Our Privacy and Cookies Policy

This privacy policy sets out how we use and protect any information that you give when you use this website. We are committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. Should we ask you to provide certain information by which you can be identified when using this website, then you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement. We may change this policy from time to time by updating this page. You should check this page from time to time to ensure that you are happy with any changes.

OUR COMMITMENT AND OBLIGATION TO PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY

This privacy policy sets out in detail how we as a company (Discovery Tours and Events Ltd) use any personal data that you provide us with in the process of booking a tour and using our services.

Discovery Tours and Events Ltd – hereinafter also referred to as “we” or “us” or “Discovery Tours and Events Ltd” – is committed to protecting your privacy in accordance with our obligations under data protection legislation. The current data protection law is found in the Data Protection Act 1998 but with effect from 25th May 2018, the main data protection law will be the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as supplemented by the Data Protection Act 2018 and related laws.

IN A NUTSHELL – A QUICK SUMMARY

Firstly, as a company (Discovery Tours and Events Ltd), is a controller of personal data under the terms of the General Data Protection Regulation 2016 (GDPR), but we do make use of third-party services as processors of your information. Details of these third-party providers, and links to their privacy policies, can be found further down this page.

We take your personal data extremely seriously and we will only ever use any information (such as your name, telephone number or email address) that you provide us with to contact you for purposes to do with any tour or service that you have booked with us.

These include, sending you a confirmation of your booking, sending you a reminder of a tour that you have booked with us 24 hours before the designated start time of the Jack the Ripper tour, phoning you on the number you provide us with to offer assistance should you not have arrived at the tour starting point at the designated start time, notifying you of any changes to our scheduled walks, or sending you details of alternative travle routes should there be any line closures on the underground on the day you will be taking the tour with us.

In addition if you have requested to receive our monthly list of free things to do in London, we will use your email address to send this to you via our data processor Mailchimp.

These are the only circumstances under which we will contact you – as we hate spam as much as you do and we simply do not engage in it.

You have the right to ask to see and/or amend or delete any of the personal details we hold on you, and details of how to do this can be found further down this page.

In summary, when you book a tour with us, we will ask you for your name, number of places, email address and phone number. These will only be used to confirm your booking, to contact you to notify you of any changes or to offer assistance should you be running late and have not checked in when the tour is about to depart.

We will not pass on or sell any of your details to third party marketers or companies, nor will we use your personal data to pester you with special offers or marketing emails.

AND NOW – THE POLICY IN DETAIL

GET A CUP OF TEA OR COFFEE AND READ ON!

For the purposes of full compliance with Data Protection Laws and specifically the General Data Protection Regulation 2016 (GDPR), which takes effect on and from the 25th May 2018, we list below, in the interest of full transparency, how we treat any personal data which we receive from you.

WE HAVE A LEGAL OBLIGATION

Whenever you provide us with personal details we have a legal obligation to use your information in line with all applicable laws concerning the protection of personal data; including the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) and The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 2016.

WHO WE ARE

Our company is Discovery Tours and Events Ltd Trading As The Jack The Ripper Tour.

We are a UK Registered Company, Registration Number 05005842.

Our Registered Office is
9 The Shrubberies
George Lane
South Woodford
London
E18 1BD.
United Kingdom

Our email address is [email protected].

Our phone number is 020 8530-8443.

THE SERVICES WE PROVIDE

We provide guided walking tours on foot in London, predominately, although not exclusively, the walking tour of the London of Jack the Ripper.

PRIVACY AND DATA PROTECTION OFFICER

Should you have any concerns about the information we might hold on you, please either phone, email or write to us, using the information provided above and address your correspondence, or ask to speak to the Privacy Officer.

VISITORS TO OUR WEBSITE

When someone visits our website, we use a third-party service, Google Analytics, to collect standard internet information and details of how visitors behave in relation to our website.

We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site and how they interact with the pages and links on our website.

This information is processed in a way that does not identify the person, or the persons, who visited our website.

INFORMATION WE COLLECT FROM YOU

When you book a tour with us, we will ask you to provide us with the following information.

1. Your name.

2. The date you wish to book the tour for.

3. Your email address.

4. Your contact phone number, either landline or mobile.

WHY WE REQUEST THIS INFORMATION

Since we operate a guest list for all our tours and services, we add your name to the guest list for the date on which you have booked your tour or service with us.

