This policy is about the personal data that we hold about you. It doesn’t cover data that belongs to your company, such as your work phone number or annual turnover. If your work email address includes your name, we’d consider that to be personal data.
Data that you give to us
In most cases, the personal data we collect about you is limited to your name, job title, employer’s name/location and work email address. In other words, the details that are typically found on email signatures, LinkedIn and business cards. This is a natural consequence of our working relationship and allows us to contact you, keep records about our transactions and do business with you. Therefore, our lawful basis for doing this is legitimate interests.
If you sign a contract on behalf of your company, we will store a copy of the document with your signature on it. Our lawful basis in this case would be contract.
Over time and where you feel comfortable doing so, you might disclose additional details about yourself to our staff. This often includes things shared conversationally, like your birthday and where you’re going on holiday. It could also include details provided for professional reasons. For example, you might confirm the date you expect your maternity leave to start. We will sometimes store or act on this information if we feel it’s important for some reason, e.g. it could help us work with your business more efficiently or strengthen our relationship with you. In this scenario, our lawful basis would be legitimate interests.
Data we collect from third parties
We may learn information about you from publicly available sources, such as social media profiles, news articles, Companies House or your company website, which we find by searching for your name and/or company. We might refer to this information in internal communications, if we feel it’s useful to us in some way – for example, it’s an interesting insight.
There may be times when one of your colleagues shares data about you with us. For example, they might let us know that you’re ill or on paternity leave if we try to contact you during an absence from work. We would only store or act on this information if doing so helped us work with your business more efficiently.
For the reasons explained in each paragraph, our lawful basis in all of these cases is legitimate interests.