GDPR Privacy Policy

GDPR & Privacy Policy

M.W. Beer & Co. Ltd (‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’) respects your privacy and is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal data.
This privacy policy sets out how we look after the personal data we hold and also gives you information about your privacy rights and the steps you can take if you are not happy with how we process your personal data.

The personal data we collect about you

We only have access to/collect personal data that you voluntarily give us via email, telephone or electronic messaging or other direct contact from you.

This information will usually include:

Your name
Your job title
The company you work for
Your business contact details
Any other personal data which is contained within your correspondence.
Any personal data which you disclose in a telephone call to us

We do not collect any special categories of personal data about you (this includes this includes details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health, and genetic and biometric data) or any information about criminal convictions an offences.
You are not under a legal obligation to provide us with any of your personal data but please note that if you elect not to provide us with your personal data we may be unable to provide our services to you.

How we use your personal data
We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

To enter into or to carry out a contract with you
To respond to any correspondence or telephone calls from you
To send you marketing information by email (where you have previously used our services, and where have not opted out of receiving marketing information from us by email).
In respect of call recording, to identify any training needs for our staff and so that we have a reliable record of services you have ordered.

We do not make use of automated decision making or profiling.

Who we share your personal data with
We will not share your information with any third party outside of our organization, other than as necessary to fulfil our contract with you.
The third parties who we may share your personal data with include:

Superintendents and Surveyors for the purposes of sharing shipping information on or before execution.
Ship Brokers for the purpose of vetting freight potential.
Supplier Brokers for the purpose of negotiating and concluding business.
Laboratories for the purpose of sharing information.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law.

We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

We may also share your personal information with third parties on a one-off basis, for example, if:

we sell or buy any business or assets (including our own), in which case we will disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets
we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce our terms and conditions and other agreements; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of our customers, ourselves or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction

International transfers of personal data
We do not transfer your personal data outside the European Economic Area (EEA).

Your legal rights

In certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. You can therefore contact us to request:

access to your personal data
correction of your personal data
erasure of your personal data
object to us processing your personal data
restrict our processing of your personal data
request that we transfer your personal data to a third party
withdraw your consent to us processing your personal data

If you would like to exercise any of the above rights, please contact us by email on trading@mwbeer.co.uk.

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we could refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

We may 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 may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within 28 days. Occasionally it could take us longer than 28 days to respond if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

Security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

How long we retain your personal data
We will only retain your personal data for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements. We may retain your personal data for a longer period in the event of a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation in respect to our relationship with you.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or other requirements.

We carry out annual information audits to identify data which we process and how it flow’s into, through and out of our business.

Website Links

Our website may contain links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of any other site that collects personal data.

If you feel that we are not abiding by this privacy policy, you should contact our compliance department immediately via telephone at +44(0)1277 356614 or via email at trading@mwbeer.co.uk. You are also entitled to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office which you can do by visiting www.ico.org.uk. Whilst you are not required to do so, we encourage you to contact us directly to discuss any concerns that you may have and to allow us an opportunity to address these before you contact the Information Commissioner’s Office.

We will review and update this policy from time to time. This may be to reflect a change in the products or services we offer or to our internal procedures or it may be to reflect a change in the law.

The easiest way to check for updates is by looking for the latest version of this policy on the site. This is policy version 02 which came into effect on May 23rd 2023.