Website Privacy Notice and Cookie Policy

Welcome to ForrestBrown’s website privacy notice and cookie policy (this privacy notice). ForrestBrown respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy notice will inform you how we look after your personal data when you visit our website (regardless of where you visit it from). It will also tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you

1.  Important information and who we are

Purpose of this Privacy Notice

This privacy notice aims to give you information on how ForrestBrown collects and processes your personal data through your use of this website, including any data you may provide through this website or directly to us.

This website is not intended for children and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children.

It is important that you read this privacy notice together with any other privacy notice or fair processing notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal data about you (e.g. when we agree to provide you with services) so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data. This privacy notice supplements the other notices and is not intended to override them.

Controller

ForrestBrown Limited is the data controller in relation to our website and is responsible for your personal data (collectively referred to as ForrestBrown, “we”, “us” or “our” in this privacy notice).

We have appointed a data privacy manager who is responsible for overseeing questions in relation to this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact the data privacy manager here.

Contact details

Our full details are:

Full name of legal entity: ForrestBrown Limited (company number 08004376)

Person responsible for data protection: the data privacy manager

Email address: you can contact the data privacy manager here.

Postal address: Floor 2, 10 Templeback, Bristol, BS1 6FL.

Telephone number: 0117 926 9022

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact us in the first instance.

Changes to the Privacy Notice and your duty to inform us of changes

This version was last updated in February 2023 and historic versions can be obtained by contacting us.

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us.

Changes to the Privacy Notice and your duty to inform us of changes

This version was last updated in July 2022 and historic versions can be obtained by contacting us.

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us.

Third-party links

Our website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit.

2.  The data we collect about you

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).

We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together follows:

  • Identity Data includes first name, last name, title, date of birth, job title and gender.
  • Contact Data includes contact address, email address and telephone numbers.
  • Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access this website.
  • Usage Data includes information about how you use our website, products and services including the full Uniform Resource Locators (URL), clickstream to, through and from our sites (including date and time), products you viewed or searched for, page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), methods used to browse away from the page, and any phone number used to call our client office number.
  • Marketing and Communications Data includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences.

We may also collect, use and share Aggregated Data such as statistical or demographic data for any purpose. Aggregated Data may be derived from your personal data but is not considered personal data in law as this data does not directly or indirectly reveal your identity. For example, we may aggregate your Usage Data to calculate the percentage of users accessing a specific website feature. However, if we combine or connect Aggregated Data with your personal data so that it can directly or indirectly identify you, we treat the combined data as personal data which will be used in accordance with this privacy notice.

We do not collect any Special Categories of Personal Data about you (this includes details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data). Nor do we collect any information about criminal convictions and offences.

If you fail to provide personal data

Where we need to collect personal data whether by law, under the terms of a contract we have with you or to consider your application for a role with us, if you fail to provide that data when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have or are trying to enter into with you. In this case, we may have to cancel a service you have with us or we may not be able to progress your application for a role with us. We will notify you if this is the case at the time.

3.  How is your personal data collected?

We use different methods to collect data from and about you including through:

  • Direct interactions. You may give us your Identity and Contact Data by filling in an online form or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you:
    • seek to explore how we might work together
    • ask us to supply you with services;
    • apply for a role with us;
    • request marketing to be sent to you;
    • enter a competition, promotion or survey; or
    • give us some feedback.
  • Automated technologies or interactions. As you interact with our website, we may automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, tags, server logs and other similar technologies. Please see our cookie policy for further details.
  • Third parties or publicly available sources. We may receive Identity and Contact Data about you from public sources such as Companies House and the Electoral Register.

4.  How we use your personal data

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

  • To consider your application for a role with us.
  • Where we are discussing the possibility of providing services to you.
  • Where we need to perform a contract we have entered into with you.
  • Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.
  • Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.

We may also monitor, record, store and use any telephone, email or other communication with you in order to check any instructions given to us, for training purposes, for crime prevention and to improve the quality of our customer service. Generally we do not rely on consent as a legal basis for processing your personal data.

Purposes for which we will use your personal data

We have set out below, in a table format, a description of all the ways we plan to use your personal data, and which of the legal bases we rely on to do so. We have also identified what our legitimate interests are where appropriate.

Note that we may process your personal data on more than one lawful ground depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your data. Please Contact us if you need details about the specific legal ground we are relying on to process your personal data where more than one ground has been set out in the table below.

Purpose/Activity Type of data Lawful basis for processing including basis of legitimate interest (please refer to the Glossary for an explanation of these terms)
To register you as a potential or new client a) Identity b) Contact c) Marketing and Communications Data a) Performance of a contract with you b) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to keep our records updated, market to you or provide services to you)
To consider your application for a role with us a) Identity b) Contract a) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to recruit staff for our business)
To manage our relationship with you which will include: a) Notifying you about changes to our terms or privacy policy b) Asking you to leave a review or take a survey a) Identity b) Contact c) Marketing and Communications a) Performance of a contract with you b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation c) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to keep our records updated and to study how customers use our products / services)
To enable you to partake in a prize draw, competition a) Identity b) Contact c) Usage d) Marketing and Communications a) Performance of a contract with you b) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them and grow our business)
To administer and protect our business and our website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data) a) Identity b) Contact c) Technical d) Usage a) Necessary for our legitimate interests (for running our business, provision of administration and IT services, network security and in the context of a business reorganisation or group restructuring exercise) b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation
To deliver relevant website content and advertisements to you and measure or understand the effectiveness of the advertising we serve to you a) Identity b) Contact c) Technical d) Usage e) Marketing and Communications Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them, to grow our business and to inform our marketing strategy)
To use data analytics to improve our website, products/services, marketing, customer relationships and experiences a) Technical b) Usage Necessary for our legitimate interests (to define types of customers for our products and services, to keep our website updated and relevant, to develop our business and to inform our marketing strategy)
To make suggestions and recommendations to you about services that may be of interest to you a) Identity b) Contact c) Technical d) Usage Necessary for our legitimate interests (to develop our products/services and grow our business)

