vethelpdirect.com – Privacy Policy
Your Privacy
Our website provides services to veterinary practices and general information to pet owners. The services to veterinary practices can be accessed via our dashboard for practices who register with us.
Our Website (“the Website”) is also designed to provide general information to pet owners about veterinary services in their area and a symptoms checker for general advice and guidance.
The Website may contain links and adverts for third party providers; if you click through such a link, you will be subject to the Privacy Policy of the website you are navigated towards, and will no longer be subject to ours.
What is the purpose of this Privacy Policy?
Vethelpdirect.com Limited is a “data controller” for our website and the reviews system, which means we must tell you certain information when asking for your personal information. Our website contains several pages where you can provide us with information, for example if you register using our online form. Our registered address is Wey Court West, Union Road, Farnham, England, GU9 7PT.
If you have any queries about the Website, this Privacy Policy or how we use your personal information, please contact us. Our Data Protection Officer is David Harris who can be contacted at the above address or email at data@vethelpdirect.com.
This Privacy Policy relates to your use of the Website and tells you:
- What personal information we collect about you when you use the Website
- How we collect your personal information in the Website
- How we use your personal information
- Who we may share your personal information with
- Any transfer of personal information outside of the EEA
- How long we keep your personal information
- What we do to protect your personal information
- What choices you have in relation to your personal information
We last updated this Privacy Statement on 20/02/2023.
PERSONAL INFORMATION WE PROCESS ABOUT YOU:
What information we process about you
We may collect the following information about you:
- your name and address
- your mobile phone number
- your email address
- information about your use of the Website (e.g. what you have read and what actions you have taken)
- reviews or other content you have posted
- (vets only) Information about you and what services you offer
- (vets only) reviews about your business
- (vets only) payment information (including bank, debit or credit card details)
Personal Information you give us
Leave a review of your vet
We collect personal information about you to verify and publicly publish your review on our website, the practice’s website, and in some cases on social media platforms.
Using our contact form/email contact/online chat
We collect personal information from you if you contact us via our contact forms, an email link or participate in an online chat with us.
Sign up for our newsletter
If you sign up for our newsletter, we will collect your email address and name which we will use to send you our newsletter and any other information that we think will be of interest to you. We will also monitor in aggregate how many people have opened the email newsletters, and what links they clicked through. This is so we can improve the content and delivery of the newsletters.
Fill in one of our surveys
If you fill in one of our surveys, you may be asked for personal information that we will use to help us tailor our services to the needs and demands of owners.
Log in via Facebook/Google/Twitter or Instagram
If you follow a link from our website to log in via Facebook/Google/Twitter or Instagram then that website will provide us with personal information but you will be asked what information you want us to receive and will have the chance to edit the information that you provide to us.
Our blog, forum and other user-generated content
You may choose to provide us with personal information if you post to our blog, the forum, or other user generated content areas.
Vets – Registering with us to use our dashboard
If you are a vet and have registered to use our dashboard we will mostly collect information relating to your organisation, but if you are a sole trader we may process personal information relating to you to provide the dashboard and our services.
Personal Information we collect automatically
When you use the Website, we may collect certain information automatically such as:
- IP addresses (the name and internet address your device uses to identify itself to us)
- Your activity in our website including times and dates of visits
- Information on your location
- other websites you may have visited
If you want to know more about how we use cookies, please see our cookie statement.
HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
Our legal basis for using your information
The law only allows us to use your personal information in certain limited circumstances. We will most commonly process your personal information:
- Where we need to perform the contract we have entered into with you (e.g. provide you with services that you have requested)
- Where we need to comply with a legal obligation (e.g. keeping records for insurance purpose)
- Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests (this allows us to send you information about our own services or products that are related to or similar to those you have already utilised or purchased from us, unless you tell us otherwise)
- Where you have consented to us using your personal information
What this means in practice
Any personal information that you give to us may be used in the following ways:
- to provide you with information about your nearest veterinary practice
- to allow you to leave a review of your practice, and to allow us to publish it
- to sign up for our newsletter
- to provide you with any information that you have requested from us
- to contact you with information about services or products similar to those you have received from us previously (unless you tell us not to)
- to prevent and detect fraud
- to tell you about changes to our website or software
- to help us improve the Website and other services to make them better for all users
- to get your feedback on the Website and other services
- to administer the Website (such as troubleshooting, data analysis, research, moderation)
Vets only
- to sign you up for an account so that you can access services through our dashboard
- to administer your account and provide you with our services
- to process your payments
- to advertise your services
- to notify you of other services that may be of benefit to you
If you fail to provide personal information
If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have entered into with you (such as providing you with our services), or we may be prevented from complying with our legal obligations (such as to ensure that we keep the necessary insurance records).