We also keep a record of your phone number and email address in the event we need to contact you to notify you of any changes to the tour you have booked.

This data is used for operational reasons, and it would not be possible to provide our services efficiently without the requested data.

HOW WE COLLECT THE REQUESTED INFORMATION

You will provide us with your information by way of our booking forms or shopping carts, all of which are fully secure (you will see the little padlock in your browser at the top of the page).

When you visit any of our websites, we will also collect technical information, such as the Internet Protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet, your browser type and version, your time zone setting, your operating system and platform.

In addition, we will use Google Analytics – which will make use of Cookies – to track your journey throughout the website in order to understand the interests of our website visitors and tailor the walks, services and information we offer to the wishes and interests of our visitors.

You can find full details of how Cookies are used further down this page.

PHONE ENQUIRIES

If you phone us for information, we may take a record of your name, phone number and email address. These records will be stored in our office and, unless you request further or regular communication with us, these records will be shredded at the end of each month.

PRIVATE TOURS

If you book a private tour with us, we will request your name, organization, phone number, postal address and email address.

This information will be stored on a secure server operated by Zoho, or Data Processor.

In addition, your name and contact mobile phone number will be passed to the guide for your tour on the day of the tour, and it will be kept by them only for the duration of the tour, after which it will be deleted.

When we invoice you for a private tour, your name, organisation (if applicable), phone number, postal address and email address will be on the invoice.

Again, all our invoices are stored securely online and are only shared with our Accountants (Alan Patient and Co, South Woodford), for the purpose of preparing our annual returns, and, if requested, by HMRC.

Other than these aforementioned instances, your private details will not be shared with any outside parties in any way.

CREDIT OR DEBIT CARD DETAILS

Although you pay for the tour using a credit or debit card, or a Paypal account, this information is processed by Paypal, and none of your financial details (credit card number, expiry date or CSV number) are sent to us.

Paypal will keep a record of the data you provide, and this will be used by us should we need to make a refund should you request one. However, we do not see, nor do we have access to, your actual credit card information.

LEGAL BASIS FOR RECEIVING YOUR DATA

Your name and contact information are necessary for us to be able to fulfil the contract that you enter into with us. When you make an online booking, for example, we will use the information you provide us with to carry out our obligation to complete and administer that booking.

Without collecting this information we would be unable to fulfil our contractual obligations to you.

HOW WE USE YOUR INFORMATION

We are dedicated to customer satisfaction and realise that, in providing us with personal information, you have placed a great deal of trust in us.

Therefore, we will never abuse your trust, and we will only use your information to provide you with the tours and services you have requested from us and booked with us.

To that end, here is a break down of how we use each piece of information that you provide us with:-

YOUR NAME:- Your name is placed on our guest list for the date and tour that you have booked with us. We will also record the number of places you have booked.

YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS:- Your email address is used to confirm your tour booking. We will also send you an email reminder 24 hours before the tour that you have booked with us is due to depart. We will also use the email address to notify you of any changes to the tour, or of any known problems on the tube, such as underground line or station closures.

YOUR PHONE NUMBER:- In the event of last minute changes to your tour, we ask that you provide us with a mobile phone number, or a landline number, at the time of booking so that we can call you should anything change or occur directly before the tour begins.

We will also call you to see if you need any assistance should you not have arrived and checked in at the tour’s designated start time.

WE NEVER SHARE YOUR INFORMATION

We will not share your personal information with, or sell it to, third-party marketers.

We will keep your information within our organisation except where disclosure is required or permitted by law or when we use third party service providers as data processors to supply and support our services to you. We have contracts in place with our data processors. This means that they cannot do anything with your personal data unless we have instructed them to do so. They will not share your personal data with any organisation apart from us. They will hold it securely and retain it for the period we instruct.

WHO ARE OUR DATA PROCESSORS?

The organisations we use to store data are:- Bookeo, Paypal and Gmail.

This is how we use their services:-

Bookeo (Bookeo Pty Ltd ) – this is where we store details of the tour you have booked with us, the date of the tour, your mail address and phone number.

You can read their privacy policy here.

