Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy

Sport On Spec Limited, a company registered in England and Wales with registration number 8298644 ("we") are committed to ensuring your data is protected and that all collected data is safeguarded and processed in line with the Data Protection Act 2019 and other applicable privacy laws.

Our privacy and cookies policy explains how we use and process personal data you give us by phone, email, online, survey and other correspondence methods.  It also outlines our use of cookies and provides you with a point of contact if you wish to gain access to your personal data. 

Privacy Policy - January 2024

This Privacy Policy explains how Sport On Spec Limited ("we") collects and uses your information and how you can influence this.  It should should be read in conjunction with our Cookies Policy (see above).  References to we refer to Sport On Spec Limited the company responsible for processing your data and for the purposes of data protection law the company operating the website www.sportonspec.co.uk ("the Website") on which you clicked on this Privacy & Cookies Policy. 

We will collect various types of information about you through your use of our Website to process your requests and orders, to provide a more personalised web-surfing experience and to help us improve the services we offer.  In doing this we also collect information about you through the use of cookies and similar technologies.

This version was last updated on 23 September 2019.  We have updated our Privacy & Cookies Policy in order to comply with new data protection laws in the UK which came into force on 25 May 2018.  Please check back regularly as we will need to make periodic changes to this policy to reflect updated guidance and requirements when they become available.

What information do we collect about you?

Information you give to us: In order to process your requests and orders, it is necessary to collect personal data from you.  This may include, but is not limited to: your name, address, e-mail address, telephone number, credit/debit card information.  We are unable to provide you with products and services if you do not provide certain information to us.  You may also be asked to provide additional (non-mandatory) pieces of information such as your interests, preferences, age, gender, feedback, and survey responses so that we can better understand our customers.  You can also choose to provide such information by posting on a forum, filling out a web form or when you communicate with us. We also obtain information about you that you have provided to our group companies where we have the appropriate permissions to do so or as otherwise authorised by applicable law.

Information we collect automatically when you use our sites or services: We collect information about your interaction with our sites and services from the devices you use, such as your unique device ID, device type and advertising ID.  We also collect information about your visits and activity on our Website including the content and any advertisements that you view and interact with, the address of the site from which you arrived and other technical data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns (such as the pages you view, the links you click, the items you add to your shopping basket, the length of your internet session, your IP address and approximate location at the time of browsing).  This information is collected using cookies or similar technologies. To learn more about these technologies and your choices, see the Cookies Policy above. 

Information collected from other sources: We will combine your information with information we collect from third parties or public sources, including analytics providers, advertising networks, and publicly available sources such as Companies House and the Electoral Register.

Social Media: Certain sites offer services that require you to set up an account prior to receiving such services.  To create a secure account you can use your email address and a password or, if the site offers a Facebook single-sign-on service, you will be able to register for and log-in to your account using your Facebook account.  If you choose to use the Facebook single-sign-on service, you are granting permission to Facebook to share certain profile information with us.  This will include your name, profile picture and list of friends and any other information notified to you by Facebook prior to you completing the single-sign-on authorisation process.  You control what social media information you allow us to have access to using the privacy settings on the applicable social media platform and any permissions you give as part of the single-sign-on authorisation process.

Children’s data

Our sites are not intended for children under the age of 13.  If you are under 13, please do not provide any information to us and instead ask your parent or guardian to do this on your behalf.  You must be at least 18 years of age to purchase products or services from us.  If you are under the age of 18, you must ensure that your parent or guardian purchases the products or services on your behalf

How will we use the information about you?

We will use your information for the following purposes:

Service Access and Registration: to register you as a new customer when you purchase a subscription, event ticket or other product or service from us or create an account on one of our sites in order to access one of our services.

Sales and Fulfilment: to process and deliver your order; to manage payments, fees and charges; to collect and recover money owed to us; to provide you with services you have requested from us when we collected the information from you.

Customer Relationship Management: to contact you about your account, subscription or other order; to provide you with customer service (such as responding to questions, concerns and feedback and contacting you via email, telephone, SMS/text, post, direct message or other similar communication method for this purpose); to notify you of material changes to our terms or this Privacy & Cookies Policy; to send you service related communications; to ask you to leave a review or take a survey.

