GuitartContact.online  Privacy Policy

This version is effective from May 1^st 2024.

This Privacy Policy delineates how GuitarContactLLC, a Limited Liability company established in the USA, gathers and utilizes your information, and how you can manage it. When we refer to “we,” “us,” or “our,” we are indicating GuitarContact.online, which provides services to you and is responsible for processing your data.

We collect various types of information about you through your usage of our websites and the provision of our services to process your requests and orders, enhance your web-surfing and shopping experience, and aid us in improving the services we offer. Additionally, we gather information about you through the use of cookies and similar technologies.

This Privacy Policy aims to empower you to make informed decisions while utilizing our sites and services. Please take the time to read and comprehend it. It should be reviewed alongside our Terms of Use and Cookie Notice. Unless otherwise specified, the capitalized terms in this Privacy Policy are employed in the same manner as in our Terms of Use.

This Privacy Policy pertains to all visitors, users, and others who access or utilize the website.

HOW WE COLLECT AND RECEIVE PERSONAL DATA ABOUT YOU AND WHAT INFORMATION WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU

Information you give to us:

• To fulfill your requests and process orders, we need to gather personal information from you. This may encompass your name, delivery and billing addresses, email, phone number, partial credit/debit card details, bank account information, account username, and password (referred to as “Services Data”). • Additionally, we will collect your first and last name, email, phone number, and delivery address (referred to as “Contact Data”) to communicate with you as outlined below.

We process data while delivering our services, such as generating invoices, processing orders, and documenting payments exchanged between you and us (referred to as “Transaction Data”). Certain information is essential for us to provide products and services to you effectively. • Additionally, you may be prompted to supply optional (non-mandatory) details like your interests, preferences, age, gender, feedback, and survey responses. This assists us in gaining insights into our customer base (referred to as “Profile Data”). You have the option to share such information through forum posts, web forms, or during communication with us

• We will also gather data regarding your marketing preferences and communication preferences (“Marketing and Communications Data”). Information automatically collected when you use the Website or Services: • We gather details about your engagement with our platforms and services from the devices you utilize, including your unique device ID, device type, browser type, operating system, IP address, and approximate location during browsing, as well as advertising ID (“Technical Data”). • Additionally, we collect data about your visits and interactions on our platforms (and those operated by our Group Companies), including the content and advertisements you view and engage with, the originating site address, and other technical information about your device, browsing activities, and patterns (such as viewed pages, clicked links, items added to your cart, and session duration) (“Behavioral Data”). This data is collected through cookies, web beacons, pixel tags, and similar technologies, collectively referred to as “Cookies.”Information collected from other sources:

We might merge your details with information obtained from third-party sources or public channels, such as analytics providers, data brokers, third-party directories, advertising networks, and technical service providers. This enables us to enhance our platforms and services. We also utilize publicly accessible sources like Companies House and the Electoral Register.

Information collected from social media:

Some websites provide services that necessitate setting up an account beforehand. To establish a secure account with us, you can utilize your email address and a password. Alternatively, if the website offers a Facebook single-sign-on service, you can register for and log into your account using your Facebook credentials. Opting for the Facebook single-sign-on service entails granting permission to Facebook to share specific profile details with us, including your name, profile picture, list of friends, and any other information disclosed by Facebook during the single-sign-on authorization process. You retain control over which social media information we can access through the privacy settings on the relevant social media platform and any permissions granted during the single-sign-on authorization process.Publicly available personal data

Occasionally, we may gather personal data about you (Contact Data or Profile Data) from publicly accessible sources, such as open-source datasets or media coverage. Additionally, information that you or a third party publicly disclose, such as speeches at events, published articles, news stories, or social media posts, may also be collected

.Children’s data

Our websites are designed for individuals aged 13 and above. If you are under 13, please refrain from providing any information to us and ask your parent or guardian to handle this on your behalf. To purchase products or services from us, you must be at least 18 years old. If you are under 18, it’s necessary for your parent or guardian to make the purchases on your behalf.

HOW WE USE INFORMATION ABOUT YOU

We will use your information for the following purposes:

Use of our sites and the provision of our Services

Service Access and Registration:

We’ll utilize your Services Data to enroll you as a new customer when you buy a subscription, event ticket, or any other product or service from us. This includes creating an account on one of our sites to access our services.

