Privacy Policy

1. INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Blocks Online Limited’s (Blocks Online) privacy policy.

As used in this Privacy Policy, “Blocks Online”, “us” and “we” refers to Blocks Online Limited (our registered company name). 

Blocks Online is what’s known as the “Controller” and this privacy notice will inform you as to how we look after your personal data when you visit our website (regardless of where you visit it from) and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you. 

This website is not intended for children, and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children. 

We respect the privacy rights of our users, recognise the importance of protecting your personal information and giving you control over what data we hold. Our Privacy Policy is designed to help you understand what information we collect and how we use and share that information.

2. WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT?

Personal data means any information about an individual from which they can be identified. 

We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together as follows: 

• Identity Data includes first name, last name, any previous names, username or similar identifier, and title. 

• Contact Data includes billing address, delivery address, residential address, email address and telephone numbers. 

• Transaction Data includes details about payments to and from you and other details of products and services you have purchased from us. 

• Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform, device ID and other technology on the devices you use to access this website. 

• Profile Data includes your username and password, purchases or orders made by you, preferences, feedback and survey responses. 

• Usage Data includes information about how you interact with and use our website, products and services. 

• Marketing and Communications Data includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences. 

We also collect, use and share aggregated data such as statistical or demographic data which is not personal data as it does not directly (or indirectly) reveal your identity. For example, we may aggregate individuals’ Usage Data to calculate the percentage of users accessing a specific website feature to analyse general trends in how users are interacting with our website to help improve the website and our service offering. 

 3. HOW YOUR PERSONAL DATA IS COLLECTED

We use a variety of methods to collect data from and about you including: 

• Information you provide to us: We collect personal information when you voluntarily provide us with such information while using our website or Services. For example, when you subscribe to notifications for our blog, if you make an enquiry through our website, or contact us in any other way, we will keep a copy of your communications with us. 

• Information collected when we do business with you: We may process your personal information when you do business with us – for example, as a customer or prospective customer, or as a vendor, supplier, consultant, or other third party. For example, we will hold your business contact information and other communications you have with us for the purposes of maintaining our business relations with you. We also hold your bank account information if you signed up to a direct debit payment plan. We do not collect or hold card payment data. 

• Information we automatically collect: We may also collect certain technical information by automatic means when you visit our website, such as IP address, browser type and operating system, referring URLs, your use of our website, and other clickstream data. We collect this information automatically through the use of various technologies, such as cookies. We may also receive Technical Data about you if you visit other websites employing our cookies. 

• Information we process on our customers behalf: As part of using our Service, a customer (an agent) will upload their clients’ data. We process this personal information on behalf of our customers in the context of supporting and providing our Service. It is the customer who controls what data is collected and stored on our systems. For example, the customer uses our Service to store a record of all unit owner/lessee names and contact details of an apartment block they manage. In such cases, we are “data processors” acting in accordance with the instructions of our customers. You will need to refer to the privacy policies of our customers to find out more about how such information is handled by them. 

Cookies 

You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when websites set or access cookies. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this website may become inaccessible or not function properly. For more information about the cookies we use, please see our Cookie Policy below in section 11.

4. HOW DO WE USE THAT INFORMATION?

Legal basis 

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: 

• Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter, or have entered, into with our customer and/or you. 

• 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. A legitimate interest includes some or all the following: 

• • where the processing enables us to enhance, modify, personalise or otherwise improve our services/communications for the benefit of our customers. 

• • to identify and prevent fraud. 

• • to enhance the security of our network and information systems. 

• • to better understand how people interact with our websites. 

• • to provide postal communications which we think will be of interest to you. 

• • to determine the effectiveness of promotional campaigns and advertising. 

• Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation. We will identify the obligation when we rely on this legal basis. 

• Where we have obtained your active agreement (consent) to use your personal data for a specified purpose, for example if you subscribe to an email newsletter. 

Whenever we process data for these purposes, we will ensure that we always keep your personal data rights in high regard and always take account of these rights. 

When we process your personal data for our legitimate interests, we will make sure that we consider and balance any potential impact on you (both positive and negative), and your rights under data protection laws. Our legitimate business interests do not automatically override your interests – we will not use your personal data for activities where our interests are overridden by the impact on you (unless we have your consent or are otherwise required or permitted to by law). 

