Privacy Policy

This privacy policy explains how we use any personal information we collect about you when you contact us by phone, email, letter, attend any of our events or when you use any of our websites listed below:

• bom.org.uk
• hiddenkingdoms.org

We take your privacy seriously and are committed to protecting your personal information. We aim to be clear and open about our data and security practices.

Where we ask you to provide us with any information by which you can be identified, you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement, and in line with UK data protection law which includes but may not be limited to the Data Protection Act 2018, the UK General Data Protection Regulations (UK GDPR) and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation (PECR)

This notice provides information concerning the processing activities for Birmingham Open Media CIC – Registered Office: 12 Dudley Street, Birmingham, England, B5 4EA
Registered Number: 08823230. Registered in England & Wales.

We collect information about you when you fill in an online form to:

• • Register for a website account or update your
  • account details
  • Sign up for email updates
    Contact us
  • Place orders for free or paid products or services
  • Apply for membership
  • Complete surveys or provide feedback.

This information may include:

• Name, role and organisation
• Contact details including email address
• Demographic information such as postcode and interests.

We collect material that you proactively post or contribute to our sites including social media and any correspondence you have with us.

We also collect information on your website usage through cookies, if your browser accepts them. Some of our websites feature tracking software – this means that if you’re a logged-in user, have filled an online form or have previously clicked a link in one of our emails, we may link your website usage information (such as pages visited, IP address, browser and device used) to other information we hold about you, such as your name and organisation.

When you contact us by email, letter or on the phone, we may also record this information on our customer relationship management system to help us process your request efficiently.

We collect information about you to manage your account, process your order or fulfil any contract we have with you.

We use information collected from your website visits to personalise your future visits and to improve the experience we provide to our online users. For example, information like the browser and device you are using helps us to maintain usable and accessible websites for all our audiences.

We also use your information to help us develop products and services that you need, and where we have a lawful basis and permission to contact you, we may use it to help us send you relevant and timely information about the help and support that we offer.

If you visit our offices, we may capture your images on our CCTV systems.

Online forms

The forms on our website are built using a platform hosted in the US, so the information you provide to us is initially stored there. The contract we have with this provider ensures their practices comply with UK data protection law and we regularly delete data from this system. We are required to ensure that such data is appropriately protected. This means that we must undertake a UK Transfer Risk Assessment (TRA) and ensure important safeguards are in place. Such safeguards may include the UK International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA) or the UK Addendum.
In the longer term your data is stored in our customer relationship management system, which is hosted outside of the UK on a secure server in the EU.

Website accounts

If you are a registered user of our website(s), the personal data within your account(s) is stored in secure web servers outside of the UK, based in the EU.

You are responsible for keeping your website account password(s) confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone for your own security.

Security and encryption

We take great care to ensure that our websites operate at the highest security levels and that our suppliers are committed to best practice in digital security. All personal information and financial data is encrypted in transmission. However, the security of data transmission via the internet can never be 100% guaranteed, and data transmission is at your own risk.

What are cookies and how do we use them?

The use of cookies is common practice on modern websites. A cookie is a small text file which is placed on your computer’s hard drive by a website. When you visit one of our websites, your browser checks to see if it has any cookies for it and sends the information contained in those cookies back to the site in order to tailor and improve your experience.

Our cookies record things like whether you are currently logged into your website account, to ensure you’re given the right access on each page. They make sure the display settings you’ve selected before (for example, preferred language) – or the settings associated with your account permissions – are activated correctly.

We also use third-party cookies to track how our websites are used, as well as to carry out our advertising and marketing activities.

Third-party cookies

When you visit our websites, we allow a number of third parties including CookieHub, Hotjar, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and ClickDimensions to set cookies on your device to help us better understand who our users are and how they use our websites. This information enables us to:

measure our sites’ effectiveness
improve our content and user experience
make our websites more useful and relevant to your interests
promote our services and resources more usefully online
make adverts you see online more relevant to you
limit the number of times you see our promotional advertising.
For example, we use Google Analytics cookies to collect anonymous usage and visitor behaviour information – this includes:

• IP address
• operating system
• browser type
• pages visited
• links you click on
• services you purchase.

Google Advertising cookies help us understand the demographics and interests of our users so we can better meet their needs. If you are a user who has signed up to receive marketing emails from us, you might receive emails containing content that is tailored to your interests, based on your browsing habits collected by ClickDimensions. Similarly, Facebook and LinkedIn cookies help make our adverts more relevant to you.

Some of the services on our websites, such as adverts from youtube, videos from Vimeo, and sharing functions from Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, may place cookies on your computer to enable their service to work properly or to measure usage of their service.

To find out more about how the third parties referred to above use cookies and how to opt out of them, please review their privacy policies.

Email cookies

Our emails and websites contain cookies to tell us whether emails are opened and verify any clicks through to links within an email. We use this information to help us understand how an email campaign has performed, what types of emails and content our users find interesting, and what actions our users took, so we can improve our email campaigns in the future and make our emails more relevant to you.

Can I refuse cookies?

Yes, you can. When you first access the site you can set your preferences. If you refuse cookies, you will still be able to access the site.

Across all of our sites, you can use your browser settings to disable cookies. Different browsers offer different levels of control – for example you may be able to accept certain cookies and reject others, such as third party cookies.

If you refuse cookies please be aware our websites may not work smoothly for you and there will be certain parts that won’t function correctly.

You can delete the cookies stored on your computer at any time.

More information

For further information about cookies, including how to manage your cookie settings, you can visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.

If you have purchased a product or service from BOM or have opted-in to hear about BOM’s events or services, we will send you information which may be of interest to you.

You have a right to stop us from contacting you for marketing purposes at any time. You can do this in several different ways:

• All our marketing emails contain unsubscribe links
• Contact us at any time to request a change to your marketing preferences.

We do not keep your information for longer than necessary. We keep financial information for up to seven years due to legal and contractual requirements, and we delete all other personal information from our customer relationship management system if we have had no contact with you for three years.

BOM will not sell your information to any third party. We may share your information with third parties where we have legal duty to do so or to provide you with a service you have asked for. We have contracts in place with all third party suppliers to ensure they are obligated to treat our customers’ personal data in compliance with the UK data protection law.

Our websites may contain links to other websites not run by BOM. This privacy policy only applies to BOM websites so when you link to other websites you should read their respective privacy policies

Data protection regulations give you clear rights over how your data is used by us. You can find out more detail about your rights by visiting the Information Commissioner’s Office website’s section on individual rights.

You also have the right to report concerns or complain about our handling of your data to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Details of how to do this can be found on its website.