We do our very best to protect your privacy by using security technology appropriately. This means we make sure that we have appropriate security measures in place to protect your information. We respect your privacy. We will collect and use individual user details only if we have your permission or we have legitimate business reasons for doing so, such as collecting enough information to manage subscriptions.

We will be clear in our dealings with you as to what information about you we will collect and how we will use it. We will use personal information only for the purposes for which it was originally collected and we will make sure we delete it securely.

We do not collect any personal data about you on this website, apart from information which you volunteer (for example by becoming a registered user, entering our competitions, or taking part in commenting on our content). Any information which you provide in this way is not made available to any third parties, however, we may send relevant marketing emails on behalf of third parties but without allowing those third parties to have access to any personal data.

You can browse this site without providing any personal information. However, to access the enhanced website, you may have to register. For this, we require your name and email address. You can log in to the website and complete your profile if you wish.

Cookies are used to enhance the user experience by storing user preferences and automatically log users into the site. The Policy concerning the use of cookies is detailed in our Cookies Policy.

Technical details in connection with visits to this website are logged by our internet service provider for our statistical purposes. No information is collected that could be used by us to identify website visitors. The technical details logged are confined to the following items:

– the IP address of the visitor’s web server.
– the top-level domain name used (for example .ie, .com, .org, .net).
– the previous website address from which the visitor reached us, including any search terms used.
– clickstream data which shows the traffic of visitors around this web site (for example pages accessed and documents downloaded).
– the type of web browser used by the website visitor.

We will make no attempt to identify individual visitors or to associate the technical details listed above with any individual. It is our policy never to disclose such technical information in respect of individual website visitors to any third party (apart from our internet service provider, which records such data on our behalf and which is bound by confidentiality provisions in this regard) unless obliged to disclose such information by a rule of law.

If you login to our site using a Google or Facebook login (or any other social media), you are granting permission to that network to share your user data with us. This will include your name, email address date of birth, and location, which will then be used to form part of your user profile on our website. You can also use your picture from that social network as part of your user profile. This will allow us and that network to share your network user ID and any other information you choose to share from your social network account. If you delete this association of your social network account from your user profile, we will no longer have access to this information.

When you post information on a discussion board or comment publicly on an article on our website, the information you post and your username are publicly accessible. This information can be viewed online and collected by other people. We are not responsible for the way these other people use this information.

When contributing to a discussion, we strongly recommend you avoid sharing any personal details, and especially information that can be used to identify you directly such as your name, age, address, and name of employer. We are not responsible for the privacy of any identifiable information that you post in our online community or other public pages of the site.

– To send emails about competitions, promotions, surveys, or other features.
– For our own general research purposes.
– To contact you in response to any feedback you give us.
– To send marketing communications when we have your permission, or when permitted by law.
– To respond to your queries and to resolve complaints.
– To personalize our services (for example, so you can sign in), remembering your settings, displaying personalized advertising well as measuring how effective our online adverts are, recognizing you when you sign-in on different devices, and tailoring our marketing communications based on what you read on our site.
– To carry out marketing analysis, for example, we look at what you have viewed on our site to better understand what your interests and preferences are, and to improve our marketing by making it more relevant to your interests and preferences.
– To improve our marketing communications, we use a similar technology to cookies to confirm whether you have opened a marketing email or clicked on a link in the email.
– For statistical purposes such as analyzing the performance of our site to understand how visitors use it.
– For security and fraud prevention, and to ensure that our site is safe and secure and used in line with our terms of use.
– To comply with applicable laws and regulations.

We will only use your personal data where we have a legal ground to do so. We determine the legal grounds based on the purposes for which we have collected and used your personal data. In every case, the legal ground will be one of the following:

– Consent: For example, where you have provided your consent to receive information about our courses. You can withdraw your consent at any time.
– Our legitimate interests: to operate a functional profitable business, we will process your personal data, for example, sending you emails about products and services we believe you may be interested in and that are not invasive, unwanted, or unexpected from time to time. In the case of marketing emails, you can ‘Opt-out’ of receiving these by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email or through your email preferences in the “emails and marketing” tab, when signed into your account. It is also in our legitimate interest to carry out marketing analysis to determine what products and services may be relevant to the interests of our visitors.
– Compliance with law: In some cases, we may have a legal obligation to use or keep your personal data.

When you register for an account with us, you have access to a profile page. Under “edit profile” you can review what information is public when you comment on our articles, or if people look up your profile. You can also update your information or provide extra information if you want. You may also update your marketing preferences in the “Emails and marketing” tab in your account.

This privacy notice does not cover links to other websites. Please read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit.

We keep your personal data for no longer than is necessary. How long we need your personal data depends on what we are using it for, as set out in this privacy policy. For example, we may need to use it to answer your queries about a product or service and as a result, may keep personal data while you are still using our product or services. If we no longer need your data, we will delete it or make it anonymous by removing all details that identify you. If we have asked for your permission to process your personal data and we have no other lawful grounds to continue with that processing, and you withdraw your permission, we will delete your personal data. However, when you unsubscribe from marketing communications, we will keep your email address to ensure that we do not send you any marketing in the future.

– Responding to service queries – If you request information from us we will contact you usually by the same method you used to contact us.
– Marketing communications – If we have your permission, we may send you materials we think may interest you. Depending on your marketing preferences, this may be by email, phone, SMS, or post. You can decide not to receive these emails at any time and will be able to “unsubscribe” directly by clicking a link in the email or through your email preferences in the tab “Emails and marketing” when you are signed in to your account.
– Market research – Sometimes we may contact you for market research purposes, for example about a survey. You can opt-out from being contacted in this way by signing into your account and going to the tab “Emails and marketing”.
– Responding to your queries or complaints – If you have raised a query or a complaint with us, we may contact you to answer your query or to resolve your complaint.

Advertising on our site that is based on cookies and similar technology

We may use personalized online advertising on our site. This allows us to deliver more relevant advertising to people who visit our site. It works by showing you adverts that are based on your browsing patterns and the way you have interacted with our site. It then shows you adverts which we believe may interest you.

When you browse our site, some of the cookies and similar technology we place on your device are advertising cookies, so we can understand what sort of pages you are interested in. We can then display advertising on your browser based on these interests.

We do not collect or use information such as your name, email address, postal address, or phone number for personalized online advertising.

We may also share online data collected through cookies and similar technology with our advertising partners. This means that when you are on another website, you may be shown advertising based on your browsing patterns on our site. We may also show you advertising on our website based on your browsing patterns on other sites that we have obtained from our advertising partners.

Online retargeting is another form of online advertising that allows us and some of our advertising partners to show you advertising based on your browsing patterns and interactions with a site away from our site.

To correct any mistakes in your personal information, please log in to our website and update your information.

To find out if we hold any personal information about you, please make a ‘subject access request’. If we do hold information about you we will:

– give you a description of it.
– tell you why we are holding it.
– tell you who it could be disclosed to.
– let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible form.

To make a request for any personal information we may hold, please visit our GDPR page for instructions.

This privacy notice was last updated on 4th Jan 2021. If there are any material changes to our data processing, we will let you know by updates to this web page and/or contacting you by email.