Privacy Policy

Protec Fire and Security Group Ltd (we or us) is aware of its obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and is committed to processing your data securely and transparently. This privacy notice sets out how we collect and use information about you whenever you visit and use our websites at www.protec.co.uk and shop.protec.co.uk.

Please read this privacy notice carefully to understand how we will use your personal information. If you have any questions or queries in relation to this privacy notice, you can contact our Data Protection Officer at:

gdpr.team@protec.co.uk
Protec House, Churchill Way, Nelson, Lancashire, BB9 6RT, United Kingdom

This privacy notice explains:

  1. Information we may collect about you
  2. Use of your information
  3. Contacting you
  4. Sharing your information
  5. Our legal basis for collecting, holding, and using your information
  6. Security and storage of your information
  7. Your rights

1. Information we may collect about you

We may collect the following information about you:

Information you give to us. If you use www.protec.co.uk or shop.protec.co.uk you may give us information about you by signing up for our mailing list, filing in a form for an enquiry, registering for an account or purchasing products on our website. This information may include your name, email address, postal address, contact number, information about when you signed up to the mailing list and your subscription, details of any enquiry you have made, the company you work for and any order details.

At www.protec.co.uk, you can also apply for jobs with us. If you do so, we will need to collect various information from you. This is set out in more detail in our recruitment privacy policy.

Information we automatically collect about you. We automatically collect information when you visit our websites. As you interact with our websites, we will automatically collect technical data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies. Please see our cookies policy for more information.

Information we receive from other sources. We do not generally collect information about you from other sources, although we do use Google Analytics to obtain information about how our websites are used. This includes statistical information about users which does not identify you.

2. Use of your information

We need to obtain, store, and use information about you so that we can provide the support you request. We may use information we hold about you in the following ways:

  • to confirm your identity
  • to administer your account with us, if you have one
  • for processing orders made via our website
  • to update and correct our account records
  • so we can review enquires and analyse the content for continuous improvement of the information we provide for our customers
  • to communicate with you regarding support tickets that you have created
  • to notify you about changes to our services
  • to send out email marketing such as events, products, and services (see the section below on ‘Contacting you’ for more information about this)
  • to administer our website and for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, statistical and survey purposes
  • to improve our website to ensure that content is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer
  • to carry out statistical and market analyses, including benchmarking exercises, to enable us to understand you better and improve our services
  • to update and correct our account records
  • to ensure that content of our website is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer
  • so we can review enquiries and analyse the content for continuous improvement of the information we provide for our customers to refer back to tickets for problems reoccurring in the future

We may combine information we receive from other sources with information you give to us for the purposes set out above (depending on the types of information we receive).

3. Contacting you

We will use your contact information to send you important information via emails, text messages or telephone. We may record telephone calls for security and training purposes.

We may use the information we hold about you in order to provide you with information about goods or services we feel may interest you. We will only contact you for marketing purposes where you have provided your consent for us to do so.

If you change your mind about being contacted for marketing purposes, please use the unsubscribe link on the email or contact marketing@protec.co.uk to update your preferences.

4. Sharing your information

We do not generally share your information with third parties. However, we do use third party processors who may access your information on our behalf. These are Barclaycard ePDQ, which provides our payment platform, MailChimp, which administers our mailing lists, and WordPress, which administers our website enquiry forms. We have contracts with these companies to ensure your personal information is kept securely.

We may share information with other members of our group of companies.

We may also share your personal information to third parties in the following circumstances:

  • If we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets
  • If we or substantially all of our assets are acquired by a third party, in which case personal data held by us about our customers will be one of the transferred assets
  • If we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our terms of use and other agreements; or to protect our rights, property, or the safety of our customers or others.

5. Our legal basis for collecting, holding and using your information

Data protection law sets out various lawful legal bases (or ‘conditions’) which allow us to collect, hold and use your personal information:

  • We will sometimes use your personal information based upon your consent. We will always tell you where this is the case and ask you to agree before we process your information. An example of using your personal information with your consent is in order to send you marketing such as events, products and services once you have opted in to this.
  • Where we have entered into a contract or contracts with you, we may need to use your information to provide you with services.
  • Where we are under a legal obligation which requires us to process your personal information.
  • Finally, sometimes it is necessary to process your personal information for the purposes of our own legitimate interests. We will only do so where these interests are not overridden by the interests and fundamental rights or the freedoms of the individuals concerned. For example, we process information about our users in order to improve our website.

Data protection law recognises certain “special categories” of personal information, which is information revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, genetic information, biometric information for uniquely identifying a person, information concerning health, and information concerning a person’s sex life or sexual orientation. These special categories are considered particularly sensitive and so we do not collect information of this nature unless you choose to tell us (for example on an enquiry form). You should only provide such information where you are content for us to use this information to respond to your enquiry.

6. Security and storage of your personal information

We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy notice.

If your query relates to a jurisdiction outside the UK, we may pass on your query to our partners in that jurisdiction. Our suppliers, including Barclaycard and MailChimp, may process and store information about you at destinations outside the European Economic Area.

We will generally keep personal information about you no longer than is needed for the purposes we collected it for. For instance, we will keep the data collected for our mailing list until you choose to unsubscribe from it, we will keep your data collected as a result of registering for an account with us or purchasing a product until you terminate the agreement with us, and we will keep records of transactions so that we can deal with any problems or issues that may arise in relation to the transaction. For further information about our retention periods, please contact gdpr.team@protec.co.uk.

7. Your rights

You have the right to request from us access to your own personal information. This is sometimes known as a ‘subject access request’.

You also have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for direct marketing purposes. We will tell you if we intend to use your data for this purpose or if we intend to disclose your information to any third party for this purpose. You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by checking certain boxes on the forms we use to collect your data or by contacting us (see part 3, above).

You have the right to request from us:

  • That any inaccurate information we hold about you is corrected
  • That your information is deleted
  • That we stop using your personal information for certain purposes
  • That your information is provided to you in a portable format
  • That decisions about you are not made by wholly automated means

Many of the rights listed above are limited to certain defined circumstances and we may not be able to comply with your request. We will tell you if this is the case.

If you choose to make a request to us, we will aim to respond to you within one month. We will not charge a fee for dealing with your request.

If you are dissatisfied with how we are using your personal information or if you wish to complain about how we have handled a request, then please contact us and we will try to resolve any issues you may have.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is the statutory regulator for data protection law. Details of how to complain to the ICO can be found at https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/.