Privacy Policy

Introduction

Welcome to the BrightLocal privacy policy (‘Policy’).

BrightLocal respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal data. This Policy will inform you as to how we look after your personal data, including when you visit our website (regardless of where you visit it from), or when you order or use our services, and tells you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

We will never sell your personal data to a third party.

This Policy is provided in a layered format so you can click through to the specific areas set out below. Please also use the Glossary to understand the meaning of some of the terms used in this Policy.

GDPR Compliance

In order to be compliant with the implementation of the GDPR we have updated this Privacy Policy and revised our use of personal data in line with the most recent guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Important information and who we are

Purpose of this policy

This Policy aims to give you information on how BrightLocal collects and processes your personal data, including through your use of this website, and any data you may provide through this website, or when you contact us or sign up to our newsletters, commission or order a product or service, or take part in a survey.

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

It is important that you read this Policy 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 Policy supplements the other notices and is not intended to override them.

Controller

BrightLocal Ltd is the controller and responsible for this website. and is the controller and responsible for your personal data (collectively referred to as “BrightLocal”, “we”, “us” or “our” in this Policy). Our parent company is BrightLocal Services Ltd. This privacy notice is issued on behalf of the BrightLocal group so when we mention BrightLocal, we, us or our in this privacy notice, we are referring to the relevant company.

Our Chief Technical Officer (CTO) is responsible for overseeing questions in relation to this Policy. If you have any questions, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact the CTO using the details set out below.

Contact details

Our full details are: First Floor, Huntingdon House, 20 North Street, Brighton, BN1 1EB, UK

Email: [email protected]

Changes to this policy and your duty to inform us of changes

This version was last updated in May 2018 and may be subject to further revisions.

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.

Third-party links

This 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 notice of every website you visit.

The data we collect about you

Personal data, or personal information, 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 may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together as follows:

  • Identity Data includes: first name, last name, username or similar identifier, title, photos or other images.
  • Contact Data includes: billing address, delivery address, email address and telephone numbers, and any social media accounts used to contact us.
  • Financial Data includes: bank account and payment card details.
  • Transaction Data includes: details about payments to and from you and other details of products and services you have ordered or commissioned from us.
  • 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: any username and password to access our systems, commissions 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.
  • Marketing and Communications Data includes: your preferences in receiving marketing from us and any third parties made known to you and your communication preferences.

We also 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.

We do not collect any Special Categories of Personal Data about you or any information about criminal convictions and offenses.

If you fail to provide personal data

Where we need to collect personal data by law, or under the terms of a contract we have with you and you fail to provide that data when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have or are trying to enter into with you (for example, to provide you with services). In this case, we may have to cancel an order or service you have with us but we will notify you if this is the case at the time.

How is your personal data collected?

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

  • Direct interactions. You may give us your Identity, Contact and Financial Data by filling in forms or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email, social media or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you:
    • commission or order for our products or services (for example, by telephone, email or via our websites);
    • create an account on our website or on one of our systems;
    • subscribe to our publications;
    • request marketing to be sent to you;
    • enter a competition, promotion or survey;
    • make a general inquiry about our products or services; or
    • give us feedback.
  • Automated technologies or interactions. As you interact with our website or social media accounts, we may automatically collect Technical 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 Policy for further details.
  • Third parties or publicly available sources. We may receive personal data about you from various third parties and public sources as set out below:
    • Technical Data from the following parties:
      • analytics providers such as Google and Hotjar based inside or outside the EU;
      • advertising networks, such as Google Ads or Facebook, based inside or outside the EU; and
      • search information providers, such as Google, based inside or outside the EU.
    • Contact, Financial and Transaction Data from providers of technical, payment and delivery services such as PayPal and Stripe, based inside or outside the EU and HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).
    • Technology providers we use, including support and inquiry ticketing systems such as Zendesk, client relationship and marketing platforms such as Intercom, and other hosting and communications providers such as Amazon WS, Linode, Digital Ocean, Rapidswitch, Wufoo, Pushcrew, Gotowebinar based inside or outside the EU.
    • Identity and Contact Data from publicly available sources.

How we use your personal data

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 or with a Customer.
  • 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.

Click here to find out more about the types of lawful basis that we will rely on to process your personal data.

Generally, we do not rely on consent as a legal basis for processing your personal data other than in relation to sending you marketing or third-party direct marketing communications via email or text message. You have the right to withdraw consent to marketing at any time by contacting us or by clicking ‘unsubscribe’ in any communication you receive from us.

Purposes for which we will use your personal data

We have set out below a description of all 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.

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. Please contact us if you need details about the specific legal ground we are relying on to process your personal data where more than one ground has been set out in the table below.

