Introduction

This sets out the basis on which any personal data we collect from you, or that you provide to us, will be processed by us. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your sensitive information and how we will deal with it. For the purposes of the Data Protection Act 2018 (‘the DPA’) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (‘the GDPR’), sensitive information includes what is defined as your personal data.

By visiting our website (sharpcircle.co.uk; the ‘website’) or using any of our applications and services, you accept and consent to the practices described in this Privacy Policy including the processing of your personal data under this lawful basis.

In this Privacy Policy, we seek to abide by the letter and spirit of the guidelines laid out by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office on its webpage on the ‘Right to be Informed’.

 

Who We Are

Sharp Circle, Norley Avenue, Wirral, CH62 9BW

For the purposes of the DPA and in-line with the GDPR, Sharp Circle is the Data Controller.

If you have any concerns about the way we use your information or any questions about this Privacy Policy, please let us know.  We can be contacted via email at [email protected], or you can write to us at the address above.

 

How We Use Your Information

We may use your information to:

 

    • market or sell our services and products to you, where you have provided your consent for us to do so
    • provide our services to you, where you are a customer or user
    • monitor, analyse and review our services in order to continually improve our provision

 

Our Products and the Specific Use of Your Data

Your data may be collected or used differently depending on which of our products and services you use. The following list provides details of the specific use of your data for each of our products:

 

    • Should I Buy This (Chrome Extension and Edge Addon): we do not collect, capture, process, store or otherwise use or handle any data via this extension/addon. This extension/addon is provided purely for entertainment purposes. Your usage or interactions with the extension/addon is not tracked by Sharp Circle, but some usage data may be captured through the standard analytics provided by the Google Chrome Web Store and the Microsoft Edge add-on. Please refer to Google’s and Microsoft’s own terms and privacy policies for further information about how your data may be used by them.

 

What Information We Collect About You

We may collect and process the following information about you:

 

    • Information you give us – this is information about you that you give us by filling in forms on our website, responding to our digital and offline advertising, using our live chat or through one of our partners or by corresponding with us by phone, email or otherwise.  We only request from you the minimum data required for you to use our service.
    • Usage data – we collect data about how you interact and use our website and other digital applications and services. This data is anonymised and used to improve our service provision.
    • Payment and financial information – we may collect payment card data at the point of payment in order to process payments. We do not directly store your card payment information; where you ask us to store your payment card details, these will be encrypted and tokenised by our payment partner, Stripe, on their platform. To find our more about how we interact with Stripe, please visit their website.
    • . Additionally, we may collect, store and use your bank account details for the administration and collection of payments for invoices, etc.
    • The only information we require from you to sign up to our marketing communications is your email address, but you may also want to provide us with your first and last names should you wish.
    • When you contact our support desk, we require only your email to initiate a support request. Information you provide during the support request may also be stored and used for audit, service improvement and training purposes.
    • We may also interact with you using our Social Media accounts. You can find information about how we interact with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn by clicking the hyperlinks in the names.

 

Information We Collect About You

Whenever you visit our website or use our digital applications and services, we may automatically collect the following information:

 

    • technical information – including the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet, your login information, browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform;
    • information about your visit – this includes the full Uniform Resource Locators (URL), clickstream to, through and from our website (including date and time), pages you have visited, page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain page and page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs).

 

Information We Receive From Other Sources

This is information we receive about you if you use any of the other websites we operate or the other services we provide. In this case we will have informed you when we collected that data if we intend to share those data internally and combine it with data collected on this website. We will also have told you for what purpose we will share and combine your data. We are working closely with third parties (including, for example, business partners, sub-contractors in technical, payment and delivery services, advertising networks, analytics providers, search information providers, credit reference agencies). We will notify you when we receive information about you from them and the purposes for which we intend to use that information.

 

Storage and Use of Your Information

All information that could identify individuals is processed in the United Kingdom, European Union or United States. Where your data is processed or stored in the United States, we ensure that providers offer adequate protection for your data and adhere to Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs).