Marketing

We strive to provide you with choices regarding certain personal data uses, particularly around marketing and advertising. We have established the following personal data control mechanisms:

Promotional offers from us

We may use your Identity, Contact, Technical and Usage Data to form a view on what we think you may want or need, or what may be of interest to you. This is how we decide which products, services and offers may be relevant for you (we call this marketing).

You will receive marketing communications from us if you have been referred to us by a third party (with your prior consent), you have requested information from us, you are in discussions with us around the provision of services to you or your client or you have purchased services from us.

Third-party marketing

We do not share your personal data with third parties for marketing purposes.

Opting out

You can ask us to stop sending you marketing messages at any time by following the opt-out links on any marketing message sent to you or by contacting us.
Where you opt out of receiving marketing messages, this will not apply to personal data provided to us as a result of a service purchase or application for a role with us or other transactions.

Cookies and tags

A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive. Data may also be collected using technology like tags, pixels, web beacons or other unique tracking codes (Tags).

We use the following types of cookies and Tags:

  • Analytical/performance cookies and tags. They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors to our website and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
  • Functionality cookies and tags. These are used to recognise you when you return to our website so for example, you are not asked to consent to us using cookies each time you visit us.
  • Targeting and remarketing cookies and tags. These cookies and tags record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests.

When you visit our website you will be given two options. The first option will be to ‘Accept all and close’ which will allow all of the cookies listed above to apply.

Alternatively, if you click ‘Manage settings‘ you can configure your individual cookie preferences and toggle cookies on or off for each of the categories of cookies listed in the tables above.

At any point during your session on the site, you can click the ‘Manage cookies‘ tab in the bottom left of your screen and configure your cookies preferences.

You can also block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. Further, Google has developed a browser add-on to allow users to opt-out of Google Analytics across all websites and Meta allows you to change you behavioural ads preference. Please note that if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our site.

Alternatively, you can opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page or control the use of device identifiers by using your device’s settings.

Please note that third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.

Change of purpose

We will only use your personal data for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If you wish to get an explanation as to how the processing for the new purpose is compatible with the original purpose, please contact us.

If we need to use your personal data for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.

5.  Disclosures of your personal data

We may have to share your personal data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in the table in paragraph 4 above.

  • Our parent company, alliantgroup LP and other members of our corporate group for the purposes of group reporting and operational support.
  • Service providers acting as processors based in the EU or US who provide IT and system administration services to us.
  • Professional advisers acting as data processors including lawyers, bankers, auditors and insurers based in the UK who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance and accounting services.
  • HM Revenue & Customs, regulators and other authorities acting as processors based in the United Kingdom.
  • Third parties to whom we may choose to sell, transfer, or merge parts of our business or our assets. Alternatively, we may seek to acquire other businesses or merge with them. If a change happens to our business, then the new owners may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this privacy notice.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

A full list of our third party data processors can be viewed here.

6.  International transfers

We may share your personal data with ForrestBrown’s parent company, Alliant Group LP and other members of our corporate group who are based in the US and India. This will involve transferring your data outside the European Economic Area (EEA).

A number of our external third-party service providers (for example Amazon Web Services and GoogleApps) are based outside the European Economic Area (EEA) so their processing of your personal data will involve a transfer of data outside the EEA. Please click here for a full list of our third party data processors.

Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the EEA, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by using specific contracts including those approved by the European Commission which give personal data the same protection it has in Europe. For further details, see European Commission: Model contracts for the transfer of personal data to third countries.

Please Contact us if you want further information on the specific mechanism used by us when transferring your personal data out of the EEA.

7.  Data security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

8.  Data retention

How long will you use my personal data for?

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal data are available in our retention policy which you can request from us by Contacting us.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see Request erasure below for further information.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

9.  Your legal rights

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. You have the right to:

Request access to your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.

Request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us.

Request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we may have processed your information unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. Note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.

Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground as you feel it impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes. In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which override your rights and freedoms.

Request restriction of processing of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios: (a) if you want us to establish the data’s accuracy; (b) where our use of the data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it; (c) where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or (d) you have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.

Request the transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party. We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.

Withdraw consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal data. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please Contact us.

No fee usually required

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

What we may need from you

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

Time limit to respond

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

10. Changes to our Privacy Notice

Any changes we make to our privacy policy in the future will be posted on this page. Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to our privacy policy

11. Glossary

Lawful basis

Legitimate Interest means the interest of our business in conducting and managing our business to enable us to give you the best service/product and the best and most secure experience. We make sure we consider and balance any potential impact on you (both positive and negative) and your rights before we process your personal data for our legitimate interests. We do not use your personal data for activities where our interests are overridden by the impact on you (unless we have your consent or are otherwise required or permitted to by law). You can obtain further information about how we assess our legitimate interests against any potential impact on you in respect of specific activities by contacting us.

Performance of Contract means processing your data where it is necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are a party or to take steps at your request before entering into such a contract.

Comply with a legal or regulatory obligation means processing your personal data where it is necessary for compliance with a legal or regulatory obligation that we are subject to.