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Privacy & Security

Inpress and The Poetry Book Society Privacy Policy

This policy applies to all the websites we operate, our use of emails for marketing purposes, and any other methods we use for collecting information. It covers what we collect and why, what we do with the information you provide, what we won’t do with the information and what rights you have.

Inpress Ltd and The Poetry Book Society (PBS) are committed to protecting your privacy. We use the information that we collect about you in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) and, from 25th May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Inpress/Poetry Book Society is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).The ICO's mission is the uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals. Our registration reference is ZA192743.

What information do we collect?
We will only ever collect the information we need – including data that will be useful to help improve our services. The personal information that we collect includes:

  • Contact details including name, title, billing address, postal address, email and phone numbers.
  • Transaction history (we never store your whole card number, although we can access the last four digits to help us and you identify transactions).
  • Unique Identifiers, such as membership number (if a PBS member).
  • Details of visits to our website including IP addresses, traffic data, location data, operating system, browser usage, and the resources that you access.
  • We may also collect demographic information from you such as age, gender, education, interests.

How do we collect your information?
You give us your information when you place an order, whether this is buying a book or buying or renewing a Poetry Book Society membership, sign up or buy a ticket for an event, or communicate with us via phone or email. We also keep your details when you sign up to receive emails from us.

We keep a record of the emails we send you, and we may track whether you receive or open them so we can make sure we are sending you the most relevant information.

Like most websites, we receive and store certain details whenever you use the Inpress or PBS website, tracking website activity through web analytics service, Google Analytics. This helps us understand how you use our website and where we can make improvements.

PBS order forms returned to us in the post are processed within 5 days of receipt and a stored in a locked drawer until they are processed. All order forms are shredded at the end of the working day on which their order has been processed.

We may also obtain personal information about you from other sources, such as if a family member or friend contacts us on your behalf. Where this occurs and it is not practical for us to provide you directly with a copy of our privacy policy, we may ask the person who provided us with your information to make this privacy policy available to you.

Social media
We use social media to broadcast messages and updates about events and news. On occasion we may reply to comments or questions you make to us on social media platforms. You may also see adverts from us on social media that are tailored to your interests.
Depending on your settings and the privacy policies used by social media and messaging services like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, we may receive non-personally identifying demographic or analytical information from these services that enables us to better understand the reach and effectiveness of our advertising.

Links to Other Web Sites
Our site and communications may include links to other websites whose privacy practices may differ from ours. If you submit personal information to any of those sites, your information is governed by their privacy statements. We encourage you to carefully read the privacy statement of any website you visit.

How we keep your details safe and secure
Your personal data will be held and processed on Inpress and the Poetry Book Society’s systems or systems managed by suppliers on behalf of Inpress and the PBS. We maintain a customer relationship management (CRM) system to hold contact details and a record of your orders, membership details and history and any other interactions with Inpress and the PBS. Where possible we aim to keep a single record for each customer.

We always seek to hold your data securely. Access to customer information is strictly controlled. The CRM system can only be accessed by people who need it to do their job.

Our basis for processing your personal information and what we use it for
We aim to be clear when we collect your data and not to do anything you wouldn’t reasonably expect.

We will use the information you provide to:

  • fulfil your requests – such as membership subscriptions, book orders, donations, competition entries.
  • process sales transactions, donations, or other payments and verify financial transactions.
  • handle orders, deliver products and communicate with you about orders.
  • provide a personalised service to you when you visit our websites.
  • record any contact we have with you.
  • prevent or detect fraud or abuses of our websites and enable third parties to carry out technical, logistical or other functions on our behalf.
  • carry out research on the demographics, interests and behaviour of our users and supporters to help us gain a better understanding of them and to enable us to improve our service. This research may be carried out internally by our employees or we may ask another company to do this work for us.
  • communicate with you.
  • if you have agreed to it, provide you with information that we think may be of interest to you.

We may process personal data because it is in our legitimate interests to do so. For example we may use your personal information to understand your reasons for being a PBS member, to better understand your interests, to tailor our communications to you. We may also collect information about how you use our services (including our website) to analyse our customer base and improve our processes.   

Giving you control
We may tell you about events and offers, and occasionally, we may include information in these communications from partner organisations or organisations who support us. We make it easy for you to tell us how you want to hear from us. When you set up your account or place your first order with us we ask your permission to send promotional emails to you and at this stage you can choose to opt in to receive emails. You will not be added to our marketing mailing list unless you tick the opt in button.  You can opt out from these marketing communications at any time - every email sent to you will tell you how to do this, or you can tell our team over the phone or by email.

If you have opted out of marketing communications, we may still need to get in touch with you. For example we may email you to give you important information about your membership or book orders.

Third parties
We do not sell personal details to third parties for any purpose nor will we share your personal data with any other organisations for their own marketing communications.

We will only share your information if:

  • we are legally required to do so, e.g. by a law enforcement agency legitimately exercising a power or if compelled by an order of the Court.
  • we believe it is necessary to protect or defend our rights, property or the personal safety of our people or visitors to our premises or websites.
  • we are working with a carefully-selected partner that is carrying out work on our behalf. These partners may include mailing houses, marketing agencies, IT specialists and research firms. The kind of work we may ask them to do includes processing, packaging, mailing and delivering purchases or member packages, sending postal mail and emails, carrying out research or analysis and processing card payments. We only choose partners we can trust. We will only pass personal data to them if they have signed a contract that requires them to treat your information as carefully as we would and only use the information for the purposes it was supplied (and not for their own purposes or the purposes of any other organisation). The list of our key trusted partners can be found here.

How long do we keep your information?
Information is stored by us on computers located in the UK. We may transfer the information to other offices and to other reputable third party organisations as explained above – they may be situated inside or outside the European Economic Area. We may also store information in paper files.

We place a great importance on the security of all personally identifiable information associated with our members, customers and users. Only authorised personnel are authorised to access user information and we use secure server software (SSL) to encrypt financial and personal information you input before it is sent to us. While we cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur while it is under our control, we use our best efforts to try to prevent this.

We may retain information for a period of ten years after your association with us has come to an end. Some information may be retained indefinitely for historical, statistical or research purposes. As stated below, you have the right to require us to erase personal data. 

Your rights
Under the DPA you have the following rights:

  • to obtain access to, and copies of, the personal data that we hold about you.
  • to require that we cease processing your personal data if the processing is causing you damage or distress.
  • to require us not to send you marketing communications.

Once the GDPR takes effect from 25th May 2018, you will also have the following additional rights:

  • to require us to correct the personal data we hold about you if it is incorrect.
  • to require us to erase your personal data.
  • to require us to restrict our data processing activities (and, where our processing is based on your consent, you may withdraw that consent, without affecting the lawfulness of our processing based on consent before its withdrawal).
  • to receive from us the personal data we hold about you which you have provided to us, in a reasonable format specified by you, including for the purpose of you transmitting that personal data to another data controller.
  • to object, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to any of our particular processing activities where you feel this has a disproportionate impact on your rights.

Please note that the above rights are not absolute, and we may be entitled to refuse requests where exceptions apply.  

Contact us
Please contact us if you have any questions about our privacy policy or information we hold about you:

  • Email us at enquiries@poetrybooksociety.co.uk
  • Write to The Data Protection Officer, Inpress / Poetry Book Society, Milburn House, Dean Street Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 1LF
  • Call us on 01912308104
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