PRIVACY POLICY

LAST UPDATED: 01 December 2022

At Net Hub we aim to be your go to destination for tracking business relationships.  Our high business standards extend to our privacy practices and the safeguarding of your personal information.

This policy describes the information we collect or you share with us when you visit our website (regardless of where you visit it from), download and use our mobile apps, as well as how that data is used, stored and safeguarded, and your choices regarding this information.

1. WHAT THIS POLICY COVERS

This policy outlines how we collect and process your personal information when you use our website, mobile apps and other online products and services (collectively the “Services”), interact with other Net Hub Users and Community Groups through the Services, or when you interact with us or receive communications from us.

Our Services are intended for use by those over the age of 18; we do not knowingly collect data relating to children.

It is important that you read this privacy policy together with any other policy on data processing or other notices we may provide on specific occasions so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data. This privacy policy supplements other notices and privacy policies and is not intended to override them.

2. DATA CONTROLLER AND CONTACT DETAILS

Net Hub Limited (“Net Hub”, “we”, “us” or “our”) is the ‘data controller’ of the processing of your personal information as described in this policy.  As the data controller, we decide why and how your personal information is processed and are responsible to you for that processing under data protection laws.

Our details are as follows:

• Registered office address: Unit 4a Channel Wharf, 21 Channel Road, Belfast, County Antrim, BT3 9DE
• Correspondence address: Suite GBE, Marsland House, Marsland Road, Sale, Cheshire M33 3AQ
• Email: info@mynethub.com
• Company number: NI680480
• ICO Registration number: ZB248736

3. HOW TO CONTACT US ABOUT YOUR RIGHTS AND DATA

We have appointed a data privacy manager who is responsible for overseeing questions in relation to this privacy policy. If you have any questions about this privacy policy, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact us using the details set out below.

By email at: info@mynethub.com, please address your correspondence as FAO: Data Privacy Manager

We are regulated by the Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) and you have the right to make a complaint at any time to them. We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact us in the first instance.

4. THIRD PARTY LINKS

Our website or Net Hub may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy practices. When you leave our website or Net Hub, we encourage you to read the privacy policy of every website you visit, connect with, or are referred to.

5. INFORMATION COLLECTED ABOUT YOU

We have set out below the personal information about you we may collect, use, store and transfer when you interact with us through the Services. Personal information means any information from which we can identify you, it does not include information we collected on an anonymous basis.

• Identity & Contact Data includes your title, first name, last name, email address, your company name, industry sector and any background information you provide either about your company or personal life.

• Financial Data & Transaction Data: includes your payment card details, billing address, as well as details about payments to and from you and other details of any purchases you have made from us.

• Profile Data: includes your username and password, details of your Net Hub account, information about the Community Groups you participate in, your profile and account preferences, and any information provided through direction interactions with us.

• Usage Data: includes information created about you through your use of our Services, such as unique identifiers, activity logs, and your interactions with us.

• Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform, and other technology on the devices you use to access our website or use our Services.

• Marketing & Communications Data includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties, other interactions with us, such as feedback to surveys or with our technical support or customer services teams, as well as your communication preferences.

We also collect, use and share aggregated data about you. This includes statistical or demographic data, which could be derived from your personal information but is not considered personal information in its own right as, on its own, it cannot be linked to you or reveal your identity. For example, we may aggregate your Usage Data to calculate the percentage of users accessing a specific feature. We may also use software to analyse your Usage Data and Technical Data in order to improve our Website and our Services. However, if we combine or connect Aggregated Data with your personal information so that it can be linked to you or can directly or indirectly identify you, we treat the combined data as personal information which will be used in accordance with this privacy policy.

How your information is collected

We use different methods to collect data from and about you including through:

Direct interactions. You may give us your Identity, Contact, Financial, Profile, Marketing and Communications Data by interacting with us through our Website or Services, filling in forms or completing our registration process, or by corresponding with us.  