Sales and Fulfilment:

We will process your Services Data and your Transaction Data to process and deliver your order; to manage payments, fees and charges; to collect and recover money owed to us; to provide you with services you have requested from us when we collected the information from you, and/or to provide you with certain offers and benefits.

Our legal basis for processing

It is necessary for us to use your personal data in such a way to perform our obligations in accordance with any contract that we may have with you for the products and Services, or it is in our legitimate interest or a third party’s legitimate interest to use personal data in such a way to ensure that we provide our products and Services in an effective, safe and efficient way.

Customer Relationship Management:

We’ll utilize your Services Data to:

• Authenticate you during Account logins.
• Contact you regarding your Account, subscription, or other orders.
• Provide customer service, including responding to inquiries, concerns, and feedback via various communication methods such as email, telephone, SMS/text, post, or direct message.
• Notify you of significant changes to our terms or this Privacy Policy.

Additionally, we’ll process certain Technical Data and Marketing and Communications Data to:

• Manage your Account effectively.
• Send you service-related communications.
• Request reviews or surveys from you.

• Contributor Management: We’ll use your Contact Data and Transaction Data to manage your contributions to our features, send you vouchers, and handle any payments owed to you.
• Contests, Awards, Events, Product Trials, Surveys: Your participation in contests, prize draws, product trials, events, awards, surveys, polls, and quizzes involves processing your Service Data, Profile Data, Behavioural Data, and/or Technical Data. This enables us to administer these promotions effectively and provide you with any applicable prizes, products, or awards. Such processing is necessary to fulfill our contractual obligations or is in our legitimate interest to ensure fair and compliant contest operations.
• Systems Administration and Security: We may process your personal data to administer and protect our systems and sites, including integration, troubleshooting, testing, maintenance, support, reporting, and hosting data. This also involves ensuring network and system security, as well as preventing, detecting, mitigating, and investigating fraud, security breaches, and other prohibited or illegal activities. Verification of your identity may also be required.
• Business Administration and Legal Compliance: Your personal data may be used to comply with legal obligations, enforce our legal rights, protect the rights of third parties, or in connection with business transitions such as mergers, acquisitions, or asset sales. Such processing is based on our legitimate interests or legal obligations.
• For all other purposes outlined in this section, we are legally obligated to use your personal data to comply with any legal obligations, such as court orders. We do not handle any special (or sensitive) categories of personal data or data relating to criminal convictions or offenses unless permitted by applicable legislation or with your explicit consent.

Receipt of products and services from our suppliers:

If you or the organization you represent have been engaged to provide us with products or services (such as IT support, financial advice, or advertising services), we will gather and manage your personal data to oversee our relationship with you or your organization. This includes receiving products and services from you or your organization and, when applicable, delivering our products and services to others. The personal data collected from you may encompass your Contact Data and any other pertinent information you voluntarily provide that is relevant to our association with you or your organization..

Insight, Data Analytics and retargeting through Cookies:

We and our third-party partners utilize cookies to gather data from the devices you use to access our sites, products, services, and emails. This collected data includes Behavioral Data, Technical Data, and certain Profile Data. Please refer to our Cookie Notice for comprehensive details, including information about our third-party partners. We and our third-party partners leverage this data to analyze your usage patterns on our sites and with our products and services. This analysis aids in: • Personalization: Tailoring content, services, and communications, as well as targeting advertising. • Advertising: Selecting and delivering advertisements and content, and evaluating their delivery and effectiveness (e.g., analyzing open and click rates). • Analyzing usage patterns and the effectiveness of our offerings. • Tracking user visits, email interactions, and other insights to enhance our sites, products, services, and email effectiveness. • Evaluating content effectiveness and user preferences on our sites. • Understanding user interests for future marketing strategies and product/service development. • Selecting future product and service lines, website design, and remembering user preferences. In some email communications, we employ “click-through URLs” linked to specific websites. We may track click-through data to gauge interest in particular topics and measure communication effectiveness.

