Relax, we want you to be comfortable about how we manage your data…
Looking after our customers is hugely important to us and how we manage your personal data is just one of the ways we show how much we care. We take data handling very seriously and want you to be confident that your personal information is safe with us. To help you better understand how we store and use your data, we’ve created this helpful page.
What is Personal Information?
Personal Information is defined as any information (data) which can be used to directly or indirectly identify a living individual. This can include obvious things like your name, date of birth, address, or contact details. However, it can also include less obvious things like your computer IP address and location.
There are also certain types of data that are considered ‘Sensitive’ Personal Information such as your medical details, political or religious beliefs, or sexual orientation. We’ll never ask you for this type of information.
What Personal Information Do We Collect?
Below is a list of the different types of personal data that we may collect from you through various interactions both in-store and online:
Aggregated Data
This data is non-identifying data. We’ll never store information that we don’t have a legal and fair reason for retaining. Sometimes, we’ll strip back a lot of information or replace your information with anonymous data such as a customer number. We use this data to help us better understand larger groups of customers or our entire consumer base.
Identifying Data
This data is what helps us identify you as an individual. This can be anything from your name and title to your customer number if you have an online account with us.
Contact Data
This is the data we collect that helps us to contact you and is usually in the form of an address, telephone number, postal address, or email address. It may also be a username on social media.
Financial Data
These are the details about your bank account or payment card. We’ll only request this information when you make a purchase online, on our app, or in-store using a payment card or cash-alternative payment method.
Location Data
This is the data we collect on your location and helps us to provide you with information such as your nearest store.
Transaction Data
This is the information we collect when you make a purchase from us either instore, online, or through our mobile app. This information includes when and where you made your purchase, what items you purchased, and how you chose to pay for your items. It also includes the location that we sent the items to and any offers or discounts that were applied to the purchase.
User Data
This is the information that we collect about you as a user of our website, app, stores, and other services. It can include anything from surveys and product feedback to CCTV footage and number plate recognition. This data allows us to create a better picture of you as a consumer and helps us to ensure we’re creating a great product offering to match demand.
Interaction Data
This is the data we collect that shows us how you interact with our website, app, and products. It can include what you click on or interact with on our website and app or the products, services, and other offerings that you choose to interact with in our stores.
Marketing & Communication Data
This is information revolving around marketing material and your preferences, which you set when you create an online account with us or sign up to email communications. It also includes your interaction with our email and online marketing – including ads features on other websites.
We want to ensure we’re sending you marketing emails with content you’ll love and this data helps us to tailor and improve those emails and other marketing materials.
When do we collect this information?
We’ll collect various bits of data depending on how you choose to interact with us. We’ve listed the different ways you might interact with us and the data we might collect from each interaction below:
Browsing or shopping on our website or app
When you browse our products online, whether it’s via our website or our mobile app, we’ll collect information about your browsing behaviour. This includes what you click on and how long you spend on each page. We’ll also collect information on the device that you’re using such as its make, model, and IP address. This helps us to identify what devices our audiences tend to use so we can better tailor our content.
If you place an order with us, we’ll gather identifying information about you, such as your name and address, as well as transaction and financial data such as what items you’ve ordered and in what quantity, when you purchased them, and how you paid for them.
Creating and using an online account
If you create an account online with us, we’ll gather some identifying data about you so we can communicate with you about your orders and provide relevant marketing material. This will include your title, name, date of birth, email address, and telephone number. You’ll also be able to provide your interests to better tailor the marketing emails you receive and set up and manage the payment card details that we have on record.
Visiting our stores
We have CCTV fitted throughout our stores so it’s likely that we’ll capture footage of you as you shop. This will only be used, along with any interaction data we collect, in order to pursue or defend any legal claims.
If you choose to receive an e-receipt rather than a paper copy for your in-store purchase, we will also need to acquire your email address.
On occasion, we may also request other data from you, such as your postcode, to assist in customer base research. You have no obligation to provide this data to us.
Communicating with us
If you contact us through any channel, we’ll store information on your contact details like your email address, telephone number, username, or postal address so we can communicate with you about your query.
If you take part in any surveys, promotions, prize draws, or competitions, we’ll collect any information that you provide to us in your feedback or contribution. Similarly, if you leave us or our products a review, we’ll gather the information you’ve provided to us in connection with this.
When we send you marketing materials, such as emails, we’ll also collect interaction data to help us learn what our customers are and aren’t engaging with.
Any other sources
In some instances, it’s helpful and necessary for us to get information from other sources. This can include third party specialist companies, online media channels, or public registers and records.
Data Privacy Notices
Where we collect your information for any purpose, we’re required to inform you: who we are, what information we’re collecting, why we need it, the lawful basis for obtaining it, how long we’ll keep it for and how we’ll use it.
You can view some of our Data Privacy Notices (DPNs) via the links below – we’ll have specific notices for certain events or actions such as store openings, customer feedback, customer services, promotions, competitions, prize draws, and online account management.
