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Privacy

  1. Introduction
    1. The British Guild of Beer Writers (“Us”, “We”, “Our”) are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our website visitors; in this policy we explain how we will treat your personal information.
    2. By using our website and agreeing to this policy, you consent to our use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this policy.
  1. Credit
    1. This document was created using a template from SEQ Legal.
  1. Collecting personal information
    1. We may collect, store and use the following kinds of personal information:
      1. information about your computer and about your visits to and use of this website (including your IP address, geographical location, browser type and version, operating system, referral source, length of visit, page views and website navigation paths);
      2. information that you provide to us when logging in to website, such as your email address;
      3. information that you provide when completing your profile on our website (including your name, profile pictures, gender, date of birth, interests and hobbies, educational details and employment details);
      4. information that you provide to us for the purpose of subscribing to our email notifications and/or newsletters, including your name and email address;
      5. information that you provide to us when using the services on our website, or that is generated in the course of the use of those services, including the timing, frequency and pattern of service use;
      6. information relating to any transactions that you enter into through our website, including your name, address, telephone number, email address);
      7. information that you post to our website for publication on the internet, including your user name, your profile pictures and the content of your posts);
      8. information contained in or relating to any communication that you send to us or send through our website, including the communication content and metadata associated with the communication); and
      9. any other personal information that you choose to send to us.
    2. Before you disclose to us the personal information of another person, you must obtain that person’s consent to both the disclosure and the processing of that personal information in accordance with this policy.
  1. Using personal information
    1. Personal information submitted to us through our website will be used for the purposes specified in this policy or on the relevant pages of the website.
    2. We may use your personal information to:
      1. administer our website and business;
      2. personalise our website for you;
      3. enable your use of the services available on our website;
      4. supply to you services purchased, including your Guild membership;
      5. send statements, invoices and payment reminders to you, and collect payments from you;
      6. send you non-marketing commercial communications;
      7. send you email notifications that you have specifically requested;
      8. send you our email newsletter, if you have requested it (you can opt-out at any time if you no longer require the newsletter);
      9. send you marketing communications relating to our business, which we think may be of interest to you, by post or, where you have specifically agreed to this, by email or similar technology (you can inform us or opt-out at any time if you no longer require marketing communications)];
      10. provide third parties with statistical information about our users (but those third parties will not be able to identify any individual user from that information);
      11. deal with enquiries and complaints made by or about you relating to our website;
      12. keep our website secure and prevent fraud; and
      13. verify compliance with the terms and conditions governing the use of our website (including monitoring private messages sent through our future website private messaging service).
    3. If you submit personal information for publication on our website, we will publish and otherwise use that information in accordance with the licence you grant to us.
    4. Your privacy settings can be used to limit the publication of your information on our website, and can be adjusted using privacy controls on the website.
    5. We will not, without your express consent, supply your personal information to any third party for the purpose of their or any other third party’s direct marketing.
  1. Disclosing personal information
    1. We may disclose your personal information to any of our employees, officers, insurers, professional advisers, agents, suppliers or subcontractors insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this policy.
    2. We may disclose your personal information to any member of our group of companies (this means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and all its subsidiaries) insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this policy.
    3. We may disclose your personal information:
      1. to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
      2. in connection with any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings;
      3. in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk);
      4. to the purchaser (or prospective purchaser) of any business or asset that we are (or are contemplating) selling; and
      5. to any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of that personal information where, in our reasonable opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal information.
    4. Except as provided in this policy, we will not provide your personal information to third parties.
  1. International data transfers
    1. Information that we collect may be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries in which we operate in order to enable us to use the information in accordance with this policy.
    2. Information that we collect may be transferred to the following countries which do not have data protection laws equivalent to those in force in the European Economic Area: the United States of America.
    3. Personal information that you publish on our website or submit for publication on our website may be available, via the internet, around the world. We cannot prevent the use or misuse of such information by others.
    4. You expressly agree to the transfers of personal information described in this Section 6.
  1. Retaining personal information
    1. This Section 7 sets out our data retention policies and procedure, which are designed to help ensure that we comply with our legal obligations in relation to the retention and deletion of personal information.
    2. Personal information that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.
    3. Without prejudice to Section 7.2, we will usually delete personal data falling within the categories set out below at the date/time set out below:
      1. Lapsed member profiles will be deleted within ninety (90) days of your membership lapsing.
    4. Notwithstanding the other provisions of this Section 7, we will retain documents (including electronic documents) containing personal data:
      1. to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
      2. if we believe that the documents may be relevant to any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings; and
      3. in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk).
  1. Security of personal information
    1. We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information.
    2. We will store all the personal information you provide on our secure (password- and firewall-protected) servers.
    3. All electronic financial transactions entered into through our website will be protected by encryption technology.
    4. You acknowledge that the transmission of information over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet.
    5. You are responsible for keeping the password you use for accessing our website confidential; we will not ask you for your password (except when you log in to our website).