Competitions, Awards, Events, Product Trials, Surveys: to enable you to participate in competitions, prize draws, product trials, events, awards, surveys, polls and quizzes and to provide you with any prizes, products or awards as applicable.

Business Administration, Systems and Security: to administer and protect our business and our sites such as troubleshooting, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting data; to ensure network and system security and prevent detect, mitigate and investigate fraud, security breaches and other prohibited or illegal activities; to verify your identity. 

Data Analytics: to measure the performance of our marketing campaigns (for example, analysing open and click rates); to provide insight and analysis of our customers for ourselves and our business partners.

Marketing: to provide you with marketing via email, post, telephone, SMS/text, social media and other digital channels (including Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Custom Match); to make suggestions and recommendations to you about goods and services that could be of interest to you.

Advertising: to select and deliver advertising and content to you and measure the delivery and effectiveness of such advertising and content.

Personalisation: to personalise content, services and communications and target advertising, as further explained in Personalisation and Advertising below.

Aggregation and Anonymisation: to aggregate and anonymise your data, so that we can use it to enable us to sell advertising and monitor the efficacy of our business partnerships.

Personalisation and Advertising

We want the ads and content displayed on our Website to be relevant to you.  Personalising and targeting advertising, content, services and communications allows us to provide you with much of our sought-after online content for free.

We will use your information to provide you with personalised content, services and communications as well as targeted advertising on our Website and selected partner sites.  We do this by matching, combining or linking the different sources of information we hold about you (e.g. linking your contact or subscriber information with your activity across our sites or by linking your activity on our sites across all your devices using your email or social media log-in details) or by creating segments based on various factors such as your age and gender, your device details or your inferred interests.  We work with data management platform providers to assist with this process.

We also use your information for retargeting (for example, you could see an advertisement on a partner site such as Facebook for a product that you have recently viewed on our sites).

These activities involve the use of cookies and other similar technologies. To learn more or to see how you can opt out of targeted advertising, please see our Cookies Policy below

Marketing

Where we have the appropriate permissions or as otherwise authorised by applicable law, we will use your information to market and advertise our products and services and occasionally third party products and services that could be of interest to you including third party offers, advertisements, competitions or commercial communications by telephone (mobile and landline when available), post, electronic messaging (including SMS and MMS), email, online or via applications.  

You can always tell us that you wish to stop receiving direct marketing communications from us.  But remember, if you do not want us to get in touch, you will miss out on offers.

If you would prefer not to receive direct marketing communications, simply let us know at any time by writing to the Customer Services Manager at Sport On Spec Limited, House of Sport, 190 Great Dover Street, London SE1 4YB or info@sportonspec.co.uk with the with the subject line “Privacy”, or by following the opt-out instructions in the relevant communication.  Please note that this will not stop you from receiving service messages from us.

What is our legal basis for processing your data?

We rely on the following legal basis when processing your data:

Providing you with our services, or to comply with a legal obligation, including to: register you as a new customer when you sign purchase a subscription, event ticket or other product or service from us or create an account on one of our sites in order to access one of our services; process and deliver your order; manage payments, fees and charges; collect and recover money owed to us; contact you about your account, subscription or other order; provide you with customer service (such as responding to questions, concerns and feedback and contacting you via email, telephone, SMS/text, post, direct message or other similar communication method for this purpose); send you service related communications; provide you with services you have requested from us when we collected the information from you; enable you to participate in competitions, prize draws, product trials, events, awards, surveys polls and quizzes and provide you with any prizes, products or awards as applicable; notify you of material changes to our terms or this Privacy & Cookies Policy; administer and protect our business and our sites such as troubleshooting, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting data necessary to ensure network and system security and prevent detect, mitigate and investigate fraud, security breaches and other prohibited or illegal activities; verify your identity.   

