Our Privacy Policy
1. Values
Thank you for trusting us with some information about you. We take that trust seriously and we want you to know how we use your information and why.
If you have queries about how we use your data, or comments or questions about this Policy, please do email us. The email address to use is set out in section 2 below.
Policy updates: We keep this Policy under regular review, and this page may be updated from time to time. Please come back here to check the latest version. This Policy was last updated on the date given in the final box in the table in section 2 below.
2. Who are we?
Name: Affordable Interior Design
Trading Name: Affordable Interior Design
Email address for official notices: Info@AffordableInteriorDesign.com
Data Retention Period(s): We Process your Personal Data in order to fulfill obligation rising from law and/or use your Personal Data for options provided by law. We reserve the right to anonymise Personal Data gathered and to use any such data. We will use data outside the scope of this Policy only when it is anonymised. We save your billing information and other information gathered about you for as long as needed for accounting purposes or other obligations deriving from law, but not longer than 20 years.
Date this Policy last updated: May 24, 2018
3. Words with specific meanings
In this Policy, there are words and phrases that have a specific meaning or that we are using in a special way. They are:
-“personal data” any information about an identifiable living human being.
-“process” we “process” your personal data when we do anything with it, which might include: collecting, recording, organizing, storing, adapting, altering, retrieving, using, combining, disclosing, or deleting it.
-“special category data” personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, sex life or sexual orientation, health, genetic or biometric data.
4. What this policy describes
This policy describes how we will collect and use personal data about you.
We process information about:
“Prospects” potential customers or referrers;
“Customers” who have bought goods or services from us;
“Suppliers”, “Associates” suppliers or potential suppliers of goods or services to us;
“Affiliates” who have signed up to our affiliate scheme (if we have one).
5. What information do we process, and WHY?
a. Prospect
Most of the information we process comes from you. We process it so we can reply to you, and when you contact us again we know what you asked before, what you were sent, and what you told us.
Typically, we are collecting name, contact details, how we came across you, and background information from you or published by you on social media or freely accessible on the internet, on why you might be interested in our products or services or a relevant contact for our business.
If you sign up to a newsletter list, you will be sent what you asked for. We operate ‘double opt-in’ lists and you will need to reconfirm your subscription before anything is sent. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the unsubscribe button on any email.
You are not automatically subscribed to any other lists, but may be invited to join an appropriate one.
If we email you individually using our own email system, or respond to an email sent to us at any of our business email addresses, a copy of that email will also be stored.
If you make an enquiry via our website, we will keep details of that enquiry and response for our data retention period (section 2, Table, above).
We do not routinely keep special category data. To the extent we hold this, it was supplied or made publicly available by you.
b. Customer
Once you buy something from us, we will collect information from you at the point of sale.
This will include the information we collect from Prospects (above). We collect your email address, phone number and postal address so we can provide what we have contracted to, invoice you and keep proper records of our business relationship.
We process your data to support the delivery the goods and services you have bought. We keep records of the goods/services provided to you, and information you give us, so we can support you when needed and advise you of any additional services you may need.
Financial and credit card details
We do not receive or store your credit card details. Credit card payments are handled by an external secure processor in accordance with their data security policies.
We receive limited information from our processor for us to tie up your payment with your invoice.
If you pay us by BACS or direct transfer, we know only what the bank tells us, which is usually the name of the person who paid us and how much and the reference number.
We do not routinely keep credit scores nor use credit reference agencies.
When we are processing data about you on behalf of a customer, we are operating under the banner of our customer’s data privacy policy. We will refer any enquiry from you to them, as they are the ‘data controller’ responsible for dealing with your query. But we will support that by providing relevant information to our customer for passing to you.
c. Supplier and Associates
We collect information on potential and actual suppliers and associates. This is mostly provided by you, but we do add to it the same kind of data we use for Prospects (see above).
If you become a supplier or associate we keep a copy of the contract between us and your bank details so we can pay you. We also keep a record of invoices/payments for accounting purposes.
We keep a record of the work you undertook for us/our clients along with any comments, reviews or suggestions about that work including complaints (if any) and their resolution.
This information is all needed to manage our customer relationships and our supply chain.
d. Affiliate
If we set up an affiliate scheme, affiliate data will be held in accordance with this policy. We will ask you for information when you apply and that will be kept to administer the affiliate scheme.
6. Newsletters and automated emails
We monitor who opens what in our newsletter lists, and pre-set sequences of information we send you. We do this, so we can see if content is popular and generate more of it, or if it is not read.
There may be sub-routines that trigger if you click on links or articles. These are designed to offer you more information about things you are interested in.
You can unsubscribe from these sequences at any time.
Existing customers may receive emails about specific offers relating to things you have already purchased. You can unsubscribe from these at any time.
From time to time, we contact individual email newsletter subscribers but it is extremely rare. This would normally be if something odd were going on and we wanted to check you could see and use the content or find out what was causing a problem.
7. Data sharing – 3rd parties
We do not sell or exchange your personal data with organisations who may want to sell you something or use your data for research or other purposes.
a. Platforms
We keep a list of the software platforms we use to run our business. If you would like more information on the platforms we use, please email us (at the email address in section 2, Table, above).
