ARE YOU SITTING COMFORTABLY? THEN WE’LL BEGIN…

Let’s be honest, the only real privacy concern most people have is when they suddenly notice the lock on the door of a public toilet cubicle looks a bit loose. Will it hold if someone pushes against the door? Cue: sheer, blind panic.

In calm contrast, we want you to feel relaxed when you use our website and when we provide services to you (hmmm, did we just compare our lovely website to a public toilet?).

As you devour every thrilling word of it, you’ll see how this policy shows our commitment to protecting your privacy. It also explains how and why we collect your information, what we do with it and how, in this little corner of your life if nowhere else, you’re always in control.

We update this policy from time to time, so please keep checking back to see the latest exciting edition.

What personal data do we collect?

First things first

We care about your privacy, so we collect the least amount of personal information possible and we never release that information to anyone for marketing purposes. Apart from anything else, we’ve got other stuff we’re more interested in doing.

Data you provide to us

We collect and process your information just so we can be in contact with you and so we can work together. That personal information will be your name, email address, phone number and maybe your postal address if we need it.

We don’t collect any “sensitive data” (like racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, trade union membership, genetic data, biometric data etc.)

How do we use your data?

We only use your data if it’s needed to provide our services to you. We’ll use it for responding to queries, keeping in touch with you and for invoicing. That’s pretty much it.

We’re not going to bombard you with stuff you don’t need, but we may send you the odd thing that we hope you will find interesting. But we’ll only do that if you’ve said it’s ok. One day you might decide that the stuff we’re sending you is distracting from those important emails about what’s coming up next month on Netflix. Just get in touch and we’ll shut down the mighty engine of our marketing
department and you can focus on planning next month’s tv viewing (we loved “The Minimalists” and “Last Breath” documentaries, if you’ve not seen them).

We seriously hope not (because then we’ve got much bigger issues to worry about), but we may need to process information about you to comply with a legal obligation or to exercise or defend legal claims.

How do we keep your data safe?

Information that we collect is stored on our computers located in the UK. We have security measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of data under our control. Only authorised personnel have access to user information and that information is protected by strong passwords and
up-to-date anti-virus software.

The world being what it is, we can’t promise that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur, but we’re doing all we can to prevent it.

How long do we keep your data?

As a general rule, we only keep information for as long as is necessary. Specifically:

• prospective clients – 6 months and then we delete if we have not managed to persuade you of how awesome we are
• actual clients – 6 years after the date of our last invoice.

Hungry? Let’s talk cookies

Disappointingly lacking in any chocolate whatsoever, cookies are small files which like to hangout on your hard drive. If you agree, the file is added and the cookie helps analyse web traffic or lets you know when you visit a particular site. Cookies allow a web application to respond to you as the wonderful individual that you are, by tailoring its operations to your needs, likes and dislikes. It does
this by gathering and remembering information about your preferences.

We use the following cookies and other technologies:

• necessary cookies: these are required to make our website work.
• functionality cookies: rather like those dreadful lanyards at conferences, these are used to recognise you when you return to our website

This is the part where you’d normally read something about Google Analytics. For a whole bunch of reasons, that isn’t our thing at all. So, if you like what you’ve seen, then let’s just have a chat. Hopefully we won’t need the help of what sounds like an 80s band, Google and the Analytics).

Just to be clear (or, as lawyers like to say, “for the avoidance of doubt”), a cookie gives us no access to your computer or any information about you as an actual human.

You can accept, decline or delete cookies using your browser settings. Like unsupervised children, most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to stop cookies. Supervising children is a whole other thing about which we can offer no useful advice whatsoever.

If you choose to disable cookies, there’s every chance our website will end up looking like a Jackson Pollock painting. The superb designers we worked with to build the thing will be very sad, but if you don’t mind hurting their feelings, then go ahead.

Third party links

We’ve provided some links to things are arguably more interesting than anything we’ve got to say on our website. If you click through to any third-party website from our website, you should check out their cookies and privacy policies. They will probably be a lot like this one, but with less reference to toilet cubicles.

You are in control

You have the right to:

• request a copy of the information we hold about you
• correct data that we hold about you that is inaccurate or incomplete
• request that we erase the data from our records
• restrict our processing of the data
• have your data transferred to another organisation
• object to certain types of processing
• complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK (www.ico.org.uk)
• party (you might have to fight for it, but you do have that right).

Get in touch

If you want to chat about any of this thoroughly exciting stuff, you can email us at
gregbargeton@emersonpartnership.com or write to The Emerson Partnership Limited, 69 Kinghorn Road, Burntisland, Fife KY3 9EB.

Finally….

We’re not convinced that anyone ever reads these things. In many ways, they are a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the legal profession. So, if you’re the first person to read this and get in touch with us to say you’ve read it, we will feel a bit sorry for you, but then we’ll donate £100 to a charity of your choice. We can’t give you back the time you wasted reading this, but we can at least help a little.