Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy for Smart Money People Limited websites (last updated 11 April 2024).

We value your privacy. This privacy notice tells you what personal information we collect about you, how we collect it, how we use and store that data and what your rights are.

You should also read our user terms, user guidelines and cookie policy carefully before you decide to use our services

Terms we use in this notice

When we say, “Smart Money People”, “we”, “us” or “our” we mean Smart Money People Limited, Ebbisham House, 30 Church Street, Epsom, England, KT17 4NL who are responsible for processing your personal data.

When we say “website’ or “platform”, we mean all Smart Money People’s websites and applications.

Personal data we collect

When you write a review on our website, create a Smart Money People user account or business account on behalf of your company, or otherwise use our platform, we may collect and process the following personal data about you:

Contact information

Your name, email address or any other contact details you may provide to us from time to time

User account information

• Your username (this is public)
• Your password (which we store in an encrypted format)
• Your email address
• Additional optional personal data such as your name, photo and age range

Smart Money People is an open review platform. This means that we display your review and connect this to the profile you create, so that other people can see who wrote the review. Therefore, depending on the information that you've chosen to add to your profile and the username you choose, you may or may not be anonymous.

Device and location information

When you visit our website, we register your device IP address, browser settings (the type of browser you use, browser language, and time zone) and location.

Business account information

• Your email address(es)
• Your password
• Your company name and domain
• Your job title
• Any other information you add to your business profile, including product or service information

Information about reviews and ratings

When you write a review about a company and post it on our platform, we collect the information you put in your review. This includes:

• Which company you reviewed
• Which product your reviewed
• The headline and content of your review, as well as the ratings, scores and answers to the questions included in our review questionnaire
• The date of your review
• If we ask you to provide information or documentation to verify an experience you've reviewed, we’ll process any documentation that you send to us for the purpose(s) stated in the request.

You're responsible for the content of the reviews you leave on the website.

Usage and profiling information

• Your Smart Money People search history
• How you’ve interacted with our website and platform including time spent on the site and which features or functions you’ve accessed or used
• How you’ve interacted with newsletter or emails we’ve sent you including which ones you’ve opened and links you’ve clicked

Information about flagged reviews and responses to reviews from your business account

• Your name
• Company details
• The information given in a response to a review
• The review that was flagged and the date this was done

Information about views, likes and how useful your review is for others

How many people find your review helpful, and we will also collect information if you click ‘helpful’ on someone else’s review.

Information about responses to reviews or validation information

• Your name and company details
• The information you include in your reply to a review
• If you notify us about a review that you believe breaks our user guidelines, we’ll collect the information that you provide to use in your notification. This can include which review you’ve notified us about, the reason for your notification, the date of your notification, etc.

Preferences information

We store data on the preferences associated with your account. This includes any specific consents you've given or declined, newsletters or similar email preferences and cookies containing your preferences.

Communication information

Any communication we receive from you such as help requests, email queries, and other electronic communications methods, as well as the metadata attached such as time and date.

Information from other services, including social networks

You can connect your Smart Money People profile with your profile on social networks, for example Facebook. When you do this, we automatically collect selected information about you from your social networks. The information we collect depends on what information you’ve made available on those social networks and your privacy settings for sharing such information on that social network. We may collect the following information:

• Name and/or username
• Email address
• Profile photo

When you make a request to connect your Smart Money People profile with a social network profile, you’ll be told which information we’ll collect from that social network before we complete your request.

If you want to disconnect your social network profile from your Smart Money People profile at any time, you can do so by deleting your Smart Money People account.

Emails from Smart Money People

You may receive transactional emails from Smart Money People – for example, if a company respond to your review, you’ll be notified of this. You may also receive campaign emails. You can change your preferences or opt out from our emails at any time.

We ask that you don’t share any sensitive personal data or documents with us.

How we collect personal data

The personal data we collect is primarily collected directly from you when you set up, or add to, your account with us, and when you interact with our platform, marketing emails or newsletter and when you leave reviews or post replies to reviews.

Sometimes we’ll get information from third parties. For example, when you sign up for your Smart Money People account using Facebook, your account is automatically updated with the information we receive from them.

We also automatically collect or generate information from your computer or device, such as IP address, location, and information about the device you’re using, as you use our services.

