Who we are
We are BiP Solutions Ltd (hereinafter BiP) and we are the data controller of the personal information we maintain and process relating to you. We are committed to protecting the privacy of your information in accordance with the principles set out in the Data Protection Act
2018 (DPA) and General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). This privacy policy explains how we use the personal information we collect about you when you use our websites or get in contact with us.
What information we collect
When you register with us for one of our services, we receive and store information about you such as the following.
Information you provide to us on registering for our eSourcing and Business Intelligence services: We collect information you provide to us. This includes:
- Your name, email address, address and/or postal code, payment method and telephone number. We collect this information in a number of ways, including when you enter it while using our service, interact with our Customer Services, or participate in surveys or marketing promotions;
- Information when you choose to provide account settings, set preferences in your account, or otherwise provide information to us through our service or elsewhere;
- We do not store any personal banking or credit card details.
Information we collect automatically when you use our eSourcing and Business Intelligence services: We collect information about you and your use of our service, your interactions with us and our advertising, as well as information regarding your computer or other device used to access our service (such as mobile devices, operating system, browser). This information includes:
- Your activity on the service, such as user profile matches, viewing history and search queries;
- Details of your interactions with Customer Service such as date, time and reason for contacting us, transcripts of chat conversations and, if you call us, your phone number and call recordings;
- Device IDs or other unique identifiers, device and software characteristics (such as type and configuration), connection information, statistics on page views, referral URLs, IP address (which may tell us your general location), browser and standard web server log information;
- Information collected via the use of cookies and other technologies, including ad data (such as information on the availability and delivery of ads, the site URL, as well as the date and time). See our Cookies section for more details.
We do not collect any personal data from you that we do not need in order to provide, oversee and improve this service to you. Information we collect for Ingenium and Opus: Information gathered through our eSourcing or Business Intelligence services is not shared with or used by Ingenium or Opus. Ingenium and Opus are entirely separate databases and independently researched whereby we collect contact details such as name, organisation name, organisation address, organisation email, organisation phone number, job title, job function, and industry sector.
Why we collect it
eSourcing and Business Intelligence services: We use information to provide, facilitate, analyse, administer, enhance and personalize our service delivery and support delivery efforts in accordance with our contractual obligations to you. For example, we use information to:
- Process your registration, your orders and your payments, and to communicate with you on these and other topics;
- Provide secure access to our services, manage your account and support quality monitoring;
- Determine your general geographic location to provide localized content, provide you with information we think will be relevant to your business, and help us quickly and efficiently respond to enquiries and requests;
- Prevent, detect and investigate potentially prohibited or illegal activities, including fraud, and enforcing our terms;
- Analyse and understand our customers, improve our service (including user interface experiences) and optimize content selection, search and relevance algorithms, and delivery;
- Communicate with you concerning our service, so that we can send you news, details about new features or content available on our services, and customer surveys;
- Measure the success of our marketing campaigns and to better understand our customers;
- Assist you with operational requests such as password reset requests and other matters relating to your use of the service.
Ingenium and Opus: The information held on contacts in Ingenium and Opus is used to share information we think will be relevant to the contacts’ business or organisation in B2B, B2G and G2B contexts. This information may be sent on behalf of BiP or on behalf of third parties.
How and where we process it
The personal data that we collect from you and process in relation to our services is processed by our staff in the UK. For the purposes of IT hosting and maintenance, this information is located on servers within the European Union.
We do not undertake any automated decision making on the basis of your personal information and third parties do not have access to your personal data unless the law allows them to do so.
What we do to protect it
We take the security of your information very seriously. To oversee the effective and secure processing of your personal information and to safeguard against its loss, theft, and unauthorized access, use and modification, we operate comprehensive data protection and information security policies and procedures, which are certified to the international standards ISO 9001 and ISO 27001, and we use reasonable administrative, logical and managerial measures.
We use multiple layers of firewalls, specialist devices to detect and prevent intrusion attempts, and encryption systems to ensure data is scrambled while being transmitted from system to system. We employ strong physical security policies to prevent physical access to our data centres. We perform regular system patching and use independent security specialists to perform penetration tests to reveal vulnerabilities in our systems and to enable them to be fixed proactively.
