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Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

1.1 We are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our website visitors; in this policy we explain how we will treat your personal information.

1.2 We will ask you to consent to our use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this policy when you first visit our website. In any event by using our website and agreeing to this policy, you consent to our use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this policy.

1.3 This policy aims to give you information on how Kingsmere Finance collects and processes your personal data through your use of this website, including any data you may provide through this website when you make an enquiry, sign up to our newsletter, purchase a product or service or take part in a competition.

This website is not intended for children and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children.

It is important that you read this privacy notice together with any other privacy notice or fair processing notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal data about you so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data. This privacy notice supplements the other notices and is not intended to override them.

Controller

Kingsmere Finance is the controller and responsible for your personal data (collectively referred to as “Kingsmere Finance” “we”, “us” or “our” in this privacy notice).

Geoff Maclauchlan is responsible for overseeing questions in relation to this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact Geoff Maclauchlan using the details set out below.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority 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.

Changes to the privacy notice and your duty to inform us of changes

This version was last updated on 12.03.2019

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us.

2. Collecting personal information

2.1 We may collect, store and use the following kinds of personal information:

(a) information about your computer and about your visits to and use of this website (including your IP address, geographical location, browser type and version, operating system, referral source, length of visit, page views and website navigation paths);

(b) information that you provide to us for the purpose of subscribing to our email notifications and/or newsletters and/or webinars and/or events (including your name and email address);

(c) information that you provide to us when using the services on our website, or that is generated in the course of the use of those services (including the timing, frequency and pattern of service use);

(d) information relating to any purchases you make of our services or any other transactions that you enter into through our website (including your name, address, telephone number, email address and card details);

(e) information contained in or relating to any communication that you send to us or send through our website (including the communication content and metadata associated with the communication);

(f) any other personal information that you choose to send to us; and

2.2 Before you disclose to us the personal information of another person, you must obtain that person's consent to both the disclosure and the processing of that personal information in accordance with this policy.

3. Using personal information

3.1 Personal information submitted to us through our website will be used for the purposes specified in this policy or on the relevant pages of the website.

3.2 We may use your personal information to:

(a) administer our website and business;

(b) personalise our website for you;

(c) enable your use of the services available on our website;

(d) supply to you services purchased through our website;

(e) send statements, invoices and payment reminders to you, and collect payments from you;

(f) send you non-marketing commercial communications;

(g) send you email notifications that you have specifically requested;

(h) send you our email newsletter, if you have requested it (you can inform us at any time if you no longer require the newsletter);

(i) send you marketing communications relating to our business which we think may be of interest to you, by post or, where you have specifically agreed to this, by email or similar technology (you can inform us at any time if you no longer require marketing communications);

(j) provide third parties with statistical information about our users (but those third parties will not be able to identify any individual user from that information);

(k) deal with enquiries and complaints made by or about you relating to our website;

(l) keep our website secure and prevent fraud;

(m) verify compliance with the terms and conditions governing the use of our website (including monitoring messages sent through our website); and

(n) send you online surveys.

3.3 If you submit personal information for publication on our website, we will publish and otherwise use that information in accordance with the licence you grant to us.

3.4 Your privacy settings can be used to limit the publication of your information on our website, and can be adjusted using privacy controls on the website.

3.5 We will not, without your express consent, supply your personal information to any third party for the purpose of their or any other third party's direct marketing.

3.6 Any financial transactions carried out via our website will be handled through a trusted payment services provider with their own privacy and cookies policy. We will share information with our payment services provider only to the extent necessary for the purposes of processing payments you make via our website, refunding such payments and dealing with complaints and queries relating to such payments and refunds.

4. Disclosing personal information

4.1 We may disclose your personal information to any of our employees, officers, insurers, professional advisers, agents, suppliers or subcontractors insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this policy.

4.2 We may disclose your personal information to any member of our group of companies (this means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and all its subsidiaries) insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this policy.

4.3 We may disclose your personal information:

(a) to the extent that we are required to do so by law;

(b) in connection with any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings;

(c) in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk);

(d) to the purchaser (or prospective purchaser) of any business or asset that we are (or are contemplating) selling; and

(e) to any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of that personal information where, in our reasonable opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal information.

4.4 Except as provided in this policy, we will not provide your personal information to third parties.

5. International data transfers

5.1 Information that we collect may be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries in which we operate in order to enable us to use the information in accordance with this policy.

5.2 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.

5.3 You expressly agree to the transfers of personal information described in this Section 5.

6. Retaining personal information

6.1 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 information.

6.2 Personal information that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.

6.3 Notwithstanding the other provisions of this Section 6, we will retain documents (including electronic documents) containing personal data:

(a) to the extent that we are required to do so by law;

(b) if we believe that the documents may be relevant to any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings; and

(c) in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk).

7. Security of personal information

7.1 We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information.

7.2 We will store all the personal information you provide on secure servers.

7.3 All electronic financial transactions entered into through our website will be protected.

7.4 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.