Purpose/Activity Type of data Lawful basis for processing including basis of legitimate interest
To register you as a new customer or account holder
  • Identity
  • Contact
 Performance of a contract with you

To process and deliver a service or order including:

  • Manage payments, fees and charges
  • Pass your details to a customer or administrative or technology providers in order to perform our services.
  • Collect and recover money owed to us
  • Identity
  • Contact
  • Financial
  • Transaction
  • Marketing and Communications
  • Performance of a contract with you or with a customer
  • Necessary for our legitimate interests (for tax and legal liability purposes, or to recover debts due to us)

To manage our relationship with you which will include:

  • Notifying you about changes to our terms or privacy policy
  • If have some other form of contractual relationship with us
  • Asking you to leave a review or take a survey
  • Identity
  • Contact
  • Profile
  • Financial
  • Transaction
  • Marketing and Communications
  • Performance of a contract with you
  • Necessary to comply with a legal obligation
  • Necessary for our legitimate interests (to keep our records updated, to comply with our legal and tax obligations, or to study how customers use our products/services)
To enable you to take part in a prize draw, competition or complete a survey
  • Identity
  • Contact
  • Profile
  • Usage
  • Marketing and Communications
  • Performance of a contract with you
  • Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them and grow our business)
To administer and protect our business and this website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data)
  • Identity
  • Contact
  • Technical
  • Necessary for our legitimate interests (for running our business, provision of administration and IT services, network security, to prevent fraud and in the context of a business reorganization or group restructuring exercise)
  • 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
  • Identity
  • Contact
  • Profile
  • Usage
  • Marketing and Communications
  • Technical
 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
  • Technical
  • Usage
 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
  • Identity
  • Contact
  • Technical
  • Usage
  • Profile
 Necessary for our legitimate interests (to develop our products/services and grow our business)
To send you marketing communications through email and, where applicable, through calls.
  • Identity
  • Contact
 Legitimate interest (to enable us to conduct account-based marketing and promote our services to new businesses).

Marketing

We strive to provide you with choices regarding certain personal data uses, particularly around marketing and advertising. We have established the following personal data control mechanisms:

Surveys & 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 products, services and offers may be relevant for you (we call this marketing).

We may send you product or service renewal reminders close to the anniversary of taking up a product or service or other communications we are obliged to send under a legal or contractual obligation.

You may receive marketing communications from us if you have expressly requested information from us about our services, or purchased goods or services, or made an inquiry, or if you provided us with your details when you entered a competition or registered for a promotion. All marketing communications are compliant with the applicable data protection regulations.

Third-party marketing

We will seek your express opt-in consent before we share your personal data with any company outside of the BrightLocal group of companies for marketing purposes.

Opting out

You can ask us or third parties to stop sending you marketing messages at any time or by following the opt-out or unsubscribe’ links in any marketing message sent to you or by contacting us.

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 commission or order, warranty registration, product/service experience or other transactions, or where we need to keep your contact details or make contact with you for contractual performance or legitimate interest purposes.

Cookies

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 information about the cookies we use, please see our Cookie Policy.

Change of purpose

We will only use your personal data for the purposes for which we collected it unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If you wish to get an explanation as to how the processing for the new purpose is compatible with the original purpose, please contact us.

If we need to use your personal data for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.

Disclosures of your personal data

We may have to share your personal data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in the table in paragraph 4 above.

  • Internal Third Parties as set out in the Glossary or elsewhere in this Policy.
  • External Third Parties as set out in the Glossary or elsewhere in this Policy.
  • Specific third parties listed in the Glossary or elsewhere in this Policy.
  • 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 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.

International transfers

In order to perform our services, we may transfer your personal data outside the European Economic Area (EEA).

Many of our external third parties are based outside the European Economic Area (EEA) so their processing of your personal data will involve a transfer of data outside the EEA.

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

Please contact us if you want further information on the specific mechanism used by us when transferring your personal data out of the EEA.

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.

We seek to use third-party technology providers that are ISO27001 certified or equivalent (SOC II) where practical.

Retention

How long will you use my personal data for

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfill 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 and employees (including Contact, Identity, Financial and Transaction Data) for six years after they cease being customers or employees for tax and legal liability purpose, but we also keep this information to make it easier for customers to make new, follow-on or repeat service orders. We will seek to renew consent for marketing communications on a periodic basis.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see Request erasure below for further information.

In some circumstances, we may 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.

Your legal rights

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:

  • Request access to your personal data.
  • Request correction of your personal data.
  • Request erasure of your personal data.
  • Object to the processing of your personal data.
  • Request restriction of processing your personal data.
  • Request transfer of your personal data.
  • Right to withdraw consent.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us.

No fee usually required

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.

What we may need from you

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.

Time limit to respond

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.

Glossary

You have the right to:

  • Request access to your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
  • Request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us.
  • Request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we may have processed your information unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. Note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.
  • Object to the processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground as you feel it impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes. In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which override your rights and freedoms.
  • Request restriction of processing of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios: (a) if you want us to establish the data’s accuracy; (b) where our use of the data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it; (c) where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or (d) you have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.
  • Request the transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party. We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.
  • Withdraw consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal data. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.