Unfortunately, however, no measures can be guaranteed to provide 100% security. Accordingly, we cannot guarantee the security of your information
Who it may be shared with
We disclose your information for certain purposes and to third parties, as described below:
Service Providers: We use other service providers (i.e. companies, agents or contractors) to perform services on our behalf or to assist us with the provision of services to you. For example, we engage service providers to provide infrastructure and IT services, to provide software to enable us administer our business, to process credit card transactions or other payment methods, to collect debts, to analyse and enhance data (including data about users’ interactions with our service), and to process and administer consumer surveys. In the course of providing such services, these service providers may have access to your personal information. We do not authorise them to use or disclose your personal information except in connection with providing their services to us.
Protection of BiP and others: BiP and its Service Providers may disclose and otherwise use your personal and other information where we or they reasonably believe such disclosure is needed to:
- Satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request;
- Enforce applicable terms of use, including investigation of potential violations thereof;
- Detect, prevent, or otherwise address illegal or suspected illegal activities (including payment fraud), security or technical issues;
- Protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of BiP, its customers or the public, as required or permitted by law.
Business transfers: In connection with any reorganization, restructuring, merger or sale, or other transfer of assets, we will transfer information, including personal information, provided that the receiving party agrees to respect your personal information in a manner that is consistent with our privacy policy.
You may also choose to disclose your information in the following ways:
- While using our services you may have opportunities to post certain information publicly and third parties could use the information you disclose;
- Certain portions of our services may contain tools that give you options to share information by email and social or other sharing applications, using the clients and applications on your smart device and the recipients could use the information you disclose;
- Social plugins for browsers (including those offered by Facebook, Twitter and Google) allow you to share information on those platforms. Social plugins and social applications are operated by the social network themselves and are subject to their own terms of use and privacy policies.
Ingenium and Opus: The data held in Ingenium and Opus may be used to send targeted campaigns and / or surveys on behalf of third party organisations as a managed service, where the data is segmented by job function and various organisational attributes such as industry sector and employee number. Some third parties have access to some of this information via our mailing platform and campaign management service, iServe. On rare occasions, data may be shared directly with a third party to enable them to run their own campaigns via their own platforms. These third parties range through governmental organisations, charities, and businesses across a wide range of industry sectors interested in B2B, B2G and G2B engagement. We do not share the information with organisations interested in B2C. If, as a result of a communication, you have taken an action, such as downloaded a paper or registered for an event for example, information about your engagement with that campaign may be included in campaign performance reporting and may result in further communication relating to the action you have taken.
When you register with us for one of our eSourcing or Business Intelligence services, the details you provide are not used for Ingenium or Opus and we will not sell or lease your personal information to third parties unless we have your permission or are required by law to do so.
The only other times we will pass your details to anyone else would be if we are required to do so for fraud or other legal purposes.
How long we keep it
We are required under UK tax law to keep our customers’ basic personal data (name, address, contact details) for a minimum of 6 years plus the current year after which time it will be destroyed. Your information that we use for marketing purposes will be kept with us until you notify us that you no longer wish us to retain this information.
Your rights
You can request access to your personal information or correct or update inaccurate or out-of-date personal information we hold about you.
On some of our services, you can do this by visiting your account settings pages where you can access and update a range of information about your account. You must be signed in to access this feature. Alternatively, where this feature is not available, you can contact us directly.
You may also request that we delete personal information we hold about you.
If you have given consent for your information to be used for certain purposes, such as informing you of related services and offers that may be of interest to you, you may withdraw that consent at any time.
To make requests, or if you have any other question regarding our privacy practices, please contact us at bip@bipsolutions.com.
We may reject requests that are unreasonable or not required by law, including those that would be extremely impractical, could require disproportionate technical effort, or could expose us to operational risks such as fraud. We may retain information as required or permitted by applicable laws and regulations, including to honour your choices, for our billing or records purposes and to fulfil the purposes described in this privacy policy.
If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact us and we will investigate the matter.
If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data in a manner that is not in accordance with the law, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Contacting us
If you need to contact us for any reason, whether to get assistance with your account and service or to discuss any aspect of this data privacy policy or our use of your personal information for example, please contact us by email at bip@bipsolutions.com. Alternatively, you can write to us at the Glasgow office –
BiP Solutions,
Medius,
60 Pacific Quay,
Glasgow,
G51 1DZ.
