Privacy at heart.

1. Introduction

This privacy policy tells you how Abtrace uses your personal data when you visit our website, interact with us, and procure our services.
It also tells you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

It is important that you read this privacy policy, together with any other privacy policies we may provide, so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data.​

This privacy policy was updated on 25th July 2019 in compliance with the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
If you have any questions, or would like to exercise your privacy rights, please follow the instructions in this privacy policy. See ‘How to contact Abtrace about privacy’ below.​

2. Our website and the Abtrace company

Through our website at www.abtrace.co, you can request contact or more information through the email provided. This website is not intended for children aged under 16 and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children.

Abtrace is a trading name of the legal entity Abtrace Limited, which is a registered Limited company in England and Wales (Company No.11535661). The registered address is: Imperial House 8 Kean Street, London WC2B 4AS, UK. The office location is: 8 Hermitage St, Paddington, London W2, 1BE, UK.
Abtrace Ltd is the data controller responsible for the Abtrace website and any handling of personal data carried out by or on behalf of Abtrace. Abtrace Ltd is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) under registration no CSN5588816.

3. Personal data which we collect about you

Personal data, or personal identifiable information (PII), means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).

We collect a minimum amount of information from our visitors to the Abtrace website. The personal data collected falls into these categories:
Identity Data: includes salutation, first name, last name, your company name, job title and registered company number (if applicable). If you interact with us through social media, this may include your social media user name.

Contact Data: includes addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers.
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.
Usage Data: includes information about how you use our website.
Tracking Data: includes information we or others collect about you from cookies and similar tracking technologies, such as web beacons, pixels, and mobile identifiers.
Marketing and Communications Data: includes your preferences in receiving direct marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences.

We may collect, use and share Aggregated Data such as statistical or demographic data for any purpose. Aggregated Data may be derived from your personal data but is not considered personal data in law, as this data does not directly or indirectly reveal your identity. However, if we combine or connect Aggregated Data with your personal data so that it can directly or indirectly identify you, we treat the combined data as personal data which will be used in accordance with this privacy policy.

​We do not collect any Profile Data, Financial Data or Transaction Data through the Abtrace website.​

We do not collect any Article 9 Special Categories of Personal Data about you via our website (this includes details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data). Nor do we collect any information about criminal convictions and offences.

If you contract with us for service, or request an initial assessment, estimate or quote, we will set up a two-way Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with you/your company, which will outline the specific privacy policy for contracted and prospective customers, including an outline of the data which we will collect about you, your company and your products. The NDA will describe how we how we will collect, store, protect and retain your data. We will never collect this data via our website.

​As part of the initial engagement process, before an NDA is in place, we may collect, store and retain some core information you provide to us about you, your company and your products. In requesting our services or more information about our services, tailored to your needs, we apply the implied consent model to the collection, storage and retention of this basic information.​

4. How is your personal data collected?

We use different methods to collect data from and about you, including remote and face to face interactions resulting in collection of personal data which is not classed as a Special Category of Personal Data under Article 9 of the EU GDPR.

You may give us your Identity and Contact Data when corresponding with us by post, phone, email or through chat or social media.

This includes personal data you provide to:

• request or enquire about our solutions and services;
• engage with us on social media;
• leave comments, feedback or reviews on our services.

You may give us your Identity Data, Contact Data and Financial Data when procuring services, setting up an NDA and/or Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) contract and settling invoices. Note that we will never request Financial Data via our website or social media, however, you may provide this information to us when corresponding by post, phone, email or via your or our invoicing/accounting system.

You may give us detailed information about your company, employees, contractors, products, legal and regulatory information, your customers and other commercial in confidence information which is covered by a two-way NDA and/or signed T&Cs contract between you and Abtrace as part of service provision. We will never collect this information via our website or social media. The NDA and T&Cs will outline how this detailed information is collected, stored, retained, and kept confidential and protected.

We may collect data via automated technologies or interactions. As you interact with us, including via the www.abtrace.co website, we may automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We may also collect Tracking Data when you use our website, or when you click on one of our adverts (including those shown on third party websites).

We may also collect data via third parties or publicly available sources. We may receive personal data about you from various types of third parties, including:

• Technical Data and/or Tracking Data from analytics providers, advertising networks and search information providers;
• Contact, Financial and Transaction Data from providers of payment and fraud prevention services;
• Identity and Contact Data from data partners; and
• Data from any third parties who are permitted by law or have your permission to share your personal data with us, such as via social media or review sites.
• We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data as outlined in section 5 below.

