Types of data collected

When you complete one of the contact forms on our website, we will ask you for a number of pieces of personal information, such as your name, email address and other contact details. This is obviously required for us to respond to your request.

If you do not use or submit an online form on the website, no data will be collected in that regard.

Account logins

For some website functionality, we will need to create for you a user account that allows you to login to the site to ensure that only authorised individuals can access your data and that functionality. Examples include when you make an online purchase via the site, or when you have a role in administering or contributing towards the website content (such as a blog author). The purpose of these user accounts is to protect your personal data behind login security, and to protect the integrity of our site and the servers that run it.

Data collected will generally involve your name and email address (which doubles as username) as a minimum, but may include your postal address if it is required for online purchases.

If you do not register for an online account then no such data will be collected in this regard.

When you visit our website, our systems will log a record of your visit in our server logs, and typically this record will include the technical ‘IP’ address that is associated with your device and the browser type and version that you are using.

Such server logs are extremely common practice, and are used to monitor technical resources, monitor high-level server activity, and importantly to detect and prevent malicious or fraudulent activity on our systems. This data can also be used, if required, to diagnose reports of technical issues. The storage of IP addresses, allow us to identify patterns of behaviour (such as repeated malicious attempts to access a system).

IP addresses, in and of themselves, do not allow us in any way to identify you as an individual, especially given that it is very common for IP addresses to be dynamically allocated by your service provider, and will therefore often routinely change.

Furthermore, we do not and will not use the content of server access logs to attempt to determine an identifiable individual. We therefore do not consider that data held within server logs falls within the scope of ‘personal data’, and accordingly we do not seek your consent to collect it.

We have included cookies, web beacons and similar technologies into one section because they all perform similar functions even if, from a technical perspective, they work slightly differently.

All of these technologies allow us to better understand how users are using our website and other related services. They can also be an essential part of providing certain online functionality. They are all essentially small data files placed on your computer (or other device) that allow us to tell when you have visited a particular page, or performed a particular action (such as clicking a particular button) on our website.

These technologies are used by most websites as they provide useful insight into how the services are being used, as well as improving speed, performance and security, and enabling us to improve our personalisation of your experience.

Cookies

These are small text files placed in the memory of your browser or device when you visit a website. Cookies allow a website to recognize a particular device or browser. There are several types of cookies:

• Session cookies expire at the end of your browser session and allow us to link your actions during that particular browser session.
• Persistent cookies are stored on your device in between browser sessions, allowing us to remember your preferences or actions across multiple sites.
• First-party cookies are set by the site you are visiting.
• Third-party cookies are set by a third party site separate from the site you are visiting.

There are a number of ways that you can influence how cookies are used on your particular device. Most commercial browsers (such as Chrome, Safari, Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox etc) allow you to set preferences for whether to allow or block website cookies.

They will also provide tools that allow you to remove any cookies that have already been set. Using the ‘Help’ functionality of your browser, or an internet search, will help you to understand how to use these features for your particular browser.

Additionally, we have incorporated specific cookie functionality on our website that allows you to easily indicate when you first visit the site whether or not you are happy for cookies to be set on your device.

Perhaps ironically, for our site to remember your preference for whether to allow cookies or not, it is necessary for us to set cookies for this specific purpose.

When you first visit our site, a Cookie Control box will be displayed allowing you to choose whether to allow cookies or not. Only Essential cookies will be set when you first visit our site.

If you click on the ‘Accept’ button in the Cookie Control box, we will enable our Analytics and Marketing cookies. Alternatively, you can click the ‘Settings’ button, where you will see further information and have the ability to accept or reject our different types of cookies individually.

If you do not positively agree to the use of cookies in one of the ways described above, we will not set any non-essential cookies.

You can change your choice at any time by clicking on the persistent cookie icon at the bottom of the screen.

Web beacons

– Small graphic images (also known as “pixel tags” or “clear GIFs”) that may be included on our sites and services that typically work in conjunction with cookies to identify our users and user behaviour.

Website Analytics

We use Google Analytics and Matomo to better understand what people look at on our website.

When people visit our site, information about their visit (such as which pages they look at, how long they spend on the site and so on) is sent in an anonymous form to Google Analytics (which is controlled by Google) or Matomo (which is hosted on our own servers).

The data contains information about anyone who uses our website from your computer, and there is no way to identify individuals from the data.

We ensure that no personally identifiable information is ever contained within the data sent to our analytics providers, and we also perform a process which partially obscures your IP address information.

As analytics information is not personal data, we do not specifically ask for your prior consent.

In addition to Google Analytics, we use a number of industry-standard Google services to provide particular pieces of website content. These include:

• Google Fonts: We may use one or more of Google’s web fonts to ensure that our website content is displayed in a clear and consistent fashion across all of the different types of devices and browsers.
• Google Maps: We may use the Google’s mapping services to provide dynamic geographic maps on our website
• Google Recaptcha: We may use Google’s Recaptcha service (which provides the ‘I Am Not A Robot’ functionality) on our web contact forms. This is a security measure to prevent the abuse of our contact forms by automated programs.

Each of these services involve our website making a connection to one or more Google servers, and may result in Google placing cookies on your device.

Like the vast majority of commercial websites, we use social media cookies from Facebook on our site. The cookies are placed by Facebook, and we use them to understand the effectiveness of social media campaigns that we operate.

If you are not logged into Facebook when you view our site, then it is not possible for any personal information about your visit to be collected, and therefore we do not specifically ask for your prior consent.

If you are logged into Facebook when you view our site, then Facebook will know when you visit us. We do not have any access to the detail of that personal data, as you have consented to share it with Facebook, not us. We just get to see anonymised data about the numbers of people who have responded to our advertising or other social media activity.

Facebook, may use cookies, web beacons, and other storage technologies to collect or receive information from your websites and elsewhere on the internet and use that information to provide measurement services and target ads. You can learn about Facebook’s privacy policy here.

There are a number of ways of controlling the ads that you see based upon your activity on Facebook. The following resources may help to understand those choices:

• You can opt-out of Facebook tracking on the Blackbox website using the Cookie Control functionality on this site. You can edit your cookie preferences at any time using the Cookie Control icon in the bottom right hand corner of your screen, and disabling ‘marketing’ cookies.
• How to opt-out of Facebook interest-based advertising on your browser or mobile device: https://www.facebook.com/help/568137493302217
• About Ads: http://www.aboutads.info/choices
• Your Online Choices: http://www.youronlinechoices.eu/

You can always use your browser’s ‘private’ or ‘incognito’ mode to browse websites anonymously.

If you disable marketing cookies on this site, it does not mean that you will not see our ads, it just means that they will not be personalised based on your Facebook activity.