This includes personal information you provide when you:

• create and verify your account;
• purchase any premium Services;
• subscribe to any of our mailing lists or request marketing to be sent to you;
• select your marketing and communications preferences;
• complete a survey; or
• give us feedback or contact us.

When using the Services. Through your use of our Services we will collect, process and store your Usage Data and Technical Data, specifically:

• we will create records of your participation within Net Hub, included records of your interactions with other users and which we use to “rate” user perception;
• we will generate Usage and Technical Data as when you, more generally, interact with your account.

Automated technologies or interactions. As you interact with both our Website and Services, we automatically collect various information about you, such as the device you use when you interact with us, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal information by using cookies, server logs and other similar technologies.

Third parties including publicly available sources. We will receive personal information about you from various third parties as set out below:

• Technical Data from the following parties:
  • analytics providers;
  • advertising networks; and
  • search information providers.

• Contact, Financial and Transaction Data from providers of technical, payment and delivery services, such as our third-party payment processors, or social media platforms, where you sign up to Net Hub through referral from these platforms.

6. HOW WE USE YOUR INFORMATION

We collect, process, store and disclose personal information for a variety of different reasons, but in all cases only to the extent the law allows us to.

Data protection laws require that organisations processing personal information set out the specific legal reason (known as the ‘lawful basis’) on which they rely to process that information.

We rely on the following lawful bases to processing your personal information:

1. Consent: we use your consent as a lawful basis for processing your personal information including for the purposes of sending marketing communications to you, in particular, where you register your interest with us through our Website or otherwise. You have the right to withdraw consent at any time by contacting us, including by opting out through any marketing communication we may provide.

2. Performance of Contract: where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you.

3. Legal Obligations: where we need to comply with a legal obligation.

4. Legitimate Interests: where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests. We rely on a wide range of legitimate interests as a business:
   • for marketing activities (other than where we rely on your consent);
   • to correspond or communicate with you;
   • to verify the accuracy of data that we hold about you;
   • to preserve the integrity of our network and information security and, in particular, for us to take steps to protect your information against loss or damage, theft or unauthorised access;
   • for prevention of fraud and other criminal activities;
   • to improve our Website, products and Services, in particular through analysing how you interact with us through our Website, products and Services to more generally improve your user experience;
   • for the management of queries, complaints, or claims, including when complying with a request from you in connection with the exercise of your data protection rights;
   • for the establishment and defence of our legal rights.

Summary of how and why we use your information

We have summarised below the various ways we use your personal information and our lawful basis for doing so.

7. COOKIES AND OTHER TECHNOLOGIES

Cookies come in a variety of forms but are essentially small data files used to collect and store information about you. We use them on our Website for a variety of different functions:

• for the smooth and safe operation of Net Hub and our website;
• to manage your preferences and remember you for future visits;
• to analyse how you use net Hub and our website in order to continually make improvements.

The majority of these cookies are linked to your browser session (session cookies) and disappear once you close your browser. Others remain on your device for a longer period (persistent cookies).

For further information about the cookies we use, please see our Cookie Policy [link].

8. OUR USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

We use social media platforms in a variety of different ways, including by publishing pages through which you can interact, running competitions or advertising to you using information you have provide those platforms or which has been provided by us or collected from our Website.  Our legal relationship with each platform will vary with the particular way we are using that platform.

In particular, we process your personal information using social media platforms as follows: 

• We use your personal information when you post content or otherwise interact with us on our official pages on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media platforms.   We also use the Page Insights service for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to view statistical information and reports regarding your interactions with the pages we administer on those platforms and their content.  Where those interactions are recorded and form part of the information we access through the Page Insights services, we and the relevant platform are joint controllers of the processing necessary to provide that service to us.