How and why, we use your personal data

We use the personal data you provide to us to:

• Provide our services to you, including displaying your reviews, and providing you with access to your user account and our platform, or providing you with access to your company’s business account
• Identify you as a registered user when you log into, or revisit, our platform
• Improve the website, our platform and our services
• Send you our newsletters
• Respond to your questions and deliver customer service
• Undertake various internal business purposes, including, but not limited to, data analysis, identifying usage trends, developing new products and services, targeting for marketing campaigns, and assessing the effectiveness of our marketing or promotional campaigns
• Comply with legal requirements and legal processes, requests from public and governmental authorities, relevant industry standards and our internal policies

When you have a Smart Money People user account, we may also use your personal data to:

• Invite you to leave more reviews
• Verify the authenticity of your reviews
• Pass on a message from the company you reviewed via the website
• Contact you if your review is flagged by other users or companies and, if necessary, ask you to provide documentation to verify your review or customer experience
• Inform you when other users find your review helpful
• Contact you to ask you if you’d participate in press activity or provide a case study
• Enforce our user terms

If you have a business account on behalf of your company on Smart Money People, we’ll also use your personal data to:

• Notify you when reviews are left for your company or the products you offer
• Let you know when users reply to a request for information or give feedback regarding your response to a review
• Enforce our terms of use

We have to process your personal data to:

• Perform our contract with you or your company
• Comply with our legal obligations and operate an online review platform in compliance with applicable legislation and legal acts
• Pursue legitimate business interests of our own related to operating the Website and providing our services to you
• Where necessary, for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims

Some of these grounds for processing your personal data overlap, so there may be several reasons which justify us processing your personal information.

Where you have expressly given your consent to us to process your personal data for example, when subscribing to our newsletters, you are free to withdraw your consent at any time. However, please be aware that we may have the right to continue to process your information if it can be justified on the other legal bases mentioned above.

You have the right to object to how we process your personal information or ask us to restrict the processing. See ‘Your rights’ below for full details.

Data Controller

Smart Money People is the data controller for all personal data you provide when you set up your account, leave a review, or submit a reply.

If you’ve been sent an invitation to write a review on Smart Money People from a business that uses our services, those businesses will be the data controllers responsible for those invitations and any personal data linked to them. s

You are the data controller for the content you choose to disclose on the website and for the data disclosed on your profile on social networks which is the consequence of the connection of your profile on the website with your profile on the social network.

Who can access your personal data?

Your personal data on Smart Money People

We share your reviews on our website so that other customers can read about your experience with a specific company and/or product. When you write a review, we’ll show your review, your username, and any other information you’ve chosen to connect with your profile, including your photograph if available.

Remember that if you have selected to use your name as your username, this could reveal your identity. You may choose to use a nickname or pseudonym. We recommend that you are careful when deciding which information to make available on our platform and be mindful that depending on the level of information provided, you may or may not be anonymous.

Social networks

If you connect your account to a social network, information such as your name, location, birth year and your profile photo, will be collected from your social media profile, and used to identify you on the platform. Depending on your privacy settings, and the information available from the social network, users of our platform could use this to establish which reviews you’ve written.

If you’ve chosen to use a pseudonym for your Smart Money People username, remember the information from social networks could reveal your identity, in part or in full, and make it possible to identify which reviews you’ve written.

Information provided and reviews by you on the website, or data compiled by us about your use of the service on the platform (e.g. the number of reviews you have written), will be shared with and displayed in connection with your profile on a social network and will be subject to that social networks’ privacy policy.

Your member profile

When you write a review on our website, and create an account, your username, review(s), photo, and the number of reviews you have written will be visible on the website. If someone, including any companies you have reviewed, clicks on your username they will be able to see this information.

Geo-location

When you write a review on the Website, your computer’s IP address is used to approximate your location to the nearest city. This data is used for internal data processing, research, and anonymised demographic profiling.

Your personal data when you create a business account on behalf of your company

All replies to users’ reviews about your company will be made available for other users of the website to see

Personal data shared with other websites, services and businesses

We allow selected services to show reviews created on our platform and this increases the potential audience for your reviews. The categories of companies and third-party services who can show your reviews alongside your public user profile, or if you have a business account, your replies to reviews about your company, are:

• Search engines, including Google
• Social networks
• Companies that invited you to leave a review on Smart Money People
• Companies within the Smart Money People group
• Companies reviewed on Smart Money People
• Consumer and business portals, including price comparison websites

If you write a review on Smart Money People in response to an invitation sent by a company via our review invitation service, the company who sent you the invite may be able to link your review with the invitation.

One of our main goals is to make Smart Money People a trusted home for your reviews. We might therefore ask you to verify your review. To do this we’ll contact you to ask you to provide proof of your experience with the company you’ve reviewed. We won’t share the proof we receive with any third party, including the reviewed company. But we may give them some information to help them find your information to help them get to a better outcome for you.