We will never share your user information with third parties for promotional purposes.

Our newsletter and other emails are delivered to you using MailChimp, you can read more about how MailChimp handles your personal data by visiting its website here.

We store some personal data with Microsoft Office 365 and you can view its policies online here.

Our CRM system and live chat is provided by Hubspot.

We use Atlassian tools for project management, such as Jira Core and Confluence. Information related to support requests is stored in Jira Service Desk, which is an Atlassian Product.

We hold financial, accounting and payroll data with Intuit Quickbooks and process payments using Stripe. We will only process your payment details in connection with a payment being made by you. Wherever possible, we will invite you to pay us by Bank Transfer (BACS) or via an online card payment so that we minimise the handling of your payment card data.

Sharp Circle holds data related to your use of our digital applications and services and maintains responsibility for this. This does not include information related to payment processing where a customer has elected to use their own payment processing service.

We may also disclose your information to 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.

 

Security of Your Personal Information

We take the security of your personal data very seriously. Our approach to information security is constantly evolving and continually reviewed.

We have adopted industry best practices from both technological and business process perspectives in order to make the security of your data a key part of the way we do business.

We have policies and practices in place that not only ensure our compliance under the DPA but also the GDPR, including training and adequate procedures put in place for any staff that handle or have access to sensitive information.

 

Your Rights

We may contact you via email with updates about the services that we offer or any changes that we have made to our website.

You can opt in or out at any time by clicking the ‘Unsubscribe’ link in our emails.

Our website may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of our partner networks, advertisers and affiliates (including, but not limited to, websites on which our service may be advertised). If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites and any services that may be accessible through them have their own privacy policies and that we are not responsible or liable for these policies or for any personal data that may be collected through these websites or services, such as contact and location data. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites or use these services.

You have the right to find out about what information we hold about you. You can exercise that right by contacting us and we will send you any request for information in a suitable electronic form within 20 working days.  To make a request for information please contact [email protected] and we will be in touch.

If your personal data is incorrect then you have the right to rectify this information and ensure that it is accurate and up to date. If your data is incorrect then please contact us at the email address above and a member of the team will rectify this on your behalf.

You have the right ‘to be forgotten’ and to have your personal identifiable information permanently deleted from our systems. Again, if you would like to exercise this right then please contact us. There will be no charge made for reasonable electronic access to your information, your right to rectification or for your right to be forgotten from our systems.

 

Retention of Information

We have procedures in place to regularly review the personal data we hold. We will delete data that is no longer required by us.

 

Changes to this Policy

Any changes we may make to our Privacy Policy in the future will be posted on this page and you will be notified of any changes made.

 

Cookies

If you would like to manage your use of cookies or completely turn off cookies then you can find out how to do so by using the link here.  Please note that if you do limit of block cookie use on our website or digital applications and services the functionality of these may be affected.

Our website uses cookies 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.  By continuing to browse the website, you agree and consent to our use of cookies.

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. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive.

As part of our overall approach to privacy and transparency, this section describes what cookies are in the context of our web and mobile interfaces, and what their use means to you. At the end, we’ve included some links to help you research cookies and their impact, and how you can use your web browser to control the way it manages cookies.

We use the following types of 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, use a shopping cart or make use of e-payment system.
    • Analytical/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).
    • Targeting cookies – these cookies 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. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose but these cookies may contain no information capable of identifying you personally to us.

 

You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use below:

 

Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics to understand general trends about our content and traffic sources; for example, where users come from, which pages are most popular, which sites provide most traffic, how our marketing efforts impact the amount of visits we receive.

Google’s statement about privacy can be found here.

 

More information about cookies

Still don’t know what cookies are?  Then why not follow the link conveniently located here which provides more information about what they are and how they work.

 

Contact the Information Commissioner if there is a problem

If you consider we have not addressed your problem, you can contact the UK Information Commissioner’s Office for assistance. Further information can be found here.

 

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