  1. Amendments
    1. We may update this policy from time to time by publishing a new version on our website.
    2. You should check this page occasionally to ensure you are happy with any changes to this policy.
    3. We may notify you of changes to this policy by email.
  1. Your rights
    1. You may instruct us to provide you with any personal information we hold about you; provision of such information will be subject to:
      1. the payment of a fee (currently fixed at GBP £30); and
      2. the supply of appropriate evidence of your identity [(for this purpose, we will usually accept a photocopy of your passport certified by a solicitor or bank plus an original copy of a utility bill showing your current address)].
    2. We may withhold personal information that you request to the extent permitted by law.
    3. You may instruct us at any time not to process your personal information for marketing purposes.
    4. In practice, you will usually either expressly agree in advance to our use of your personal information for marketing purposes, or we will provide you with an opportunity to opt out of the use of your personal information for marketing purposes.
  1. Third party websites
    1. Our website includes hyperlinks to, and details of, third party websites. All links to external websites are identified by this icon ().
    2. We have no control over, and are not responsible for, the privacy policies and practices of third parties.
  1. Updating information
    1. It is your responsibility to update the personal information we hold about you via your account with us on this website.
  1. Cookies
    1. Our website uses cookies.
    2. A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.
    3. Cookies may be either “persistent” cookies or “session” cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before the expiry date; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed.
    4. Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies.
    5. We use both session and persistent cookies on our website.
    6. The names of the cookies that we use on our website, and the purposes for which they are used, are set out below:
      1. PHPSESSID
        Contains a random set of letters and numbers used to inform the website that you are the same person moving around our website and not a new visitor. This cookie is removed when you close your browser window.
      2. wordpress_test_cookie
        Contains the encoded phrase “WP Cookie check” and is set by WordPress when you access the login page. The cookie is used by WordPress to determine whether you have cookies enabled or disabled in your browser.
      3. wordpress_logged_in_*, wordpress_sec_*
        Contains data specific to you that ensure you remain authenticated after logging in. These cookies are removed when you close your browser window.
      4. wp-settings-*, wp-settings-time-*
        Contains customised information about you to personalise at least the administrators interface of the WordPress installation. These cookies are persistent and by default set to expire in one (1) year’s time.
      5. comment_authorcomment_author_emailcomment_author_url
        Contains your name, email and website url that you provided when first commenting on a page, post, article or other resource on our website. This cookie is set for your convenience to prevent the need to retype your information. These cookies are persistent and by default set to expire in one (1) year’s time.
      6. _bgbw-recmem
        Contains an encoded string of of Guild Member IDs that you’ve previously looked at the profiles for. This cookie expires thirty (30) days after the last member page you’ve looked at – i.e. one month of inactivity on our website.
    7. We use Google Analytics to analyse the use of our website.
      1. Our analytics service provider generates statistical and other information about website use by means of cookies.
      2. The analytics cookies used by our website have the following names: _ga, _gat, __utma, __utmt, __utmb, __utmc, __utmz and __utmv.
      3. The information generated relating to our website is used to create reports about the use of our website.
      4. Our analytics service provider’s privacy policy is available here.
    8. Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies; for example:
      1. in Internet Explorer (version 11) you can block cookies using the cookie handling override settings available by clicking “Tools”, “Internet Options”, “Privacy” and then “Advanced”;
      2. in Firefox (version 47) you can block all cookies by clicking “Tools”, “Options”, “Privacy”, selecting “Use custom settings for history” from the drop-down menu, and unticking “Accept cookies from sites”; and
      3. in Chrome (version 52), you can block all cookies by accessing the “Customise and control” menu, and clicking “Settings”, “Show advanced settings” and “Content settings”, and then selecting “Block sites from setting any data” under the “Cookies” heading.
    9. Blocking all cookies will have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites.
    10. If you block cookies, you will not be able to use all the features on our website.
    11. You can delete cookies already stored on your computer; for example:
      1. in Internet Explorer (version 11), you must manually delete cookie files (instructions);
      2. in Firefox (version 47), you can delete cookies by clicking “Tools”, “Options” and “Privacy”, then selecting “Use custom settings for history” from the drop-down menu, clicking “Show Cookies”, and then clicking “Remove All Cookies”; and
      3. in Chrome (version 52), you can delete all cookies by accessing the “Customise and control” menu, and clicking “Settings”, “Show advanced settings” and “Clear browsing data”, and then selecting “Cookies and other site and plug-in data” before clicking “Clear browsing data”.
    12. Deleting cookies will have a negative impact on the usability of many websites.
  1. Our details
    1. This website is owned by us and operated by Henderson Grime & Associates Ltd trading as HGA (“Developer”, “Partner”, “Agency”), a registered company in England. Company registration number 02382992.
    2. We are registered in England and Wales under registration number 10214210, and our registered office is at B10 Seedbed Centre, Severalls Park, Colchester, England, CO4 9HT.
    3. You can contact us:
      1. by post, using the postal address published in our footer, located at the bottom of each webpage;
      2. using our website contact form; or
      3. by email, using the email address published in our footer, located at the bottom of each webpage or on our primary contact page.
  1. Data protection registration
    1. Our developer is registered with and regulated by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) for data handling, processing, storage and protection.
    2. Our developer’s protection registration number is ZA120625.

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