SHARING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
Our Business Partners
We may share your information with carefully selected third parties including:
- Our business partners, suppliers and sub-contractors for the performance of any contract we enter into with them or you
- Analytics and search engine providers who analyse information about your use of our website and help us to tailor the product and offers that we offer to you and other users
The following organisations are used by us as data processors:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS/AWS-S3) – the servers for our websites and products
- Arc Analytics – for monitoring traffic on the website
- Atlassian – for Support Tickets
- Autoentry – an accounting tool
- BBPress – for forms and reporting
- Campaign Monitor – for sending emails
- Customer.io – for customer support
- Facebook and Instagram – for communicating with users and clients
- FreshSuite – for customer support
- G-Suite – for communication, file archiving and processing, advertising and communicating
- Linear – for internal communications
- Mailgun – for sending reminders to service users
- MongoDB Atlas – for VetBooker functionality
- NewRelic – for database security
- Quickbooks – for accounting
- Sendgrid – for sending emails from forms
- Sentry – for database security
- Stripe – for processing customer payments in our vet practice products
- Yay – for communications
For a full list of all our data processors, please see the list here.
Legal Requirements and Law Enforcement
We may also disclose your personal information to third parties:
- If we sell our business in which case the personal information that we hold will be part of the transferred assets.
- If we are required by law, or in order to enforce or Website our terms of use. This includes exchanging information with other organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction and also law enforcement agencies.
European Representative under Article 27 of GDPR
We have appointed EU Rep as our Representative under Article 27 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”). All GDPR queries from EU Data Subjects or Data Protection authorities should be addressed to privacy@eurep.ie. BizLegal Limited trading as EU Rep have their registered office at 27 Cork Road, Middleton Co. Cork, Ireland. Company number 635921. You may also contact us directly at data@vethelpdirect.com.
Third Party Privacy Policies
The Website may contain links to websites owned by other organisations. If you follow a link to another website, these websites they will have their own privacy policy. We suggest that you check the policies of any other websites before giving them your personal information as we cannot accept responsibility for any other website.
KEEPING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
How we store your personal information
The security of your personal information is important to us.
We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to safeguard personal information. We use encryption technology where appropriate to enhance privacy and help prevent information security breaches. We use industry-standard measures and processes for detecting and responding to inappropriate attempts to breach our systems.
We may transfer of personal information from the UK to a country outside of the EEA. If we do, we will ensure that we enter into a data transfer agreement which gives you enforceable rights and legal remedies and provides adequate levels of protection for any personal information that is transferred outside of the EEA.
All third parties who provide services to the Website are required to sign contract requiring them to have appropriate technical, administrative and physical procedures in place to ensure that your information is protected against loss or misuse.
All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers or on secure servers operated by a third party. Information on our third-party providers can be found above.
Modification of information
We may from time to time be required to modify information that you give us. In particular, we actively moderate the comment boxes and forum. Any comments made which are defamatory or otherwise illegal, or which at our complete discretion are deemed to be in breach of the code of conduct will be removed, in part or in full.
Retention of information
We only hold your personal information for as long as necessary for the purposes for which we collected your information.
We have a company retention policy which lays down timescales for the retention of information. The document retention policy can be found here.
We have set these timescales in accordance with any applicable legislation and where none exists then we will keep your information for the duration of your employment (or services contract) and then for a period of 7 years after which time it will be deleted.
Emails
If you chose to send us information via email, we cannot guarantee the security of this information until it is delivered to us.
YOUR RIGHTS
Access to information
You have the right to access information that we hold about you. If you wish to receive a copy of the information that we hold, please contact us or write to us at the address above.
Changing or deleting your information
You can ask us at any time to change, amend or delete the information that we hold about you or ask us not to contact you with any further marketing information. You can also ask us to restrict the information that we process about you.
You can use the check boxes on the forms we use to collect your information, or you can also request that we change, amend, delete your information or restrict our processing by emailing us at data@vethelpdirect.com or writing to us at the address at the beginning of this Privacy Policy.
Right to prevent Automated decision making
You have a right to ask us to stop any automated decision making. We do not intentionally carry out such activities, but if you do have any questions or concerns we would be happy to discuss them with you and you can contact us at data@vethelpdirect.com.
Transferring Personal Information
You have the right to request that your personal data is transferred by us to another organisation (this is called “data portability”). Please contact us at data@vethelpdirect.com with the details of what you would like us to do and we will try our best to comply with your request. If may not be technically feasible, but we will work with you to try and find a solution.
Complaints
If you make a request to us under this Privacy Statement and you are unhappy with the response, you can ask for the request to be reviewed under our internal complaints procedure. Our internal complaints procedure allows your request to be reviewed by David Harris, our Data Protection Officer, who will do their best to try and resolve the issue.
If you have been through the internal complaints procedure and are still not happy with the result, then you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office. They can be contacted as follows:
Website: www.ico.org.uk
Telephone: 03031231113
Address: Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Changes to our Privacy Statement
We review our Privacy Statement on a frequent basis to check that it accurately reflects how we deal with your information and may amend it if necessary. You should check this page regularly to see the most up to date information.
How to Contact us
We welcome questions, comments and requests regarding this Privacy Statement which can be sent to data@vethelpdirect.com.