event of a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation in respect to our relationship with you.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal, regulatory, tax, accounting, or other requirements.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see Your Legal Rights below for further information. In some circumstances we will anonymize your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes, in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

10. Your Legal Rights Under GDPR

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. Please click on the links below to find out more about these rights:

• The right to be informed – You have the right to be informed about the collection and use of your personal data.
• The right of access – You have the right to request copies of your personal data from us (commonly known as a "data subject access request").
• The right to rectification – You have the right to request correction of any inaccurate or incomplete personal data we hold about you.
• The right to erasure – You have the right to request erasure of your personal data in certain circumstances (the "right to be forgotten").
• The right to restrict processing – You have the right to request restriction of processing your personal data in certain circumstances.
• The right to data portability – You have the right to request transfer of your personal data to you or a third party in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format.
• The right to object to processing – You have the right to object to processing of your personal data in certain circumstances, including for direct marketing.
• Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling – We do not engage in solely automated decision-making that has legal or similarly significant effects.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us using the details in Section 15. You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive, or excessive. Alternatively, we could refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK regulator for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact us in the first instance.

11. Cookies & Similar Technologies

Our website uses cookies and similar tracking technologies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site. A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree.

We use the following categories of cookies:

• Strictly Necessary Cookies: These are required for the operation of our website (e.g., to enable you to log into secure areas).
• Analytical/Performance Cookies: These allow us to recognize and count the number of visitors and see how visitors move around our website. This helps us improve the way our website works.
• Functionality Cookies: These are used to recognize you when you return to our website, enabling us to personalize our content for you, greet you by name, and remember your preferences.
• Targeting Cookies: These record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited, and the links you have followed. We may use this information to make our website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests.

You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when websites set or access cookies. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this website may become inaccessible or not function properly. For more detailed information on the cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them, please see our separate Cookie Policy.

12. Third-Party Links

This website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins, and applications (e.g., links to historical resources, architectural databases, or social media platforms). Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy policy of every website you visit.

13. Children's Data

Our website and services are not intended for children under the age of 16, and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children. If you are under 16, please do not provide any personal data to us. If we learn that we have collected personal data from a child under 16, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe we might have any information from or about a child under 16, please contact us immediately.

14. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, technology, legal requirements, or other factors. We will post the updated policy on this page with a revised "Last Updated" date. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically to stay informed about how we are protecting your information. Where changes are material, we may notify you by email or through a notice on our website.

15. Contact Details & Complaints