Hills Automotive Privacy Policy

Here at Hills Automotive we take your privacy seriously. When you buy a product or receive services from Hills Ford, certain information about you and your vehicle (personal information) will be collected. Please take a moment to read the Hills Automotive Privacy Policy to understand the way that we collect and use personal information.

Who we share your information with

The information you provide will only be disclosed to relevant employees where required as part of their role in processes related to the items disclosed in the ‘How do we use your information’ section detailed further below in this policy. Some of your personal information may also be disclosed to:

• Carefully selected and approved companies or other organisations that Hills Automotive have engaged to provide services on their behalf.
• Our other trading divisions or holding company
• To companies or other organisations where you have asked us to or agreed that we may share your personal information with them
• Regulators and government authorities if we are required to do so by law or if the regulator/authority requests it and we deem that request as reasonable
• Ford Motor Company in order to support a vehicle purchase or warranty/recall
• Fraud prevention agencies or other 3rd parties that assist us in preventing fraud or loss
• Our insurers, legal advisers or other 3rd parties who need access to it in context of investigating or defending actual or potential claims or complaints

Security of Data

• Hills Automotive protects personal information by having in place appropriate physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the personal information we collect.
• We will never sell personal information collected by our company, including e-mail addresses, to outside parties
• All information you provide us is stored on our secure servers which are located within the UK. Any payment information held will be encrypted
• Please be aware that when providing your information to us through our websites or you send us or ask us to send you any confidential information by email, that the internet and email communications over the internet may not be secure. We therefore cannot guarantee the complete security of data transmitted as described above, any transmission is therefore at your own risk

What information will we use?

Hills Ford collects and holds personal information you provide when conducting a transaction with us, taking a test drive or when making an enquiry either in person, over the phone, by email or via the web.The personal information may include your name, address, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, vehicle information, driving licence details and national insurance number.

We will also collect information about your vehicle(s) including the model, age, registration number, vehicle identification number (VIN) and mileage. When you bring your vehicle in for servicing or repairs, we may collect diagnostic information about your vehicle and keep a record of the work carried out and parts supplied. CCTV footage may also be gathered when visiting any of our premises.

How do we use your information?

• Hills Ford collects and uses information to allow you to make the most of the products and services provided
• We may combine and analyse your personal information to help us identify and develop products and services which may be of interest to you.
• In order to fulfil any order for vehicles, parts, accessories or services that you place with us
• To maintain our records to support the provision of guarantees and warranties we provide as part of our vehicle and product and services we supply
• To meet our legal responsibilities
• To allow us to contact you in the event of a safety issue identified by the manufacturer relating to any vehicle, part or service we have provided
• To enable reminders to be provided for servicing, MOT or essential repairs or for items covered under a service/repair or warranty plan you have purchased from us
• To conduct customer satisfaction surveys
• We may wish to inform you about other products or services we think may be of interest to you, or to share new and exclusive offers, news and events with you.
• To carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us
• To notify you about any changes to our business or the products offered where it is in our legitimate interests to do so and where you have expressed an interest in the same previously or where such notification is required so as to allow us to perform any contractual agreement with you or where you have expressly opted into receiving such communications

Our lawful basis for processing personal data



At Hills Ford we may lawfully process your personal data under one of three options:

• Art. 6 (1) (a) Consent: In circumstances where you have provided us with a freely given, informed and specific choice to allow Hills Ford to process your data, consent will be the lawful basis under which we process your data.

• Art. 6 (1) (b) Contract: If you have entered or are in the process of entering into a contract with Hills Ford, your personal data may be processed if it is necessary for performance of the contract or is in order to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contract.

Art. 6 (1) (f) Legitimate interest: If you have completed or negotiated a sale with Hills Ford, you may have your personal data processed for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by Hills Ford or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by your interests or fundamental rights and freedoms which require protection of personal data.

To balance your fundamental rights and freedoms with Hills Ford’s commercial interests, you will be informed that you may receive marketing communications for similar products and services at the point enquiry or purchase and will be given the ability to opt-out of further processing at any subsequent point in the relationship by visitinghttps://www.hillsford.co.uk/site/privacy-and-legal/

You may also call one of Hills Ford’s dealerships or contact our Data Protection Officer who will complete the on line opt-out for you.