Any data we hold about you should be kept accurate and up to date. We’ll often rely on you to notify us of any changes. This supports your right to rectify discrepancies and errors in the personal data we hold of you.
Why do we collect personal data?
Gathering personal information helps us to gain a better understanding of our customers and helps us ensure we’re offering the best products and services. We want to give you a great, personalised shopping experience and we wouldn’t be able to do this without getting to know you.
Studying large-scale data of our customer base gives us valuable insight and helps us to gauge what our customers love or just like and tailor our offering to suit demand. This research also helps us to further develop and adapt our website, app, and stores in an effort to improve your shopping experience.
Personal data such as your location and interests help us to provide you with fantastic services like our local store finder, online account, and relevant marketing communications (such as emails an online advertisements). We also need your contact details and address so we can communicate with you about your order, give you great customer service, and get your products to your door.
To ensure the safety of both our customers and colleagues, we use CCTV in our stores. These cameras capture footage to help prevent and detect crime, ensuring our stores remain safe environments.
Our carparks utilise Automatic Number Plate Recognition technology (ANPR) to ensure that all vehicles adhere to our parking restrictions. In the event of a motor incident or security issue within our car park, we may use this captured data to assist in any investigations.
We’ll only process your data for the purpose that we inform you of such as processing orders, sending product updates and offers, marketing, handling complaints. We should not use data collected for one purpose to fulfil another purpose.
Who do we share this personal data with?
We don’t usually share your information with any other parties, however, there are occasions when we might have to - for example, to provide a courier with your address. On the occasions where we do share your data, we’ll never provide third parties with more information than they need to perform their duty directly on our behalf and under our instruction.
If your order contains items that are sold and dispatched by our Trusted Partners, we’ll need to share some details with them - such as your name, contact information, and delivery address – so they can get your items to you and provide any after-purchase services.
If we need to share your personal information for any other reason, we’ll always endeavour to gain your consent beforehand.
We partner with Microsoft Clarity and Microsoft Advertising to capture how you use and interact with our website through behavioral metrics, heatmaps, and session replay to improve and market our products/services. Website usage data is captured using first and third-party cookies and other tracking technologies to determine the popularity of products/services and online activity. Additionally, we use this information for site optimization, fraud/security purposes, and advertising. For more information about how Microsoft collects and uses your data, visit the Microsoft Privacy Statement.
How do we protect your personal data?
We’ve always been very careful with the data we hold, especially customer data. We take every reasonable effort and technical measure to protect the data we hold about you from unauthorised access, alteration, or disclosure.
We won’t ask you for more information than is necessary to carry out the activity we’re collecting it for and we’ll only request information that we have a legal and fair reason for obtaining. We also won’t keep your data for longer than is necessary or for any length of time that breaches legal statutory or regulatory requirements.
We have both physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards in place relating to the storing and imparting of any personal date. If we transmit your data for any reason, we’ll encrypt it during the process, and we also use encryption for some of our stored data as well and have the additional safety measure of strong firewalls. These systems are monitored frequently and we regularly carry out penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities.
If we ever need to transfer your data outside of the UK, we’ll put a contract in place to ensure the non-UK party protects your data to the safe level we do and will comply with UK data protection laws and regulation.
Only employees and Trusted Partners with legitimate reason for accessing this data are granted permission to do so. We’ll even ask you for proof of identity before we share your own personal data with you and we won’t reveal your full payment card details at checkout. You can never be too safe.
What are your rights?
Remember, you’re in control of the personal information that we collect and hold. You’re entitled to the following:
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To be informed when and how we collect, process, and store your data. This is ideally done before your data is collected, but there may be times when this isn’t possible, for example when your data isn’t collected directly from you. In this case, we’re required to inform you that we’ve acquired your data within one month of its collection.
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To access information that we hold about you. These requests for your personal information are free. To help us respond in the most efficient and effective way, please contact our Data Protection Officer using the email address provided below.
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To rectify any discrepancies or errors in the information we hold about you. If we’ve stored any information about you, and you believe it to be incorrect, you may ask that it be rectified.
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To restrict or object to processing. Other than processing your orders and handling service communications and marketing emails, we don’t tend to process your identifiable information. However, you may ask us to stop processing it, for example, if you want to take a break from receiving marketing communications.
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The right to data portability. If you want to transfer your data that we hold, we can.
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To ask us to erase the data we hold about you. However, you should note that there may be overriding legal statutory or regulatory reasons that prevent us from doing this.
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Where Automated Decision Making is used, there must be an option for human intervention.
Our Data Protection Officer
When it comes to your data, you’re in control. If you’d like to get in touch with us regarding your personal information or anything mentioned above, please contact our Data Protection Officer using the details below.
Email: [email protected].
Write to: DPO, The Range, Elsie Margaret House, William Prance Road, Plymouth, PL6 5ZD
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