Payments for our tours are processed by Paypal. They will keep a record of your payment details, which we as a company will only make use of should we need to make a refund. However, the only personal data we see is your name, the service you have purchased, the amount you have paid and your email address. We do not see, nor have access to any of your financial information, such as credit or debit card details. You can read the Paypal privacy policy here.

Other than the above-mentioned data processors, we will not share your personal information with or sell it to any other third-party services or marketers.

SOCIAL MEDIA

We use the following social media services:-

Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram and Pinterest. Any information shared on our social media channels is subject to the individual privacy policies of each of these external services.

THIRD PARTY WEBSITES

Our website may include links to third party websites that are not controlled by us. In the event of visiting these websites, please be sure to check their Privacy Policies as our policy will not apply.

HOW LONG DO WE STORE THE INFORMATION?

We will not store your data for any longer than is necessary. If you are a user of our services, then your information will be held for as long as you continue to use our services. With regards to invoices, we are required by UK tax law to hold all financial records for six years.

QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS

If you have any questions or comments, or if you want to update, delete, or change any Personal Information we hold, or you have a concern about the way in which we have handled any privacy matter, please use our contact form to send us a message.

You may also contact us by postal mail, email or telephone at:

Privacy Officer

Discovery Tours and Events Ltd
9 The Shrubberies
George Lane
South Woodford
London
E18 1BD
United Kingdom

Email [email protected].

Telephone: 020 8530-8443

ACCESSING, CHANGING AND DELETING YOUR INFORMATION

Under the General Data Protection Regulation, you have the right to request a copy of any personal information we hold about you.

You can review this personal information you have provided us with and make any desired changes to your information at any time by contacting our Privacy Officer, using the above details.

You can also request that we delete any or all of the information that we hold on you, and your request will be complied with within 24 hours.

 

SHOULD YOU WISH TO MAKE A COMPLAINT

We are committed to meeting the highest standards when collecting and using personal information. For this reason, we take any complaints we receive about this very seriously.

We ask that you bring it to our attention if you think that the way in which we collect or use your information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate. We would also welcome any suggestions for improving our procedures.

Should you wish to make a complaint, we promise that we will deal with your concerns promptly and with the utmost courtesy.

If, having contacted us, you are not fully satisfied with our response, then you can further complain to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO), the statutory body which oversees data protection law.

Their “report a concern” page can be accessed here.

CHANGES TO OUR PRIVACY POLICY

All future changes that we make to our privacy policy will be posted on this page and, if it is a major change and we consider it appropriate, we will also notify you by e-mail that a change has taken place. Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to our privacy policy.

This Privacy Policy was last Updated on 18th May, 2018.

COOKIES AND WEBSITE SECURITY

Security

Website Security

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure,

we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure

the information we collect online.

  • Payment Security

    We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information. We will never store your credit/debit card information on our website.

  • All electronic transactions you make to or receive from us will be encrypted using SSL technology and will be processed by Paypal. Of course, data transmission over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet. You are responsible for keeping your password and user details confidential. We will not ask you for your password.
  • External Links

    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.

An introduction to 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.

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 our website.

Cookies deployed by our website:

  • ensure that functionality operates as intended
  • remember your choices and preferences during and between visits
  • allow you to share pages via social network widgets like Facebook, Twitter and AddThis
  • allow you to interact with our website by leaving comments or opinions
  • post enquiries via our Anti-Spam enquiry form
  • track your visit for statistical analysis, allowing us to improve the usability, speed and security of our website

Cookies are not deployed to:

  • collect any personal identifiable information (without your express permission)
  • collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
  • pass data to advertising networks
  • pass personally identifiable data to third parties
  • pay sales commissions

Your consent for cookie deployment by our website.

Upon your first visit to our website, you may have noticed our banner alerting you to the use of cookies by our website. In compliance with the 2011 EU Cookie Law, our website operates on an ‘Implied Consent’ basis. This means that we will assume that you have opted-in for our website to deploy cookies until you choose to deactivate them within your browser settings or via the instructions below. By default, the majority of popular web browsers automatically permit websites to deploy cookies onto your device. Below you can learn more about the specific cookies deployed by our website, and how they can be disabled. For more information on the EU Cookie Law in the UK, we recommend visiting the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website where you can find the latest information, guidelines and advice on the EU Cookie Law.

