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Individual customers privacy policy

We are committed to protecting the personal information of all our users. We do not share personal information with third parties except to allow us to take orders and deliver guidebooks and other products and services to our users.

In handling any personal information, Cicerone acts as a data controller. We can be contacted at our offices at Juniper House, Murley Moss, Oxenholme Road, Kendal, Cumbria, LA9 7RL or by Contact Form here. Cicerone is incorporated in England, company number 03690943.

Order processing

To enable us to meet our contractual commitments to buyers, we hold personal information on addresses, contact details including names, email and phone numbers, and a note of the guidebooks ordered. We also record website user statistics. Most of the information we process is provided to us directly by you when you place an order on the Cicerone website, we then use the information you have given us to process and despatch your order.

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the lawful bases we rely on for processing this information are:

  • Your consent. You are able to remove your consent at any time. You can do this by contacting us at info@cicerone.co.uk.
  • We have a contractual obligation.
  • We have a legitimate interest.

How we store your personal information

Your information is securely stored.

We keep personal information such as your name, email address, address, and phone number for five years. We will then dispose of your information by manually removing your personal information from our records.

Your information

About BookSource

We work with our distribution and logistics partner, BookSource, to process and despatch all orders and hold financial records of sales. All information we transmit to BookSource is encrypted. See details on BookSource below – their privacy policy is available on their website.

In common with many other publishers, Cicerone works very closely with a distributor, in our case BookSource who are based in Glasgow. BookSource hold our stock and picks, packs and ship our orders. They also take payment from phone orders (but not website orders which Cicerone does directly with secure payment providers, see below). In addition, they collect and report to us all our sales, royalty, and inventory information. BookSource are an extension of our own service and run to the same standards, especially in the area of privacy.

Addresses

We work with a postcode look-up service to assist purchasers to fill in address details. This is provided by PCA Predict – whose privacy policy can be found here.

Payments

To take payment the Cicerone website requests credit or debit card or Paypal/wallet-type payment information. Cicerone never sees this information, card or other details which are securely encrypted and passed directly to our payment providers. We work with the following “payment gateways” to ensure secure payments.

These are:

  • PayPal – their privacy policy can be found here.
  • Stripe – their privacy policy can be found here.

Your account at Cicerone

Most online purchases are made through an account on the Cicerone website, which allows you to manage your personal details and select any marketing preferences. Website users buying guidebooks for the first time are invited to open an account when making a purchase. Users with an account already are invited to open their account to smooth the buying process.

Alternatively, through our Guest Checkout facility, you may buy guides from Cicerone without opening an account. However, if you open an account, Cicerone will store your purchase history of guidebooks, eBooks and other products. You can also register guidebooks acquired at other retailers whether online or shops, in the UK or elsewhere.

Having an account allows you to access other Cicerone services, such as the ability to download GPX files, to subscribe for updates to your guides, and other services we plan to add in the future. It is also integral to buying eBooks from Cicerone as we need to retain information on guides bought to enable you to download them. We are unable to provide these extra services if you do not have an account.

Accordingly having an account with Cicerone is a contractual condition of accessing these services, and we may contact you from time to time about the account and our services.

Marketing information

Cicerone holds name and address information to mail catalogues and other information about guidebooks, and email addresses to send email newsletters and similar communications regularly. This information is held secure at Cicerone.

This information is held only so that we may communicate information about our guidebooks and other products. It is held based on your consent, so you have the right to be removed from databases at any time, most simply done by unsubscribing.

We use a marketing platform called Campaign Monitor to compose and distribute newsletters. Newsletter sign-ups are recorded in our systems and passed to this service, and unsubscribes are recorded. The service allows us to understand how our newsletters are used.

When we mail catalogues, we pass name and address information to our mailing house, Cumbria Mailing. They use this information to create mailing forms. They also perform tests on the information to eliminate duplicate information, to remove letters from a mailing where occupants are known to have died, addresses do not actually exist and other checks to ensure more accurate mailings. This information allows us to keep our records up to date.

Communications with users

Cicerone has a healthy dialogue with users of our guidebooks and other services. We welcome this as it helps us improve our guidebooks and the parts of the world we cover. Often this will include update information about changes that have taken place since the guidebook was published. It is important to confirm such update information before publishing it so we share it with our authors and, with their agreement, we post the information online.

We regard users to have consented to the use of the information provided, in update notes and in due course in our guidebooks, and also to have consented to us passing contact details to our authors. Although it will usually be Cicerone responding to users, sometimes the details can only be resolved by direct communication with authors, where the author has agreed to do this.

Please note that we do not include details of correspondents in update notes or guidebooks. We are happy to do so if you wish, but only with your express consent. From time to time, we may contact selected consumers to research whether our guidebooks are matching your needs. This is generally by email and may be on a regional basis.

Social media

To help us communicate with users, Cicerone has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and other social media platforms. All these services have their own privacy policies.

Cicerone does not take any personal information from users of these social media services. We may communicate directly with users of these services through the mechanisms they make available. Our use of them conforms to all regulations.

Website privacy and cookies

Our website is an important part of our communication with our users, and we seek to improve it continually through improvements to its design and content.

To improve our site, we employ standard web evaluation tools. The main tool is Google Analytics. This allows us to understand where visitors come from regionally and geographically, and how visitors have come to our site, their movements through it and the points where they have left the site. This uses cookies to collect and report visitor numbers and usage. In addition, we use a service named Hotjar to help us ensure that the website is presenting information as well as possible. These companies’ privacy policies are on their websites.

Where Cicerone deploys Apps to deliver guidebook content, we also use similar tools to help us understand how the App is used and how we can make it better. Cicerone’s web services are provided entirely from servers based in the European Economic Area. No personal information is passed outside the European Economic Area.

Privacy Rights

You have important rights concerning any personal information held about you. You can exercise these rights either through managing your account online, unsubscribing, or contacting Cicerone using the Contact form here.

These rights are:

  • Your right of access – You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information.
  • Your right to rectification – You have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete.
  • Your right to erasure – You have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances.
  • Your right to object to processing – You have the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.

You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.

Please contact us at info@cicerone.co.uk, or by calling us on 01539 562069 if you wish to make a request.

How to complain

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us at:

Cicerone,
Juniper House,
Murley Moss Business Park,
Oxenholme Road,
Kendal
LA9 7RL

You can also call us on 01539 562069 or email us at info@cicerone.co.uk.

You can also complain to the ICO if you are unhappy with how we have used your data.

The ICO’s address:

Information Commissioner’s Office,
Wycliffe House,
Water Lane,
Wilmslow,
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Helpline number: 0303 123 1113.

ICO website: https://www.ico.org.uk