Abtrace does not collect personal data which is classed as a Special Category of Personal Data under Article 9 of the EU GDPR.​

5. How we use your personal data

• Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you. For example, when you purchase our products or services, that’s a contract.
• 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.
• Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation. For example, keeping records of our sales for tax compliance

For non-Article 9 interactions, generally, we do not rely on consent as a legal basis for processing your personal data as outlined in this privacy policy, other than where the law requires it, for example in relation to sending certain direct marketing communications. Regardless, you have the right to object at any time and/or request us to delete the information we hold about you.

See ‘Explaining the legal bases we rely on to process personal data’ to find out more about the types of lawful basis that we will rely on to process your personal data.

6. Explaining the legal bases we rely on to process personal data

The list below outlines the legal bases which we rely on to collect, process and store your personal data:

• Delivery of a contract with you;
• Necessary for our legitimate interests;
• Necessary to comply with a legal obligation;
• Consent obtained for direct marketing and communications.

Remember that if you request further information from us or request a call back/contact via our website, email, social media, telephone, text or messaging and, in doing so, you provide us with some of your (non-Article 9) personal or company details, we do not need explicit consent from you to process this data, as your consent is implied when you request the service or contact. However, we do need your explicit consent for us to use that information to subsequently send you certain direct marketing communications (outside of the original purpose you contacted for). Abtrace’s current advertising policy is to not directly market or advertise its (or anyone else’s) services to any individual, however, if such a time arises, Abtrace will ask you to opt in or out to receive direct marketing, advertising or promotions. You will be able to change your preferences at any time.​

Note that we may process your personal data for more than one lawful ground depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your data.

We do not carry out any automated decision making.

If you ever have any questions about this, all you have to do is ask. See ‘How to contact Abtrace about privacy’ below.

7. Advertising, marketing and your communications preferences

We may use your Identity, Contact, Technical, Tracking, Usage and Profile Data to form a picture of 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 and tell you about them. This is what we call direct marketing.

We may carry out direct marketing by email, phone, text or post.

On our website, we always try hard to make it really clear what we are doing and what communications you will be sent, and you have a right at any time to change your mind and say no thank you and opt out.

There may be different ways you will see adverts for Abtrace, and not all of these are based on using personal data – sometimes we buy advertising space in the real world and websites and social media. If you see Abtrace’s adverts on websites and in social media, these may not be directed specifically at you, we might just have bid for the space. But here’s some things we may do that may be specifically directed at you:

• Emails, for example an Abtrace newsletter;
• Phone calls, to tell you something that might be relevant to you.

Cookies can tell us if you have seen a specific advert, and how long it has been since you have seen it. This is helpful, because it means we can control the effectiveness of our adverts and control the number of times people might be shown our adverts (you know, before we risk become annoying). Cookies also help us understand if you’ve opened a marketing email because we don’t want to send you things you don’t read.

If you want more information about Tracking Data, in particular cookies, see Cookies below.

Almost all the cookies that relate to advertising are part of third party online advertising networks. If you’d like to read about how you can control which adverts you see online, see opt-out programs established by the Digital Advertising Alliance (United States), the Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada and the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance. We do not control cookies which are set by advertising networks.

8. Cookies

You can see from ‘Advertising, marketing and your communications preferences’ above, that cookies are a tool which we (and everyone one else who operates online) uses for advertising. That is just part of why cookies are used. Generally, they are pretty clever.​

Cookies help www.abtrace.co work better and provide lots of help in the background to make the process of being a www.abtrace.co customer a lot easier. You’d miss a lot of these things if they were gone – like it being easy to move from page to page and filling in forms.​

Other cookies collect information about how visitors use www.abtrace.co, for instance, which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies don't collect information that identifies a visitor. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and used to improve how www.abtrace.co works.

There are also cookies that allow www.abtrace.co to remember choices you make (such as the language or the region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features.​

There are cookies that collect information about your browsing habits in order to make advertising delivered to you more relevant to you and your interests (see Advertising, marketing and your communications preferences above). They are usually placed by advertising networks with our permission. They remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organisations such as advertisers. Quite often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organisation.​

When you use www.abtrace.co, your device or browser may be sent cookies from third parties, for example when using embedded content and social network links. It's important for you to know that we have no access to or control over cookies used by these companies or third-party websites. We suggest you check the third-party websites for more information about their cookies and how to manage them.