Your rights

The law gives you certain rights in respect of the personal data that we hold, which you should be aware of:

• You have the right to obtain your personal data from us except in limited circumstances. Where we provide it, the first copy will be free of charge, but we reserve the right to charge a small fee for additional requests.
• You have the right to require us to rectify any inaccurate personal data we hold concerning you.
• Taking into account the purposes of the processing, you may also have the right to have incomplete personal data completed, by means of providing a supplementary statement or otherwise.
• You have the right to require us to erase your personal data on certain limited grounds (including where they are no longer necessary for the purpose for which they were collected or where you withdraw your consent and there is no other legal ground for the processing).
• Where we process personal data either on the basis of consent, legitimate interests or contractual necessity, you provided the personal data to us, and we process that personal data by automated means, you have the right to require us to give you your data in a commonly used electronic format.
• You have the right to object to our processing of personal data which we process on the grounds of our legitimate interests, although we do not always have to honour your objection. For more information see the section above titled “Withdrawing your consent and/or objecting to our processing”.
• You have the right to require us to restrict the processing of your personal data on certain grounds, including where:

• you contest the accuracy of the personal data and want us to restrict processing of your personal data while we verify its accuracy;
• the processing is unlawful, but you request a restriction of the processing rather than erasure;
• we (as controller) no longer need the data for the purposes of the processing, but you have told us you require us to retain that personal data for you to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or
• you have objected to us processing your personal data on grounds of legitimate interests and want us to restrict processing of your personal data while we consider your objection.

If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the details set out below;

Contact: Richard Hill, Hills Ford, Worcester Road, Kidderminster, Worcestershire, DY10 1JB or on 01562 540550 or via email on kidderminster@hillsford.co.uk

Retention of Data

We regularly review our data retention periods and will only hold your personal data for as long as it is necessary to fulfil the purpose it was collected for, or as required by law, or as set out in any relevant contract we have with you. Further information on our data retention periods can be requested in writing.

How we use cookies

A cookie is a small file which asks permission to be placed on your computer's hard drive. Once you agree, the file is added and the cookie helps analyse web traffic or lets you know when you visit a particular site. Cookies allow web applications to respond to you as an individual. The web application can tailor its operations to your needs, likes and dislikes by gathering and remembering information about your preferences.

We use traffic log cookies to identify which pages are being used. This helps us analyse data about web page traffic and improve our website in order to tailor it to customer needs. We only use this information for statistical analysis purposes and then the data is removed from the system.

Overall, cookies help us provide you with a better website, by enabling us to monitor which pages you find useful and which you do not. A cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any information about you, other than the data you choose to share with us.

You can choose to accept or decline cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. This may prevent you from taking full advantage of the website.

Facebook

We use the “visitor action pixels” from Facebook Ireland Ltd., 4 Grand Canal Square, Grand Canal Harbour, Dublin 2, Ireland (“Facebook”)) on our website.

This allows user behavior to be tracked after they have been redirected to the provider’s website by clicking on a Facebook ad. This enables us to measure the effectiveness of Facebook ads for statistical and market research purposes. The data collected in this way is anonymous to us, i.e. we do not see the personal data of individual users. However, this data is stored and processed by Facebook, which is why we are informing you, based on our knowledge of the situation. Facebook may link this information to your Facebook account and also use it for its own promotional purposes, in accordance with Facebook’s Data Usage Policy https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/. You can allow Facebook and its partners to place ads on and off Facebook. A cookie may also be stored on your computer for these purposes.

The legal basis for the use of this service is Art. 6 paragraph 1 sentence 1 letter f GDPR. You can object to the collection of your data by Facebook pixel, or to the use of your data for the purpose of displaying Facebook ads by contacting the following address: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads.

Facebook is certified under the Privacy Shield Agreement and thus guarantees compliance with European data protection legislation (https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt0000000GnywAAC&status=Active).

