Privacy Policy
This statement covers the services provided by the Consumer Direct website
The Data Controller for this website is the Office of Fair Trading. Consumer Direct is a telephone and online consumer information and advice service, which launched in 2004, and will ultimately operate throughout Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales).
The Consumer Direct website is managed by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). The purpose of this statement is to provide you with information on:
- What information we collect from you when you visit this site
- How we protect your privacy
- How we use this information
- When we might disclose information to parties outside Consumer Direct and the OFT
- What you can do if you wish to see all the information we hold about you
- Links to other sites from the Consumer Direct website
- Changes to the Privacy Policy
What information we collect from you when you visit this site
We collect personal information from those visitors to www.consumerdirect.gov.uk who email us with consumer enquiries and complaints about traders, with comments and complaints about the Consumer Direct service, and with feedback on the site. Information collected may include personal details such as names and addresses, email addresses and details of individual queries. In addition, we collect information on the usage of the site itself.
Please note that you are not required to provide your personal details to use the Consumer Direct service, though if you choose not to this may affect the way we handle your query or complaint.
Please note that if you use our 'Email this page to a friend' service, we do not hold details of the email addresses entered in this way.
Any personal information you provide will be held securely by Consumer Direct in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998. This Act protects your personal information and ensures that:
we only hold and process your information for purposes that we make clear to you in advance,
we keep your information only for as long as we need to carry out these purposes,
we will put in place appropriate measures that ensure your information is held and processed securely and confidentially.
Consumer enquiries and complaints
If you email Consumer Direct with a consumer enquiry or complaint, we will use the information you have provided to advise you on your rights as a consumer, on how to avoid consumer problems and how to address any problems you may have encountered. We may need to pass information you have provided to a partner organisation to address a problem you have encountered; we also share data with partner organisations to assist in the monitoring of trading activities and practices (see 'When we might disclose information to parties outside Consumer Direct and the OFT'). We will hold details of your enquiry or complaint for six years.
Comments and complaints about Consumer Direct
If you have a comment on the service you have received - good or bad - we will use the information you provide to help us maintain and enhance our service to all our customers. We will hold details of your comments for six years
If you have a complaint about Consumer Direct itself, we will use the information you provide to investigate your complaint. If your original enquiry or complaint was passed on to a partner organisation, we may also need to pass details of your complaint to them to help them investigate your complaint further. We will hold details of your complaint for six years.
For details of how you can give us your comments, or make a complaint about Consumer Direct, and how we will deal with your comments and complaints, please see Your Feedback on Consumer Direct.
Feedback
We welcome your feedback. If you provide feedback on the Consumer Direct website through our on-line form we will only use this information to develop and improve the site. We may hold details of your feedback for up to one year.
Cookies and visitor statistics
Cookies are short files that a website can store on your computer when you visit the website. These files contain information about your use of a website and may contain personal details. www.consumerdirect.gov.uk uses cookies to gather statistics on visitors' use of the site. We will use this information to make improvements to the layout of the site and to the information in it, based on the way that visitors enter, move around and leave the site.
In addition, certain pages of this website use cookies to determine how many visitors have arrived at these pages via our online advertising. These files do not contain any personal details.
When we might disclose information to parties outside Consumer Direct and the OFT
Consumer Direct works with a wide range of partner organisations who monitor trading activities, help individuals to avoid consumer problems and/or resolve consumer problems they have encountered. We provide data on queries received to bodies which enforce consumer and other legislation (for example Local Authority Trading Standards Services and the Office of Fair Trading), and may provide your personal details to these organisations as part of this data.
If we wish to provide information to an organisation which does not have an enforcement role (for example a Citizens Advice Bureaux), we will specifically request your consent before passing on your details.
This disclosure will take place in order that partner organisations can monitor trading practices, act to address a problem on your behalf, or so that they can identify problem traders and new scams. Any information about you that we pass to a partner will be held securely by that party, in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998, and used only to provide the services highlighted above.
In certain cases prosecutions may be taken by these partner organisations; in these cases they will contact you to seek permission to use information about you in these circumstances.
Please note that you are not required to provide your personal details to use the Consumer Direct service, though if you choose not to this may affect the way we handle your query or complaint.
Consumer Direct may also use the data collected to produce statistical reports and information, which may be shared with partner organsiations. Information on complaints will also be collated, and Consumer Direct may use the combined data internally, or share it with any of the partner organisations listed above. We will not include your personal details in this combined data.
What you can do if you wish to see all the information we hold about you
You have a right to request a copy of your personal details at any time to check the accuracy of the information held by Consumer Direct. If you wish to do this, please write (explaining that your interest is in personal data maintained by Consumer Direct) to the
Data Protection Officer,
Office of Fair Trading,
Open Government and Data Protection Unit,
Fleetbank House, 2-6 Salisbury Square
London EC4Y 8JX
Links to other sites from the Consumer Direct website
Our website contains links to other websites, mainly those of other Government departments, but also to those of our partners and other organisations. This privacy policy applies only to our website. The OFT is not responsible for the privacy practices within any of these other sites. You should always be aware of this when you leave the www.consumerdirect.gov.uk site and we encourage you to read the privacy statement on any other website which collects personal information.
Changes to this privacy policy
When this privacy policy changes, we will place an updated version on this page. Regularly reviewing this page ensures that you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances, if any, we will share it with other parties.
You should always check the privacy policy before using the site, even if you have visited it in the past. This ensures that you will be aware of any changes. Changes to our privacy policy do not affect information we already hold about you.
June 2005