Other disclosures

In addition to categories outlined above, we share your personal data with the parties outlined below in the circumstances outlined:

• To comply with laws or respond to claims, legal process (including subpoenas and court orders) and requests from public bodies, regulatory bodies and government authorities
• To third parties in connection with enforcement of our Terms of Use
• To third parties to allow us to protect our operations
• To third parties to enable us to investigate, prevent or take action regarding suspected or actual prohibited activities, including but not limited to fraud and misuse of our platform
• To third parties in the event of a proposed or actual merger, restructure, sale, acquisition or other disposal of all or part of our business assets, or to anyone who we may transfer our rights and/or obligations for the purposes of evaluation and performing the proposed transaction

We may also share aggregated and/or anonymised information to assess marketing and sales performance

Data shared with data processors

Our carefully selected partners and service providers may process personal information about you on our behalf as described below:

Digital marketing service providers; we periodically appoint digital marketing agents to conduct marketing activity on our behalf, such activity may result in.the compliant processing of personal information.

Cloud-based data processing tools; we may use tools or software to analyse and manage data. This includes purposes such as data analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), or data storage.

Our appointed data processors include:

(i) Prospect Global Ltd (trading as Sopro) Reg. UK Co. 09648733. You can contact Sopro and view their privacy policy here: http://sopro.io. Sopro are registered with the ICO Reg: ZA346877 their Data Protection Officer can be emailed at: [email protected]

Some of this data processing may be performed outside of the European Union, such as in the US. By accepting this policy, you consent to us using data processors in non-EU countries if there is a legal framework governing the transfer of your personal data and ensuring adequate protection of it, for example if the data processor is part of the EU-US Privacy Shield framework.

How long do we store your personal data

We only keep your data for as long as we need it or are required to for legal reasons. This will depend on why it was collected, and if we have a continuing legal basis to retain it for example, to perform a service you asked for, meet legal requirements, fulfil contractual obligations between us or for our legitimate interests. When we no longer have a valid reason to keep your data, we’ll either delete it or anonymise it.

The personal data you provide, including your reviews, is kept for as long as you have an account with us, or as required to provide you with our services. If you delete your account, all your reviews will also be deleted and we’ll only save a log with the following information: your name, email address and the date of the deletion of your account. We’ll keep the log for three years. All other information will be deleted.

If you only use our website for searching for reviewed companies, but have created an account, your account will remain open until you decide to close it.

In certain cases, even if you delete your account, we’ll keep certain information we’re required to by law or have compelling legitimate interests to keep. Examples of reasons we might keep some data for a longer period include, but aren’t limited to, compliance with legal or regulatory requirements, defending our legitimate business interests, security and preventing abuse of our platform.

For business accounts, we’ll only delete business user accounts when instructed to do so by the business.

Keeping your personal data secure

We have a responsibility to protect your personal data and we take various technical, operational and security measures to do so.

However, you should remember that the internet isn’t a completely secure environment, and we can’t ensure or warrant the security of information you transmit to us. Emails sent via the platform aren’t encrypted, and we therefore advise you not to communicate any confidential information in your emails or messages.

Cookies

Our website uses cookies. Cookies identify your computer or device rather than you as an individual user and are used for different purposes. Further information about the cookies we use can be found on our cookie policy

Third-party websites

Our website contains links to other websites. We encourage you to carefully read the privacy notice of any third-party website you visit before you share any personal data as their procedures for collecting, handling, and processing personal data may be different to ours.

Your rights

Correction and deletion of your personal data

If any of the personal data, or other information that we have about you, is incorrect or misleading, you can correct most of the information yourself on your user account. You may also ask Smart Money People to assist with this.

You may at any time correct or delete any content and personal information on the website for which you are the data controller. If your personal information changes, or if you no longer wish to appear on the website, you can update or delete the information by logging in to your account.

If your personal account is deleted, all the data associated with it will be deleted, including your reviews on the website.

Other rights

In addition to the rights set out above concerning your personal data, you also have the following rights:

• You have the right to object to the processing of your personal data and have the processing of your personal data restricted, including for the purposes of direct marketing
• Where we’ve asked for your consent, you can withdraw this consent at any time. Your withdrawal will not affect the lawfulness of the processing of data undertaken before you withdrew your consent. To withdraw your consent email us at [email protected]

Updates to the privacy notice

The date shown at the start of this notice shows when it was last reviewed.

We may update this notice in the future either because of changes to laws, regulations, or industry standards, or where we make changes to our services or business. These changes will be shown on this page, and we encourage you to check back from time to time to review the current version.

If we believe that any changes we make are material, we may provide additional notice through our platform or via email. Your continued use of our website, after we publish or send a notice about the changes to the policy, will mean that you accept and agree to the updated policy.

Accessing the personal data we hold about you

If you have an account on Smart Money People, you can log in to your account and see what information we have about you, including your reviews. You can sign-in here: https://smartmoneypeople.com/sign-in

For businesses, please contact [email protected]

Questions about our website or our privacy notice

We try to make this information as clear as possible, but if you still have questions about our privacy notice, our processing of your personal data, correction of data, or you would like to exercise your rights under this notice, you can contact us via email or post:

Email: [email protected]

Address: Smart Money People Limited, Ebbisham House, 30 Church Street, Epsom, England, KT17 4NL