Google Analytics

We have Google Analytics Advertiser enabled on our website. Google Analytics Advertiser Features include:

• Remarketing with Google Analytics
• Google Display Network Impression Reporting
• DoubleClick Platform integrations
• Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting

By enabling these advertising features, we enable Google Analytics to collect data about our website traffic via Google advertising cookies and anonymous identifiers, in addition to data collected through a standard Google Analytics implementation. We will not facilitate the merging of personally-identifiable information with non-personally identifiable information collected through any Google advertising product or feature.

To provide website visitors the ability to prevent their data from being used by Google Analytics, Google have developed the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on for the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, dc.js). If you want to opt-out, download and install the add-on for your web browser.

Our Website

Our website is powered by G-Forces Web Management Limited (“GForces”), our third party web services provider. GForces is committed to ensuring that data is processed in accordance with applicable data privacy laws, and is kept secure. GForces is certified to the standard of ISO27001 (an international standard for information security). GForces uses Amazon Web Services, Inc. as its cloud platform provider. All data processed by GForces is stored on Amazon’s web servers in the EEA.

If you visit our website

When someone visits our website, GForces collects standard internet log information (your IP address, browser, and type of device) and details of visitor behaviour patterns (where you joined our site from, the path you take through our site and where you leave). These are stored against unique ids (which are strings of numbers). GForces collects this information for the legitimate business purpose of monitoring the number of visitors to the various parts of the site, the general geographic location of visitors and engagement levels, which in turn enables it to make improvements to its websites and services, and provide business intelligence. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify anyone. It is kept indefinitely.

GForces also uses Google Analytics to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns, which are stored against unique ids (i.e. strings of numbers). We collect this information for the legitimate business purpose of monitoring website traffic and engagement levels, which in turn enables us to make improvements to our website and the way we sell our cars and services. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify anyone. It is kept indefinitely.



If you use our enquiry forms

When you submit information using an online form, GForces processes the data collected and stores it for 31 days for the legitimate business purpose of enabling us to access the information and deal with your request (it is then kept for a further 14 days in GForces’ routine back-ups for business continuity purposes). We collect the following information:



Name, Email Address, Telephone Number for enquiry forms. This allows us to reply back to your enquiry.



If you enter your post code, GForces stores the first part of it (e.g. ‘ME14’ or ‘SW1’) and links it to standard internet log information already collected (it is used for the same purposes as that information, as outlined above).

If you use our Live Chat service

We use a third party provider, Gubagoo Inc.to supply and support our LiveChat service. If you use the LiveChat service we will collect your name and email address if you provide this and any other personal information that you volunteer to us. This is used for the legitimate business purpose of handling customer enquiries in real time and then following up. This data is stored by Gubagoo for 2 years to enable us to access the information and deal with your enquiry. Gubagoo stores the information in the US under the EU-US privacy shield framework. Please see Gubagoo’s privacy policy for more information on how they use your data. https://www.gubagoo.com/about/policy.]

Hotjar

We use Hotjar in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimize this service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behavior and their devices (in particular device's IP address (captured and stored only in anonymized form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), preferred language used to display our website). Hotjar stores this information in a pseudonymized user profile. Neither Hotjar nor we will ever use this information to identify individual users or to match it with further data on an individual user. For further details, please see Hotjar’s privacy policy by clicking on this link.



You can opt-out to the creation of a user profile, Hotjar’s storing of data about your usage of our site and Hotjar’s use of tracking cookies on other websites by following this opt-out link.

Links to other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites of interest. However, once you have used these links to leave our site, you should note that we do not have any control over that other website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information which you provide whilst visiting such sites and such sites are not governed by this privacy statement. You should exercise caution and look at the privacy statement applicable to the website in question.







Controlling your personal information

If you have previously agreed to us using your personal information for direct marketing purposes, you may change your mind at any time by writing to Richard Hill,Hills Ford, Worcester Road, Kidderminster, Worcestershire, DY10 1JB or emailing us at kidderminster@hillsford.co.uk

We will not sell, distribute or lease your personal information to third parties unless we have your permission or are required by law to do so. We may use your personal information to send you promotional information about third parties which we think you may find interesting if you tell us that you wish this to happen.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We keep our privacy policy under regular review. This policy was last updated 24th May 2018.