Legal and Privacy Statements

1.0 The aleastwest.com overview of privacy and data protection

  • At aleastwest.com we believe that privacy and data protection are human rights
  • We believe that data is a liability and should only be collected and used when absolutely necessary
  • We hate spam as much as you do and endeavour to prevent spam at every opportunity
  • We will never sell, mis-use, make public, or distribute your personal information.

2.0 We cover ALL the relevant legislation and laws

2.1 Legislation and Laws
This website is designed to comply with all the relevant and current legislation on data protection and privacy. Links to the relevant legislative websites can be found below:

  • The UK Data Protection Act 1988 (DPA)
  • The EU Data Protection Directive 1995 (DPD)
  • The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

2.2 Website Statement
Whilst the information provided on this website is given in good faith by aleastwest.com, no warranty or representation is given concerning such information which must not be taken as establishing any contractual or other commitment binding upon aleastwest.com. Furthermore, whilst aleastwest.com uses reasonable efforts to include accurate and up-to-date information on the website, to the extent permitted by law, aleastwest.com makes no warranties or representations as to its accuracy. To the extent permitted by law, aleastwest.com excludes all liability to third parties arising directly or indirectly from their use of or reliance on information or materials contained in this website.

The Web site may contain references or links to other websites on the Internet which are owned and operated by third parties. Those references or links are not an endorsement of those third parties or their products or services. Aleastwest.com reserves the right to revise this website at any time.

3.0 Personal information collection by our website

3.1 Tracking visitors to our website and cookies
At aleastwest.com we attempt to use Google Analytics (GA) to track users interaction with our website. We use this data to find out what number of people are using our site and what journey they take through it from page to page. This is useful because we can then adjust our site to make it a better user experience.

Although GA records data such as your geographical location, device, internet browser and operating system, none of this information will ever personally identify you to us. GA also records your computer’s IP address which could be used to personally identify you but Google do not grant access to this. We consider Google to be a third party data processor (see section 6.0 below).

GA makes use of cookies, details of which can be found on Google’s developer guides.

Disabling cookies on your internet browser will stop GA from tracking any part of your visit to pages within this website.

Like most operations, we only rarely use Google Analytics to track visitors to our website. We do not use any other analytics program, display advertisements or have affiliate links. For our day to day work, we do not require persistent cookies which would require us to show the cookies popup (EU Cookie Directive 2011).  However, all websites use session cookies (tiny pieces of information which speed up loading, or assist with other functionality). These are created automatically through your browser when you visit our websites but only exist during a session.  However, because we have GA working, we need your permission with regard to cookies because that free system uses persistent cookies. We have therefore included the EU Directive ‘cookies popup’ statement with a link to this page.

3.2 The aleastwest.com website perspective section (blog page).
Should you choose to respond to any blog posts that we have published on our perspective section, your response will be saved to this website’s database, along with your computer’s IP address and the time and date that you submitted the response. This information is only used to identify you as someone who has responded on a blog post and is not passed on to any of the third party data processors. 

3.3 Email and contact forms
Contact information from the contact form is used to respond to enquiry or send information as appropriate. The individual’s contact information is also used to get in touch with the individual when necessary. Such Contact information is never disclosed to a third party. Your contact information is only stored on secure mail software when we are required to maintain a business relationship with you, e.g. your enquiry remains active.

4.0 How we protect your information
For our website we use Squarespace. The hosting company industry is largely unregulated and many of the largest companies do not use sufficient levels of diligence to prevent hacking or other data breaches. The company we use complies with the Data Protection Act 1998 and has numerous measures to prevent compromise of websites and data.  No website is 100% secure, but at aleastwst.com we endeavour to ensure that everything we do online is as secure as it can be.

5.0 Third part data processors
We may use a number of third parties to process personal data on our behalf. These third parties have been carefully chosen and all of them comply with the legislation set out in section 2.0. Both of these third parties are based in the USA and are EU-U.S Privacy Shield compliant.

Google Privacy policy (https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-GB)
Squarespace Privacy Policy (https://www.squarespace.com/privacy/)

6.0 Data breaches
We undertake to report any unlawful data breach relating to our websites or their databases, and any other source from hardware and software used at aleastwest.com. We will report this breach to all the required authorities within 72 hours as is the requirement under the GDPR legislation.

7.0 Who to contact
If you have any questions or concerns with regard to data or this policy, then please contact:

AMY LOU
t: +44(0)7734089834
e: amylou@aleastwest.com