We only work with Processing partners who are able to ensure the adequate level of protection to your Personal Data. We disclose your Personal Data to third parties or public officials when we are legally obliged to do so. We might disclose your Personal Data to third parties if you have consented to it or if there are other legal grounds for it.In order to provide a robust and reliable service, we depend on a number of cloud service providers to carry out key operations within our business. This includes things like document storage, payment processing, email processing, marketing assistance, social media management and website security.
b. People
We have an outsourced support team for our own business which may include Virtual Assistants, Web Designers, IT support, Sales and Marketing, Accounting and more. They have limited access to your data, where the service they provide to us means they need it.
For example, if our IT support wants to check the functionality of a laptop or back up, they may need temporary access to information that may include something about you.
For example, if we invoice you, our Accountant needs to process the information in the invoice.
Your information/advice is held in the strictest confidence. Our team are all contracted to strict confidentiality clauses.
8. Where is your data located?
Like most small businesses, we do not have any tailor-made software – we use mainstream packages for everything from our customer records, to email, to accounting.
This means that some of your data may be held in the EEA, and some may be held in services in the USA (with suitable data privacy shields) or elsewhere. We have picked mainstream suppliers with appropriate security standards.
9.Retention periods
Your information will be kept for the length of time set out in our retention period (see section 2, Table, above).
We need to keep customer information long enough to satisfy HMRC and our insurers. We keep information on prospective customers long enough to make our sales enquiry system effective.
If you subscribed to a newsletter or updates list, you will remain on the list(s) you joined until you unsubscribe from that list.
10. Your rights
You have the right to know what information we are collecting on you, and to amend it if it is inaccurate.
If you feel for some reason we have information we should not be keeping, or it is out of date or otherwise wrong, please let us know and we will take appropriate action.
Most of the information we hold is not based on your individual consent but is based on our needing the information to run our business and provide our products and services.
If you want to know what information we have about you (if any) email us at the email address set out above and give us your name, email address(es) and we will happily do a search and let you know what information we hold on you and how we are using it/have used it.
You have a “right to be forgotten” – but that does have some legal limits to it. If you want us to remove information about you, let us know. If you have been a customer, we may not be able to remove all data as we will have to ensure that we can continue to comply with legal, accounting, taxation and our insurer’s requirements.
11. Complaints
If you have a complaint about the way we are handling your information or how we have responded to a request for information or removal, you can take this up in the first instance by emailing us at the email address set out above.
12. Cookies and how they benefit you
Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites
Our cookies help us:
- Make our website work as you’d expect
- Offer you free services/content (thanks to advertising)
- Improve the speed/security of the site
- Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
- Continuously improve our website for you
- Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)
We do not use cookies to:
- Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
- Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
- Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
- Pay sales commissions
You can learn more about all the cookies we use below:
Granting us permission to use cookies
If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.
More about our cookies
We use cookies to make our website work including:
- Allowing you to add comments to our site
There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.
Third party functions
Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following which use cookies:
- Google – Privacy Policy
Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.
Social Website Cookies
So you can easily “Like” or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter, we have included sharing buttons on our site.
Cookies are set by:
- Facebook – Privacy Policy
The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.
The Facebook Pixel has also been installed to enable us to run ads based on the fact you have visited our site. Facebook also uses cookies to prevent you from seeing the same ad over and over again across the different devices that you use. Further details can be found in the link above.
Visitor Statistics Cookies
We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so-called “analytics” programs also tell us if how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.
Advertising Cookies
Cookies are widely used in online advertising. Neither us, advertisers or our advertising partners can gain personally identifiable information from these cookies. We only work with advertising partners who work to accepted privacy standards such as http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/iab-good-practice-principles
You can learn more about online advertising at http://www.youronlinechoices.com . You can opt-out of almost all advertising cookies at http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices although we would prefer that you didn’t as ultimately ads help keep much of the internet free. It is also worth noting that opting out of advertising cookies will not mean you won’t see ads, just simply that they won’t be tailored to you any longer.
We use:
DoubleClick – Privacy Policy owned by Google. A List of third-party vendors can be found here.
We use the Facebook Pixel. You can learn more about interest-based advertising from Facebook by visiting this page: https://www.facebook.com/help/164968693837950
To opt-out from Facebook’s interest-based ads follow these instructions from Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/help/568137493302217
To see more about Facebook’s participation in the Digital Advertising Alliance please visit the Choices section of this notice.
For more information on the privacy practices of Facebook, please visit Facebook’s Data Policy: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation
Banner Ads
We fund our site by showing adverts as you browse our site. These adverts are usually managed by a partner specializing in providing adverts for multiple sites. Invariably these partners place cookies to collect anonymous data about the websites you visit so they can personalise the adverts to you, ensure that you don’t see the same adverts too frequently and ultimately report to advertisers on which adverts are working.
Turning Cookies Off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (Learn how here). Doing so, however, will likely limit the functionality of our’s and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites
It may be that you concerns around cookies relate to so-called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software.
The cookie information text on this site was derived from content provided by Attacat Internet Marketing http://www.attacat.co.uk/, a marketing agency based in Edinburgh. If you need similar information for your own website you can use their free cookie audit tool.