Please note that if you contact us to assist you, for your safety and ours we may need to authenticate your identity before fulfilling your request.
Other websites
Our websites may contain links to websites belonging to other organisations. This privacy policy only applies to our websites, so when you link to other websites you should read their privacy policies and terms and conditions. We cannot accept responsibility for your use of these websites.
Cookies
What are cookies?
Cookies are small data files containing alphanumeric identifiers commonly transferred to and stored on your device when you browse and use websites and online services. They are widely used to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide reporting information and assist with service or advertising personalization.
Why does BiP use cookies?
We use cookies for various reasons. For example, we use cookies to enable our systems to recognise your browser and to provide personalised information. We also use cookies to make it easy to access our services by remembering you when you return, to provide and analyse our services, to learn more about our users and how they use the service, and to deliver and tailor marketing or advertising. We want you to be informed about our use of these technologies, so this notice explains the types of technologies we use, what they do and your choices regarding their use.
What cookies do we use?
We may use the following types of cookies:
Essential cookies: These cookies are strictly necessary to provide our website or online service. For example, we or our Service Providers may use these cookies to authenticate and identify our members when they use our websites and applications so we can provide our service to them. They also help us to enforce our Terms of Use, prevent fraud and maintain the security of our service.
Our website sets a cookie that stores a unique identifier for your session:
Name: _signon or JSESSIONID
Typical content: randomly generated alpha-numeric value
Expires: After 4 hours of user inactivity or upon closing the browser
Our website sets a cookie that stores your username if you set remember me to true to keep you signed in to your computer:
Name: username
Typical content: username of user who has signed on
Expires: 1 month after sign in
Our website sets a cookie that stores an encrtyped security string if you set remember me to true to keep you signed in to your computer securely:
Name: ACEGI_SECURITY_HASHED_REMEMBER_ME_COOKIE
Typical content: encrypted security ID string
Expires: Immediately
Cookies for improving services: These cookies are not essential, but help us to personalize and enhance your user experience. For example, they help us to remember your preferences and prevent you from needing to re-enter information you previously provided (for example, during member sign up). We also use these cookies to collect information (such as popular pages, site usage patterns, click-through and other information) about our visitors’ use of the service so that we can enhance and personalize the service. Deletion of these types of cookies may result in limited functionality of our service.
Our website uses Google Analytics cookies to help us accurately trend user activity and page requests. This ensures that the
service offers the most user-friendly journey through the application:
Name: __utma
Typical content: alpha-numeric value
Expires: when user exits the browser
Name: __utmb
Typical content: alpha-numeric value
Expires: when user exits the browser
Name: __utmc
Typical content: alpha-numeric value
Expires: when user exits the browser
Name: __utmd
Typical content: alpha-numeric value
Expires: when user exits the browser
How can I exercise choice regarding cookies and other types of online tracking?
The help menu on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies altogether. Additionally, you can disable or delete similar data used by browser add-ons. However, because cookies allow you to take advantage of our website features, we recommend that you leave them turned on. If you do leave cookies turned on, be sure to sign off any logged-in service when you finish using a shared computer.
Does BiP use other technologies?
We sometimes use other technologies similar to cookies, such as browser storage and plugins (e.g. HTML5 and WebSQL). Like cookies, some of these technologies may store small amounts of data on your device. We may use these and various other technologies for similar purposes as cookies, such as to enforce our terms, prevent fraud, and analyse the use of our service. There are a number of ways to exercise choice regarding these technologies. For example, many popular browsers provide the ability to clear browser storage, commonly in the settings or preferences area – see your browser’s help function or support area to learn more.
Changes to this privacy policy
We will update this privacy policy from time to time in response to changing legal, regulatory or operational requirements. Your continued use of the service after any such updates take effect will constitute acceptance of those changes. If there is a material change that could have a detrimental effect on you, we will notify you by placing a prominent announcement on our web pages. If you do not wish to accept updates to this privacy policy, you may cancel your use of the service in accordance with our terms and conditions and of course exercise your rights under privacy law as noted above.
This privacy policy was last updated on: 05 April 2023 version 8.0