• Targeted advertising. We use social media platforms (as well as search engines and third party websites and other platforms to deliver targeted advertising to you via those platforms, unless you object. You may receive advertising because you have previously interacted with us (such as by visiting one of our websites) or because of your profile on a social media platform on which you have an account. You can find our more by consulting the help pages of the relevant social media platform but in summary we use social media platforms to send targeted advertising using two methods:
  • ‘Custom audience’ targeting.  You may receive advertising based on information about you that we have provided to the platform or allowed it to collect using cookies/pixels or code embedded in this Website (or a combination of the two).  For example, we may target you if you have signed up to our mailing list and where cookies have detected that you have visited this Website in the last month.  Please see the paragraph below regarding our use of cookies to send targeted advertising using social media. 
  • ‘Lookalike audience’ Targeting. You may also receive advertising because, at our request, the social media platform has identified you as falling within a group or ‘audience’ whose attributes we have selected, or a group that has similar attributes to you (or a combination of the two).

Information we send using social media cookies

We also use cookies and similar technologies to collect and send information to Facebook (who operates the Facebook and Instagram platforms), LinkedIn and Twitter about actions you take on our Website or through our Services. In particular:

• Facebook (who operates the Facebook and Instagram platforms) uses this information to provide services to us and also for further processing for its own business purposes.  We and Facebook are joint controllers of the processing involved in collecting and sending your personal information to Facebook using cookies and similar technologies as each of us has a business interest in Facebook receiving this information.   You can find out more about these technologies by visiting our Cookie Policy.  The services we receive from Facebook that use this information are delivered to us through Facebook’s Business Tools, which include Facebook Login (Facebook’s single sign-on service, see above), Facebook Pixel and Website Custom Audiences (which includes ‘lookalike audience’ targeting).  The data from these tools allows us to target advertising to you within Facebook’s social media platform by creating audiences based on your actions on our website and applications. They also allow Facebook to improve and optimise the targeting and delivery of our advertising campaigns for us. Please see the paragraph above for further information.] 
• We use LinkedIn Insight Tag, a small piece of code that we embed in this Website that allows us to perform in-depth campaign reporting and unlock insights about users that may visit this Website via our LinkedIn campaigns (e.g. by allowing us to discover business demographics by layering LinkedIn data on data about our Website’s visitors).  LinkedIn Insight Tag enables the collection of metadata such as IP addresses, timestamps, and events such as page views.  You can find out more about these technologies by visiting our Cookie Policy. 

Our relationship with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. As we are joint controllers with these platforms for certain processing, we and each platform have: 

• entered into agreements in which we have agreed each of our data protection responsibilities for the processing of your personal information described above; 
• agreed that we are responsible for providing to you the information in this privacy statement about our relationship with each platform; and 
• agreed that each platform is responsible for responding to you when you exercise your rights under data protection law in relation to that platform’s processing of your personal information as a joint controller. 

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter may also process, as our processors, personal information that we submit for the purposes of matching, online targeting, measurement, reporting and analytics purposes.  These services include the processing these platforms carry out when they display our advertisements to you in your news feed at our request after matching contact details for you that we have uploaded to them.  These advertisements may include forms through which we collect contact information you give to us. 

Further information. The Facebook company that is a joint controller of your personal information is Facebook Ireland Limited, 4 Grand Canal Square, Grand Canal Harbour, Dublin 2, Ireland. The LinkedIn company that is a joint controller of your personal information is LinkedIn Ireland Unlimited Company, Wilton Place, Dublin 2, Ireland.   For further information regarding these platforms and their use of your personal information, please see:

• Facebook’s Controller Addendum for Page Insights and Controller Addendum for Business Tools and LinkedIn’s Page Insights Joint Controller Addendum which include information regarding how our and those platforms’ responsibilities to you are allocated as controllers of your personal information;
• Facebook’s Data Policy at https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy and LinkedIn’s Privacy Policy at https://www.linkedin.com/legal/privacy-policy which include details of the legal reasons (known as ‘lawful bases’) on which each platform relies to process your personal information, together with details regarding your data protection rights;
• Facebook’s help pages regarding its Page Insights and Business Tools and its terms and conditions relating to those tools; and
• LinkedIn’s help pages regarding its Page Insights and its terms and conditions relating to its advertising services, including LinkedIn Insight Tag.