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.

9. Disclosures of your personal data

We may share your personal data (which is not classed as a ‘special category’ under Article 9 of the EU GDPR) with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in this privacy policy and to deliver the agreed contract between you and Abtrace. We may also share your personal data if the law otherwise allows it.

We may share personal data with the following category third parties:

• Suppliers and service providers to Abtrace (such as technology, software as a service and data hosting providers, payment processing and fraud prevention providers, manufacturers and post and courier services);
• Auditors, compliance organisations and professional advisers like bankers, lawyers, accountants, standards auditors, accreditation and certification framework organisations and insurers; and
• Government, regulators, and law enforcement.

We do not currently share personal data of any type with third parties connected to advertising, retargeting and analytics, other than our website and online store provider (which has inbuilt analytics services).

We may share data with third parties to whom we may, in the future, 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.

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.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

10. International transfers

Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the EEA, we will comply with applicable data protection law. This will only apply to personal data which is not classed as a Special Category under Article 9 of the EU GDPR.

Some of the mechanisms we may choose to use when undertaking an international transfer are:

• The transfer of your personal data is to a country that has officially been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data by the European Commission.
• We may use specific contracts approved by the European Commission which give personal data the same protection it has in Europe (called the “EU Model Clauses”).
• Where we use providers based in the US, we may transfer data to them if they are part of the Privacy Shield which requires them to provide similar protection to personal data shared between the Europe and the US. If the provider is not EU-US Privacy Shield certified, we may use the EU Model Clauses.

Some of our external third-party providers are based outside the EEA, so their processing of your personal data will involve a transfer of data outside the EEA.

Note that this does not apply to personal identifiable information which is classed as a ‘special category’ under Article 9 of the EU GDPR. We will never transfer this type of data outside of the EEA.​

11. 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. This is outlined in our IT Security Policy. 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.

12. Third-party links

Our www.abtrace.co website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. 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. Data retention

We will only keep 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.

​By law we have to keep basic information about our customers (including Contact, Identity, Financial and Transaction Data) for six years after they stop being customers for tax purposes.

​In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data; see ‘Your legal rights’ below for further information.

​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.

14. Your legal rights

If the EU GDPR applies to you because you are in the European Union, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data:

• The right to be informed – that’s an obligation on us to inform you how we use your personal data (and that’s what we’re doing that in this privacy policy);
• The right of access – that’s a right to make what’s known as a ‘data subject access request’ for copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• The right to rectification – that’s a right to make us correct personal data about you that may be incomplete or inaccurate;
• The right to erasure – that’s also known as the ‘right to be forgotten’ where in certain circumstances you can ask us to delete the personal data we have about you (unless there’s an overriding legal reason we need to keep it);
• The right to restrict processing – that’s a right for you in certain circumstances to ask us to suspend processing personal data;
• The right to data portability – that’s a right for you to ask us for a copy of your personal data in a common format (for example, a .csv file);
• The right to object – that’s a right for you to object to us processing your personal data (for example, if you object to us processing your data for direct marketing); and
• Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling – that’s a right you have for us to be transparent about any profiling we do, or any automated decision making.

​These rights are subject to certain rules around when you can exercise them. You can see a lot more information on them, if you are interested, on the UK Information Commissioner’s Office website.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us (see ‘How to contact Abtrace about privacy’).

​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 may 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. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

​We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.​

We have appointed an Information Governance Officer (IGO), who is responsible for overseeing questions in relation to this privacy policy. If you have any questions about this privacy policy, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact the IGO using the details in ‘How to contact Abtrace about privacy’ 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.​

15. How to contact Abtrace about privacy

If you have any questions about this privacy policy, or would like to exercise any of your rights, please email us , heading your email with the title ‘Information Governance Query’ (remember that Abtrace is a trading name of Abtrace Ltd) or write to us with your letter addressed to: Information Governance Officer, Abtrace, 8 Hermitage St, Paddington, London W2, 1BE, United Kingdom.

If you need help about our products and services, or our website generally, please contact us using the same email address.

16. A small request from Abtrace to you

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. You can do this by emailing us. Thank you.

​17. Changes to this privacy policy

The General Data Protection Regulation is new and the ICO is still issuing new bits of guidance about how businesses should follow it. So, you may see little updates to our privacy policy over the coming months. Be sure to check in and have read every now and then. Thank you.

© 2022 Abtrace Ltd