Cookies used by our website

  • Social Network Sharing

    We encourage users to share our content and/or like our on profile on the popular Social Media websites Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn. In order to make ‘Social Sharing’ accessible, our website utilises widgets either provided directly from the Social Networks and/or via amalgamative widgets from third parties such as AddThis. Cookies and privacy implications from the social networks vary and will be dependent on your nominated privacy settings with each Social Network. Social Sharing buttons will only deploy cookies if you are signed to that respective Social Network at the time of being on our website.

  • Analytical Tracking

    Our website has Google Analytics installed which allows us to track and compile anonymous visitor statistics. The information collected ranges from simple traffic volume to the type of browser you are viewing our website with. This information is valuable to us not just for marketing analysis and quantification, but to improve the usability, security and load speed of our website content. Google Analytics is a popular, secure, flagship webmaster product from Google. The privacy and security of Google Analytics data is a high priority at Google that you can read more about on Google’s Analytics Data Safeguarding page. Google also offer a Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on that will allow you to automatically Opt-out of all websites that track your activity via Google Analytics. No personal information is collected by Google Analytics.

  • Cookie Consent Check

    As mentioned above, upon your first visit our website displays a banner at the top of the page alerting you about cookies being deployed by our website.
    In order for our website to remember your choice of opting-in, we store an anonymous cookie to remove the alert banner for 28 days. To prevent this cookie being stored, simply do not accept and close the alert. If you have already accepted the alert and you wish to remove the cookie, please clear your cookies within your browser settings.

  • WordPress

    Our website, either in full or in part, is built on the popular open-source CMS framework – WordPress. WordPress utilises cookies to allow visitors to register, login and comment on our website’s content. If you do not wish to participate in commenting on our website, WordPress will not deploy any cookies onto your device. Cookies will only be created by WordPress if you actively register or comment via the clear forms on our website.

    Enquiry Forms

    Visitors can choose to contact us via enquiry form(s) on our website. In order to prevent spam enquiries, we protect our forms with a ‘CAPTCHA’ challenge to ensure the submission is from a living person, rather than a computer bot. This CAPTCHA challenge creates a cookie that is used only to check the input response from the user is correct. The CAPTCHA cookie does not store any other information from your enquiry.

    Google Maps/Places

    Our website may have our Google Maps/Places profile embedded within an iframe. Google Maps creates cookies that enable the functionality of their powerful mapping software. No personal information is stored or shared on the cookies deployed by Google Maps/Places

Actual cookies deployed

Below is a table of information which lists all cookies deployed and used on our website.

Cookie CategoryCookie NameCookie Description
Google_utmaA Google Analytics cookie, which keeps track of the number of times, a visitor has been to the site, when their first visit was, and when their last visit occurred.
_utmbA Google Analytics cookie, which creates a timestamp of the exact moment when a visitor enters a site.
_utmcA Google Analytics cookie, which creates a timestamp of the exact moment when a visitor leaves the site.
_utmvUsed for reporting in Google Analytics classifying the visitor.
_utmzA Google Analytics cookie which tracks where the visitor came from, what search engine was used, what link was clicked on, what keywords used, and where in the world the site was accessed from.
PREF, NIDThis cookie is set by Google Maps when you load a map of our location
AddThisloc, uid/uit, psc, di/dt, atuvc/bt/ssc/ssh/sshs/xtcAllows users to share content via Social Networking websites and email
WordPresswp-settings, wp-settings-time-This is a cookie is to verify if you are logged into the website or not.
wordpress_, wordpress_logged_inWordPress cookie for a logged in user.
comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_urlWhen you enter a comment on this site you will be asked to provide certain information about yourself including your name, email and website address.

How to disable cookies

Most modern browsers allow you to control your cookie settings for all websites that you browse. You can disable cookie deployment completely by editing your browser settings, however ,in doing this ,you may be limiting the functionality that is displayed on our website.

To learn how to disable cookies on your preferred browser we recommend reading this advice posted by Google.

If you are concerned about cookies tracking your movements on the Internet then you may be concerned about spyware. Spyware is the name given to a particular band of cookies that track personal information about you. There are many antispyware programs that you can use to prevent this from happening. Learn more about antispyware software – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware.

As mentioned earlier in this page you call also disable Google Analytics on all websites by downloading the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.