Privacy Policy

Your privacy and security of your personal data is extremely important to us

This privacy policy explains the types of personal data we, Matt Thomas Photography, may collect about you whilst you interact with us. We collect and process data in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679 and the Data Protection Act 2018. We do not disclose data to any third parties unless it is necessary for the fulfilment of service, you have specifically given consent for a particular service, or we have a legitimate interest in disclosing data. Instances in which we do disclose data to third parties are outlined below

Site Activity Data

Matt Thomas Photography considers Internet user privacy and data protection to be of paramount importance.

The Matt Thomas Photography website complies with the Data Protection Act 1998 in relation to all processing of personal data supplied to us by users and other personal data in our possession for any reason. It is the policy of Matt Thomas Photography to maintain the privacy and confidentiality of any personal information, such as your name, address, email address, or telephone number that you provide to us. Because your privacy is important to us, we maintain this website privacy policy to protect your personal information. By using this site, you consent to the terms of this website privacy policy. We do not collect, use or disclose your personal information for any purpose other than those identified below, except with your consent or as required by law.

Each time you visit our website www.matt-thomas-photography.co.uk the web server collects and logs certain information. We keep these access logs for a reasonable period of time. These logs include, but are not restricted to: your computer’s TCP/IP address, your username (if applicable), date, time and files accessed. These logs also contain information about referrer information if you clicked on an external link in order to access a webpage. We use these logs solely for performance, site administration and security reviews. We do not sell or share this information with any third party.

Personal Information

We collect only personal information about you, such as your name, address, email address, or telephone number that you voluntarily provide to us. For example, we may receive personal information about you when you send us an email through our website or sign up for our newsletter (where applicable). We may forward the personal information you provide to us to the person or department (internally) equipped to handle your request or respond to your inquiry.

We do not sell any personal information we receive through our website to any third party, nor will we add such information to any bulk email list we may prepare.

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Cookies

A “cookie” is a block of text placed in a file on your hard drive by a website you’ve visited. Portions of the website may use cookies for security and authentication purposes.

We use cookies on this website for a number of reasons, including but not limited to tracking the number of people who read each article (via Google Analytics), and serving advertisements. Our use of Google Analytics includes the service’s Advertising Features in order to customise the advertising that you see on the site.

If you do not wish to have cookies stored in your browser, you may instruct your web browser to reject them. Here are instructions for doing so in Google Chrome, for example, and Firefox, but the same result is possible in just about any browser.

We do not share or sell information we may learn about you through our use of cookies to any third party or for any purpose.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article or comment, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Comments

When visitors leave comments we collect information about visitors that use our Akismet anti-spam service. The information we collect includes the commenter’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself).

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Automattic Gravatar service privacy policy is available online here. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Contact Forms

When using our contact form we collect the following information which is directly provided by the user, their name, email address and the message itself. A contact number is an optional field. The information provided is only used to reply or for direct contact with the user. This information is never used by third-party services or sold.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Litespeed Cache

This site utilises caching in order to facilitate a faster response time and better user experience. Caching potentially stores a duplicate copy of every web page that is on display on this site. All cache files are temporary, and are never accessed by any third party, except as necessary to obtain technical support from the cache plugin vendor. Cache files expire on a schedule set by the site administrator, but may easily be purged by the admin before their natural expiration, if necessary. We may use QUIC.cloud services to process & cache your data temporarily. Please see https://quic.cloud/privacy-policy/ for more details.

Embedded Content from Other Websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

How Long We Retain Your Data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What Rights You Have Over Your Data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Our Online Store

The online store featured on Matt Thomas Photography is powered through WooCommerce and during your visit the following information captured.

While you visit our site, we’ll track:

  • Products you’ve viewed: we’ll use this to, for example, show you products you’ve recently viewed
  • Location, IP address and browser type: we’ll use this for purposes like estimating taxes and shipping
  • Shipping address: we’ll ask you to enter this so we can, for instance, estimate shipping before you place an order, and send you the order!

We’ll also use cookies to keep track of cart contents while you’re browsing our site.

When you purchase from us, we’ll ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number, credit card/payment details and optional account information like username and password. We’ll use this information for purposes, such as, to:

  • Send you information about your account and order
  • Respond to your requests, including refunds and complaints
  • Process payments and prevent fraud
  • Set up your account for our store
  • Comply with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes
  • Improve our store offerings
  • Send you marketing messages, if you choose to receive them

If you create an account, we will store your name, address, email and phone number, which will be used to populate the checkout for future orders.

We generally store information about you for as long as we need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it, and we are not legally required to continue to keep it. For example, we will store order information for 5 years for tax and accounting purposes. This includes your name, email address and billing and shipping addresses.

We will also store comments or reviews if you choose to leave them.

Who on our team has access

Members of our team have access to the information you provide us. For example, both Administrators and Shop Managers can access:

  • Order information like what was purchased, when it was purchased and where it should be sent, and
  • Customer information like your name, email address, and billing and shipping information.

Our team members have access to this information to help fulfill orders, process refunds and support you.

What we share with others

We share information with third parties who help us provide our orders and store services to you;

We share information with third parties who help us provide our orders and store services to you;

Google Analytics is a web analysis service provided by Google Inc. (“Google”). Google utilizes the Data collected to track and examine the use of this Application, to prepare reports on its activities and share them with other Google services. Google may use the Data collected to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network.

Payments

We accept payments through Stripe. When processing payments, some of your data will be passed to Stripe, including information required to process or support the payment, such as the purchase total and billing information.

Please see the Stripe Privacy Policy for more details.

Online Bookings

Each online booking processed on this website, we’ll ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number, credit card/payment details and optional account information like username and password.

Policy Revisions

Any changes to this website privacy policy will be promptly communicated on this website. Any such change will be prospective only and will not affect how we handle personal information submitted to us before the change occurs.

Contacting Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact me via the email address below or using the contact form.

info@matt-thomas-photography.co.uk


Resources and Further Information