Our legitimate interests (to run an effective and successful business), or the legitimate interests of a third party, where not outweighed by your interests, including to: measure the performance of our marketing campaigns (for example, analysing open and click rates); provide you with marketing via post, telephone, social media and other digital channels (including Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Custom Match); provide you with marketing via email where you have purchased goods or services from us; ask you to leave a review or take a survey; administer and protect our business and our sites such as troubleshooting, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting data; use data analytics to provide insight and analysis of our customers for ourselves and our business partners; make suggestions and recommendations to you about goods and services that could be of interest to you; select and deliver advertising and content to you and measure the delivery and effectiveness of such advertising and content; personalise content, services and communications and target advertising; to aggregate and anonymise your data, so that we can use it to enable us to sell advertising and monitor the efficacy of our business partnerships. The legitimate interests we rely on for this processing are: to keep our records updated; to study how customers use our products and services; to improve the customer experience; to develop our products and services; to develop and grow our business; to run our business; to provide administration and IT services; for network security and fraud prevention; in the context of a business reorganisation or a group restricting exercise; to inform our marketing and content strategy; to keep our sites and content updated and relevant.

Your consent, including to: provide you with marketing via email, SMS/text, post and telephone and from third parties. You can withdraw your consent at any time – see Marketing.

What will we disclose to third parties?

We share your information with advertisers, ad servers, ad networks and content recommendation services to select and deliver advertising and content, and target and personalise advertising and content both on our sites and on selected partner sites.  This will not include any information which directly identifies you in the real world, such as your name, email address, address or phone number.  However, by interacting with or viewing an advert or content, you should be aware that the third party could make the assumption that you meet the targeting criteria used to display the advert or content.  We also share your information with analytics and search engine providers to assist us in the improvement and optimisation of our sites.

We will pass your personal data to third parties to enable them to supply you with a prize in the event you win a competition. 

We could merge with or be acquired by another business. If this happens we share the information that relates to you.  You will be sent notice of such an event.

We reserve the right to disclose your personal data in order to comply with the law, applicable regulations and government requests.  We also reserve the right to use such information in order to protect our operating systems and integrity as well as other users.

How do we protect your information?

Once we have received your data we will take steps to ensure that it is treated in accordance with any applicable laws.  Unfortunately the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure.  Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk.

Other websites

Please note that clicking on links and advertisements on our Website could result in you being transferred to another website, where data privacy practices vary from ours.  If transferred to another website you should consult their privacy policy as we are not responsible for, and have no control over, information that is submitted to or collected by these third parties.

How long do we keep your information?

We are required by law to keep certain information about our customers (such as financial and transaction related data) for seven years after they cease being customers for tax purposes.

Our data retention periods vary depending on the context of the services that we provide to you and our legal obligations.  To determine the appropriate period for which we keep your data, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of your data, the potential risk or harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process that data (and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means), and applicable legal requirements.

Your Rights

You have certain rights in relation to the personal data we hold about you, which we detail below.  Certain rights only apply in specific circumstances as set out in more detail below.  We also set out how to exercise those rights. When you exercise your rights, we need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights).  This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We will also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

You have the right to:

Request access to your personal data.  This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.

Request correction of the personal data that we hold about you.  This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected, though we need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us.

Request erasure of your personal data.  This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it.  You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we could have processed your information unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law.  Note, however, that we are not always able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.

Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground as you feel it impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms.  You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes (more information on your marketing choices can be found in the Marketing section above).  In certain cases, we will demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which override your rights and freedoms.

Request restriction of processing of your personal data.  This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios: (a) if you want us to establish the data's accuracy; (b) where our use of the data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it; (c) where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or (d) you have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.

Request the transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party.  We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format.  Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.

Withdraw consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal data.  However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent.

Make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the supervisory authority for data protection issues in the UK.  We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact us in the first instance by contacting us using the details provided in the Contacting Us section below.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us using the details provided in the Contacting Us section below.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

We keep this Privacy Policy under review and will update it to reflect changes in our privacy practices.  Any updates will be made on this page so that you can always find out what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances we will disclose it.

Contacting Us

If you have any questions or concerns about how your information is processed or handled, please contact us by writing to Sport On Spec Limited, 17 Park Crescent, Elstree, WD6 3PT or emailing info@sportonspec.co.uk with the subject line 'Privacy'.

Cookies Policy - January 2020

We use cookies on our website www.sportonspec.co.uk ("the Website") to improve your experience on the Website.  This policy should be read in conjunction with our Privacy Policy (see below) which explains how we use personal information.  If you do not accept our use of cookies please disable them following the guidelines below.
 
