Privacy policy

Richard Aczel Ltd (Aczel) is committed to protecting your personal information. This Privacy Policy relates to us using any personal information that we collect from you via the following online services:

• any Aczel website that links to this Privacy Policy
• social media or official Aczel content on other websites

It also relates to us using any personal information that you provide by phone, SMS, email, in letters and other correspondence, and in person.

Whenever you provide such information, we are legally obliged to use it in line with all applicable laws concerning the protection of personal information (these laws are referred to collectively in this Privacy Policy as the ”data protection laws”). The Aczel website may contain hyperlinks to websites owned and operated by third parties. These third-party websites have their own privacy policies, and also likely use cookies, so we urge you to review them. They govern the use of personal information you submit when visiting these websites, which may also be collected via cookies. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the privacy practices of such third-party websites and your use of such sites is at your own risk.

Whilst we do not ask for any personal information whilst you are browsing or using our website, we do utilise tools or systems that may capture information relating to your visit(s). These are detailed as follows. Should you disagree with any of the information contained within, please do not continue to use our website.

Cookies: As is the case for most websites, this site uses cookies to understand how our website is used, and to inform future improvements. Cookies are small text files stored on your computer, smartphone or other device used to access a website. Cookies allow websites to recognise a user’s device and store some information about the user’s preferences and past actions. They do not store any personal information, and cannot contain viruses.

We won’t use our website or social media platforms to collect any personal information (such as your name, telephone number, email address) without your explicit consent to provide it to us. Cookies cannot capture this information.

Google Analytics: We use Google Analytics to measure and evaluate our website traffic and understand user engagement with our webpages. Google Analytics uses cookies to analyse how visitors use our website, but does not store any personally identifiable information. The cookies used by Google Analytics do track your Internet Protocol (IP) address. Every computer and device connected to the internet is assigned an IP address. IP addresses are usually assigned in country-based blocks and can often be used to identify the country, state and city from which a computer is connecting to the Internet. Because IP addresses need to be used by websites in order for the Internet to function, website owners have access to the IP addresses of their visitors regardless of whether or not they use Google Analytics. Google Analytics uses IP addresses to provide and protect the security of the service, and to give website owners a sense of where in the world their visitors come from (also known as “IP geolocation”). Google Analytics does not share actual IP address information with Google Analytics customers.

We may receive your personal information when you: participate in, access or sign up to any of our services, activities or online content – such as webinars or downloads – phone or email us or reserve a place at an event or enquire about employment opportunities.

Please note that we may need additional, sometimes sensitive, personal information from you such as ethnic origin or health (e.g. if you’re applying for a job). In these circumstances, we’ll explain further why we’re collecting your information and how we’ll use it.

• name, nationality, gender preference and date of birth;
• contact details including postal address, email and phone;
• your communication preference;
• employment information, including previous employment, industry, job title, level of seniority and number of years of postgraduate work experience;
• dietary requirements, including allergies;
• equality monitoring.

Aczel collects information about how you use its website or other related online content, and the device(s) you use to access these services. This includes collecting unique online identifiers such as IP addresses, which are numbers that can uniquely identify a specific computer or other network device on the web.

We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as necessary for the relevant activity, or as long as is set out in any relevant contract you hold with Aczel.

We may occasionally offer ad hoc communications to let you know about updates at Aczel and our services. We may also invite you to take part in surveys about our products and services or issues affecting Aczel.

We may personalise the message content based on any information you provide to us and your use of our platforms.

If you believe you have received unwanted, unsolicited emails sent by or purporting to be from Aczel, please forward a copy of that email with your comment to info@aczel.org for review.

Occasionally, we may contract a third party to communicate on our behalf to the third-party’s contacts. We don’t collect your email address or contact information from this third party, and we don’t have access to their mailing list.

Depending on the nature of the third-party mailing, we may, in order to comply with applicable laws, provide the third party with a suppression list of contacts to exclude from their list. The third party doesn’t have permission to keep or market to contacts this list, or to use it in any way other than as a suppression list for a mailing they’re providing on our behalf.

You have the following rights:

Right of access – Request a copy of the information we hold about you via a Subject Access Request (SAR). You have the right to request a copy of the personal information we hold about you, except where releasing that information would breach another person’s privacy or where an exemption applies, and to have any inaccuracies corrected.

If we do hold information about you, we’ll:

• give you a description of it;
• tell you why we are holding it;
• tell you who it could be disclosed to, and/or
• let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible form.

You may request in writing that we disclose details of data which we holds about you and the purpose for which such data is held. A SAR Form will be supplied upon request. We will need your passport or driver’s licence for proof of identity. We’ll use reasonable efforts consistent with our legal duty to supply, correct or delete personal information about you on our files.

If we hold information about you, you can ask us to correct any mistakes by contacting info@aczel.org

Right of rectification – We will update or amend the information we hold about you if it is incorrect.

Right of erasure – You can ask us to remove your personal information from our records. If you request that your data be erased, we’ll securely dispose of it. We’ll continue to retain a core set of personal data (name, email address) to ensure we don’t contact you again in the future.

Right to restrict processing – You have the right to ‘block’ or suppress processing of your personal data. When processing is restricted, we’re permitted to store the personal data but not further process it. We can retain just enough information about you to ensure that the restriction is respected in future.

Right to data portability – You have the right to obtain a copy of your personal data so that it can be reused for your own purposes in another IT environment.

Right to object to processing – You have a right to object by withdrawing your consent at any time.

Your information is used to contact you from time to time about:

• topics we believe you are interested in hearing our opinion about
• arranging meetings with you
• agreeing contractual arrangements with you
• invite-only Aczel hosted events with cross-industry peers.

We will never share, sell or lease your data with anyone outside of Aczel.

By accessing our website, you understand that your personal information may be collected, stored, used and shared by us for any of the following purposes:

• to enhance the security of our network and information systems;
• where the processing enables us to enhance, modify, personalise or otherwise improve our services/communications for the benefit of our customers;
• to better understand how people interact with our website;
• to determine the effectiveness of promotional campaigns and advertising; and/or
• for the direct marketing of Aczel services.

We may ask for consent to send you marketing communications about our services. You’ll be able to opt out of these communications at any point by selecting the ‘opt out’ option at the bottom of each email we send you.

Whenever processing data for these purposes, we’ll ensure we always keep your personal data rights in high regard and take account of them. You have the right to object to this processing if you wish. Please bear in mind that if you object, this may affect our ability to carry out the tasks, mentioned above, for your benefit.

We’ll notify you before using your personal information for any other means.

Our legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described above will depend on the personal information concerned and the specific context in which we collect it.

However, we will normally collect personal information from you only (i) where we have your consent to do so, (ii) where we need the personal information to perform a contract with you, or (iii) where the processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your rights. In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect personal information from you.

If we ask you to provide personal information to comply with a legal requirement or to perform a contract with you, we’ll make this clear at the relevant time and advise you whether the provision of your personal information is mandatory or not (as well as the possible consequences if you do not provide your information).

Similarly, if we collect and use your personal information in reliance on our legitimate interests (or those of any third party), we’ll make clear to you at the relevant time what those legitimate interests are.