8. Amendments

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

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

9. Your rights

9.1 You may instruct us to provide you with any personal information we hold about you; provision of such information will be subject to:

(a) the payment of a fee (currently fixed at GBP 10); and

(b) the supply of appropriate evidence of your identity (for this purpose, we will usually accept a photocopy of your passport certified by a solicitor or bank plus an original copy of a utility bill showing your current address).

9.2 We may withhold personal information that you request to the extent permitted by law.

9.3 You may instruct us at any time not to process your personal information for marketing purposes.

9.4 In practice, you will usually either expressly agree in advance to our use of your personal information for marketing purposes, or we will provide you with an opportunity to opt out of the use of your personal information for marketing purposes.

10. Third party websites

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

10.2 We have no control over, and are not responsible for, the privacy policies and practices of third parties.

11. Marketing 

We strive to provide you with choices regarding certain personal data uses, particularly around marketing and advertising. 

12. Promotional offers from us 

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, 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 services from us or if you provided us with your details when you entered a competition or registered for a promotion and, in each case, you have not opted out of receiving that marketing.

13. Updating information

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

13.2 You can ask us or third parties to stop sending you marketing messages at any time by contacting us at any time.

14. About cookies

14.1 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.

14.2 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.

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

14.4 Cookies can be used by web servers to identify and track users as they navigate different pages on a website and identify users returning to a website.

15. Our cookies

15.1 We use both session and persistent cookies on our website.

15.2 We use cookies 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 and improve the security of the website / personalise the website for each user / target advertisements which may be of particular interest to specific users.

16. Analytics cookies

16.1 We use Google Analytics to analyse the use of our website.

16.2 Our analytics service provider generates statistical and other information about website use by means of cookies.

16.3 Our analytics service provider's privacy policy is available at: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ .

17. Third party cookies

17.1 Our website also uses third party cookies.

17.2 We may publish Google AdSense interest-based advertisements on our website. These will be tailored by Google to reflect your interests. To determine your interests, Google will track your behaviour on our website and on other websites across the web using the DoubleClick cookie. This behaviour tracking allows Google to tailor the advertisements you see on other websites to reflect your interests. You can view, delete or add interest categories associated with your browser by visiting: http://www.google.com/settings/ads/. You can also opt out of the AdSense partner network cookie using those settings or using the NAI's (Network Advertising Initiative's) multi-cookie opt-out mechanism at: http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/. However, these opt-out mechanisms themselves use cookies, and if you clear the cookies from your browser your opt-out will not be maintained. To ensure that an opt-out is maintained in respect of a particular browser, you may wish to consider using the Google browser plug-in available at: https://www.google.com/settings/ads/plugin.

18. Blocking cookies

18.1 Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies; for example:

(a) in Internet Explorer (version 11) you can block cookies using the cookie handling override settings available by clicking "Tools", "Internet Options", "Privacy" and then "Advanced";

(b) in Firefox (version 39) you can block all cookies by clicking "Tools", "Options", "Privacy", selecting "Use custom settings for history" from the drop-down menu, and unticking "Accept cookies from sites"; and

(c) in Chrome (version 44), you can block all cookies by accessing the "Customise and control" menu, and clicking "Settings", "Show advanced settings" and "Content settings", and then selecting "Block sites from setting any data" under the "Cookies" heading.

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

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

19. Deleting cookies

19.1 You can delete cookies already stored on your computer; for example:

(a) in Internet Explorer (version 11), you must manually delete cookie files (you can find instructions for doing so at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/internet-explorer/delete-manage-cookies#ie=ie-11);

(b) in Firefox (version 39), you can delete cookies by clicking "Tools", "Options" and "Privacy", then selecting "Use custom settings for history" from the drop-down menu, clicking "Show Cookies", and then clicking "Remove All Cookies"; and

(c) in Chrome (version 44), you can delete all cookies by accessing the "Customise and control" menu, and clicking "Settings", "Show advanced settings" and "Clear browsing data", and then selecting "Cookies and other site and plug-in data" before clicking "Clear browsing data".

19.2 Deleting cookies will have a negative impact on the usability of many websites.

20. Cookie preferences

20.1 You can manage your preferences relating to the use of cookies on our website by clicking on the Cookie Control box on our website.

21. Data Security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised 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.

22. Data Retention

How long will you use my personal data for?

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

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 unauthorised 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 requirements.

Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal data are available in our retention policy which you can request from us by contacting us.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data.

In some circumstances we may anonymise 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.

23. Our details

24.1 This website is owned and operated by Kingsmere Finance Directors Ltd.

24.2 We are registered in England and Wales under registration number 10158567, and our registered office is at 9 Spindlestone View, Newcastle Upon Tyne, England, NE13 9AQ.

24.3 You can contact us by writing to the business address given above, by using our website contact form, by email to gm@kfdl.co.uk or by telephone on 07484 296515.

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