You have the right to object to this processing if you wish, and if you wish to do so please inform us by contacting support@blocksonline.co.uk. 

Please bear in mind that if you object this may affect our ability to carry out tasks above for your benefit. 

Why we process your personal data 

We have set out below, in a table format, a description of all the ways we plan to use the various categories of your personal data, and which of the legal bases we rely on to do so. We have also identified what our legitimate interests are where appropriate. 

 

Purpose/Use	Type of data	Legal basis
To register you as a new customer or user	(a) Identity  (b) Contact	Performance of a contract with you and or your agent
To manage our relationship with you which will include:  (a) Notifying you about changes to our terms or privacy policy  (b) Dealing with your requests, complaints and queries	(a) Identity  (b) Contact  (c) Profile  (d) Marketing and Communications	(a) Performance of a contract with you and or your agent  (b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation  (c) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to keep our records updated and manage our relationship with you)
To administer and protect our business and this website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data)	(a) Identity  (b) Contact  (c) Technical	(a) Necessary for our legitimate interests (for running our business, provision of administration and IT services, network security, to prevent fraud and in the context of a business reorganisation or group restructuring exercise)  (b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation
To deliver relevant website content to our customer and you	(a) Identity  (b) Contact  (c) Profile  (d) Usage  (e) Technical	Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them, to grow our business and to inform our marketing strategy)
To use data analytics to improve our website, products/services, customer relationships and experiences and to measure the effectiveness of our communications and marketing	(a) Technical  (b) Usage	Necessary for our legitimate interests (to define types of customers for our products and services, to keep our website updated and relevant, to develop our business and to inform our marketing strategy)
To send our customers relevant marketing communications and make personalised suggestions and recommendations to you about goods or services that may be of interest to you based on your Profile Data	(a) Identity  (b) Contact  (c) Technical  (d) Usage  (e) Profile  (f) Marketing and Communications	Necessary for our legitimate interests (to carry out direct marketing, develop our products/services and grow our business)
To carry out market research through your voluntary participation in surveys		Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services and to help us improve and develop our products and services).

5. DATA SECURITY

We have 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 use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption – This is industry standard technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. Blocks Online uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, as used by many major corporations including Google, Amazon and eBay. 

We have 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. 

Disclosures to Third Parties 

We do not sell or trade your personal information to third parties. 

We engage certain sub processors that process certain categories of personal data submitted to our Service. These sub processors are listed below and may be updated from time to time: 

• Fasthosts 

• Cloudflare 

• Docmail 

• Zoho 

• Mailgun 

• GoCardless 

• Microsoft 

• Amazon Web Services 

• Docusign 

• DocRaptor 

• Simple Backups 

We may disclose personal data to third parties to whom we may choose to sell, transfer or merge parts of our business or our assets. Alternatively, we may seek to acquire other businesses or merge with them. If a change happens to our business, then the new owners may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this privacy policy. 

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. 

Third Party Links 

Our Service contains links to third party websites. This Privacy Policy applies solely to information collected by us. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of any such third party. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of such third parties to determine how they handle any information they separately collect from you. Please be aware that we do not warn you when you choose to click through to another website when using the Service.

6. INTERNATIONAL DATA TRANSFERS 

We may transfer your personal data to service providers that carry out certain functions on our behalf. This may involve transferring personal data outside the UK to countries which have laws that do not provide the same level of data protection as the UK law.

7. DATA RETENTION

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. 

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 requirements. 

By law we must keep basic information about our customers (including Contact, Identity, Financial and Transaction Data) for six years after they cease being customers for tax purposes. 

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see [paragraph 8] below for further information. 