What are cookies? 
 
Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computer’s, or mobile device’s, hard drive through your Web browser.  Cookies are often used by websites to save where you left off and to remember useful information like your login details.  They are widely used and help to provide you with relevant and personalised content and advertising, and help make websites work more efficiently.  
 
While this policy refers to the general term “cookie”, the main method used by our Website to store information, we may use other tracking technologies through this Website such as web beacons.  The information included in this policy is applicable to all such tracking technologies that we use.
 
You can find out more about cookies at www.allaboutcookies.org.
 
Why and how we use cookies:
 

We may use cookies on our services to enable our systems to recognise your browser and to capture and remember certain information to improve your browsing experience.  We may use cookies to understand and save your preferences for future visits and social media cookies in order to tailor advertising.  We use Google Analytics to help analyse use of the site.  These analytical tools use cookies to collect standard internet log information and visitor behaviour information which is then aggregated so that it does not identify any individuals.  The information about your use of the Website and your IP address is transmitted to Google and is used by us to evaluate visitors' use of the website, compile statistical reports on website activity and create a profile of aggregated visitors based on demographics and interests.

Cookies on our Website, and any of our other domains, are used for a variety of different functions.  Broadly speaking there are four types of cookie that can be summarised as:

a) Strictly Necessary cookies – These are used to ensure that the Website delivers you information and services optimally.  This particularly ensures that you are not treated as a new visitor on every single page you visit.

b) Performance cookies – These are used to allow us to understand the performance of our Website.  They provide information on the number of users on our Website, and how users use our services.  This is vital for us to understand how we can improve our offering, and therefore your experience.

c) Targeting/Advertising cookies – These record your visit to our Website, the pages that you visit and any links that you click during any session.  This information then may be used to display online adverts more relevant to your interests.

d) Functionality cookies – These improve and enhance your use of the Website.  This may be by remembering your consent to previously load something within the website.

In more detail cookies we may use include:
 
_fbp – This Facebook pixel cookie helps deliver advertising to people who have already visited the website when they are on Facebook, or Facebook-powered services. It expires at the end of the session, or after 2 hours of inactivity.
 

_ga – This Google Analytics cookie renders a unique ID for this user to enable statistical data on interactions you have with services across our platforms. It expires 2 years after the last recorded session for that unique ID.

_gat – Used to limit the number website request rates to help load times. It expires after 1 minute.

_gid – An alternative to help distinguish users using the service. It expires after 24 hours.

ADS/GA-AUDIENCES – This enables Google Ad Words for the ability to advertise to you as a user from other websites. It expires at the end of the session.

We may also use some cookies which are strictly necessary in order for you to use our services available on the Website.
 

Website cookie acceptance

By clicking accept when you visit the Website you consent to our use of cookies as updated from time to time.  In particular, you consent to cookies being stored on your computer and/or mobile device (unless rejected or disabled by your browser).
 
Turning cookies off

Internet browsers normally accept cookies by default. However, most browsers let you turn off either all or third-party cookies.  What you are able to do depends on which browser you are using.  If you do not accept our use of cookies as set out above, please don’t accept cookies, or please set your browser to reject cookies.   However, please be aware that this may impair or limit your  ability to use our Website. The option to do this is usually found in the options, settings or preferences menu of your browser or mobile device.

You may opt-out of Google’s analytics cookies by visiting Google’s opt-out page - https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Click on the links below to find out how to change your cookie settings in:
 
 
 
More information about online advertising

The advertising companies we work with generally use cookies and similar tracking technologies as part of their services.  To learn more about how advertisers generally use cookies and the choices they offer, and the steps you can take to choose which cookies you can accept or reject, you can review the website of the European Interactive Digital Alliance.  In addition, there is software available which enables you to use settings that allow to you choose
which cookies are set on your computer or mobile device, such as the Ghostery app.
 
Updating this Cookies Policy

We may update our use of cookies from time to time and consequently we may update this Cookies Policy.  We therefore recommend that you check this policy regularly. We will notify you of any significant changes by way of a notice on our website or by contacting you directly when reasonably possible.