9. INFORMATION SHARING AND DISCLOSURE

We share the information we collect or that is provided to us as follows:

Sharing with other Users

Net Hub is a business networking platform and as such your profile is visible to other users of Net Hub. You control the amount of information other users see about you by decided who which users to “connect” with and include in your Net Hub network.

Users who you are not connected with will be able to see basic information about your profile, such as your name, company and sector.

Where you connect with another user, this will allow them to see all the information you choose to include in your Net Hub profile, as well as details about your job posts and details of any commission tied to lead generation related to those jobs.

Sharing with Networking Groups and our Partners

We will share your personal information with those Networking Groups who you are a member of.

Sharing with our Suppliers

External Third Parties, who help us provide our Services. Currently, we use the following trusted Partners:

International Transfers

Some of the information you provide to us may be transferred to countries outside the UK and European Economic Area (“EEA”). These countries may not have similar data protection laws to the UK and EEA.

Where we transfer your information outside of the UK and EEA in this way, we take steps to ensure that appropriate security measures are taken with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected in the ways required by data protection law as outlined in this policy. These steps include imposing contractual obligations on the recipient of your personal information.  Please contact us using the details at the end of this policy for more information about the protections that we put in place and to obtain a copy or access to the relevant documents.

If you use our Services whilst you are outside the UK and EEA, your information may be transferred outside the UK and EEA in order to provide you with those services.

10. HOW WE SAFEGUARD YOUR DATA

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal information breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

11. RETENTION AND DELETION

We will only retain your personal information for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal information, the purposes for which we process your personal information and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or other requirements.

As a general rule we retain your personal information for 7 years from the date our relationship with you ends, however we apply shorter/longer retention periods for the following information:

• you exercise your right to have the information erased (where it applies) and we do not need to hold it in connection with any of the reasons permitted or required under the law;

• you exercise your right to require us to retain your personal information for a period longer than our stated retention period;

• we bring or defend a legal claim or other proceedings or receive complaints during the period we retain your personal information, in which case we will retain your personal information until those proceedings or complaints have concluded and no further appeals are possible;

• we archive the information, in which case we will delete it in accordance with our routine deletion cycle; or

• in limited cases, existing or future law or a court or regulator requires us to keep your personal information for a longer or shorter period.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data by contacting us.

In some circumstances we will anonymise your personal information (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes, in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

12. YOUR INFORMATION, YOUR RIGHTS

You have a number of rights in relation to your personal information under data protection law. In relation to certain rights, we may ask you for information to verify your identity and, where applicable, to help us to search for your personal information. Except in rare cases, we will respond to you within 1 month after we have received this information or, where no such information is required, after we have received full details of your request.

You can enforce your rights by contacting us, or in most cases, by deleting your account and/or by ending your use of our Website, products or Services.

You have the following rights, some of which may only apply in certain circumstances:

• to be informed about the processing of your personal information (this is what this statement sets out to do);
• to have your personal information corrected if it is inaccurate and to have incomplete personal information completed;
• to object to processing of your personal information;
• to withdraw your consent to processing your personal information;
• to restrict processing of your personal information;
• to have your personal information erased;
• to request access to your personal information and information about how we process it;
• to electronically move, copy or transfer your personal information in a standard, machine-readable form; and
• rights relating to automated decision making, including profiling.

To find out more about each of your rights, please click the ✓ icon next to each right above.  To exercise these rights, please contact us using the details at the end of this policy.

You have the right to lodge a complaint with the UK data protection regulator.  The contact details for the ICO, the data protection regulator in the UK, are available on the ICO website, where your personal information has or is being used in a way that you believe does not comply with data, however, we encourage you to contact us before making any complaint and we will seek to resolve any issues or concerns you may have.

13. UPDATES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

As we further enhance our Website, our Services and your user experience, we may make changes to this policy from time to time. If we make any major changes, or any changes which directly affect the services provided to you or the data collected or processed by us, we will notify you of those changes directly. For all other changes and enhancements, we will notify you by posting an updated version on our Website. However, we encourage you to periodically review this policy for the most up to date version.