In some circumstances we will anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes, in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

8. YOUR RIGHTS

We want to ensure that you remain in control of your personal data. Part of this is making sure you understand your legal rights, which are as follows: 

• the right to confirmation as to whether we have your personal data and, if we do, to obtain a copy of the personal information we hold (commonly known as a “data subject access request”) 

• the right to have your data erased (though this will not apply where it is necessary for us to continue to use the data for a lawful reason, which we will notify you of) 

• the right to have inaccurate data rectified though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us 

• the right to object to your data being used for marketing or profiling. In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which override your right to object (but the right to object in respect of marketing is absolute); 

• where technically feasible, you have the right to transfer to you or a third party of personal data you have provided to us which we process automatically based on your consent or the performance of a contract. This information will be provided in a common electronic format; and 

• request restriction of processing of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in one of the following scenarios: 

• • If you want us to establish the data’s accuracy 

• • Where our use of the data is unlawful, but you do not want us to erase it 

• • 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 

• • You have objected to our use of your data, but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it. 

Please keep in mind that there are exceptions to the rights above and, though we will always try to respond to your satisfaction, there may be situations where we are unable to do so. 

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 one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made several requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated. 

Please note if your information is on our Service as part of a customer’s uploaded data you will need to contact that Data Controller. 

You can also unsubscribe from our marketing communications at any time by following the instructions or unsubscribe mechanism in the email message itself. 

9. CHANGES TO OUR PRIVACY POLICY

We keep our Privacy Policy under regular review and reserve the right to change our Privacy Policy at any time. If we make changes, we will post them and will indicate on this page the policy’s new effective date. 

If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify customers by email or through notice on the Service. 

10. CONTACT US

We have appointed a Data Privacy Manager who is responsible for overseeing questions in relation to this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact the data privacy manager using the details set out below. 

Contact details: 

Blocks Online 

Data Privacy Manager: Dominic Jackson, Chief Executive Officer 

Email Address: support@blocksonline.co.uk 

Registered office and Postal address: 79 College Road, Harrow HA1 1BD 

Telephone number: 020 3384 3418 

 

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us, for example a new address or email address. 

Complaints 

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). However, before you approach the ICO you must have first made your complaint to us or asked us for clarification if there is something you do not understand. 

If you have questions or need to contact us about this Privacy Policy, please email us at support@blocksonline.co.uk 

11. COOKIE POLICY

You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when websites set or access cookies. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this website may become inaccessible or not function properly. 

As is common practice with almost all professional websites we use cookies, which are tiny files that are downloaded to your computer, to improve your experience. 

For more general information on cookies see https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/online/cookies/ 

How We Use Cookies 

We use cookies for a variety of reasons detailed below. Our website use cookies to distinguish you for other users of our website, which allows us to provide you with a good experience when using it and allows us to make improvements. Unfortunately, in most cases there are no industry standard options for disabling cookies without completely disabling some of the functionality and features they add to this site. We recommend that you leave on all cookies if you are not sure whether you need them or not in case they are used to provide a service or feature that you use. 

The Cookies We Use 

Some cookies are ‘strictly necessary’ to enable you to move around the website and use its features. These cookies contain information about the user active session and enable us to provide our services. Without these cookies, we will not be able to provide certain features of our website. These essential cookies will always be enabled on our website. These include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website. 

We use ‘analytic cookies’ to collect information about how people use our website. We do this to measure how visitors use our website and to understand how we can improve the website. Analytic cookies store information about the pages you visit, how long you are on the website, how you got there, what you click on and whether you have visited the website before. 

We use ‘functionality cookies’ which are used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region). 

Some cookies are ‘targeting cookies’ which record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our website and any advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose so that they can serve you with relevant advertising on their websites. 

Please note that the following third parties may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These named third parties may include, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services. These third-party cookies are likely to be analytical cookies or performance cookies or targeting cookies: 

• Blocks Online 

• Google Analytics 

• Google Tag Manager 

• LinkedIn 

• Cloudflare 

• Zoho 

To deactivate the use of third-party advertising cookies, you may visit the relevant consumer page to manage the use of these types of cookies. To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites, visit http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. 

Disabling Cookies 

You can prevent the setting of cookies by adjusting the settings on your browser (see your browser Help for how to do this). Be aware that disabling strictly necessary cookies may affect the functionality of this and many other websites that you visit. Disabling such cookies will usually result in also disabling certain functionality and features of this site. Therefore, it is recommended that you do not disable strictly necessary cookies. You can disable other categories of cookies. 

If you have any questions or concerns about our use of cookies, please send us an email at support@blocksonline.co.uk.