When collecting data through non-essential cookies, we depend on your consent to gather your personal data and for subsequent processing purposes. Please refer to our Cookie Notice for comprehensive information. Under specific circumstances, we may rely on another lawful basis for using your personal data obtained through cookies. For instance, when utilizing personal data gathered via essential analytics cookies to analyze site usage, it is in our legitimate interest to employ such data to enhance our sites and products and services.

Marketing communications:

We utilize your Contact Data to send marketing communications via email, post, telephone, and SMS/text to you or the organization you represent. Our marketing includes press releases, information about us, our site, our products and services, upcoming events, and occasional offers and promotions. Marketing content can be personalized or non-personalized. Personalized marketing tailors content to your preferences, using Profile Data, Transaction Data, and Behavioral Data to inform our decisions. Please refer to the “Insight, Data Analytics, and retargeting through Cookies” section for details.

For online personalized advertising, we and our third-party partners utilize Behavioral Data, Technical Data, and other data from your interactions with third-party websites and services to deliver personalized ads. These ads align with your interests based on your browsing behavior. Our partners may also display personalized ads for third-party products and services.

In marketing via third-party channels, we share your email address and other identifiers with third-party providers like Facebook and Google to match your data with their registered users. This enables us to display our ads to you on their platforms. This activity requires your consent. You can opt-out of this sharing by exercising your data subject rights.

Additionally, we provide your data to third-party providers to find other users with similar interests and characteristics for “lookalike” audience advertising. This activity is based on your consent and our legitimate interests. If you see such advertising on a platform, it’s in our legitimate interest, although we do not receive your data directly.

Aggregation and Anonymization: We may combine and anonymize your Profile Data and Behavioral Data to enhance and promote our advertising services and monitor the effectiveness of our business partnerships. Our legal basis for this processing relies on our legitimate interests to aggregate and anonymize your personal data for the aforementioned purposes.

Marketing – Further Information and Opt-Out: With appropriate permissions or as authorized by applicable law, we use your information to market and advertise our products and services, those of our group companies, and occasionally third-party products and services that may interest you. This includes offers, advertisements, competitions, or commercial communications via various channels such as telephone, post, electronic messaging, email, online, or through applications. You may also be contacted directly by our group companies for these purposes. For more details, please refer to the relevant sections: • Marketing communications • Online personalized advertising • Marketing via third-party channels • Advertising to other individuals who share similar interests and characteristics with you You can opt out of receiving direct marketing communications from us at any time by contacting [email protected] with the subject line “Privacy”. You can also follow the opt-out instructions provided in the relevant communication. However, please note that opting out of direct marketing communications will not affect service-related messages you may receive from us. To stop receiving online marketing communications from us or our third-party partners, please follow the opt-out instructions in our Cookie Notice.

Failure to Provide Personal Data: If we are legally obligated to collect your personal data or require it under a contractual agreement, and you fail to provide this data upon request, we may be unable to fulfill the contract or service you have requested. This situation may arise if you do not provide the necessary personal data for us to deliver the products and services you have requested or to process an account registration application. In such cases, we may need to cancel your application or the provision of the relevant products and services, and we will notify you accordingly.

WHAT WILL WE DISCLOSE TO THIRD PARTIES?

We disclose your personal data to our affiliated companies for the purposes stated in this Privacy Policy. Additionally, we may transfer your personal data to third parties where legally permitted. In such instances, we implement contractual agreements and security measures to safeguard the shared personal data and adhere to our data protection, confidentiality, and security standards and obligations. Please note that the following list is not exhaustive, and there may be situations where we must share personal data with additional third parties.

HOW WE PROTECT YOUR INFORMATION

We are committed to keeping the personal data you provide to us secure and we have implemented information security policies, rules and technical measures to protect the personal data under our control from unauthorised access, improper use or disclosure, unauthorised modification and unlawful destruction or accidental loss. In addition, all our employees and data processors (i.e. those who process your personal data on our behalf) are obliged to respect the confidentiality of the personal data of all users of our sites and those who purchase our products and Services.

Other websites

Please note that clicking on links and advertisements on our sites could result in you being transferred to another website, where data privacy practices vary from ours. If transferred to another website you should consult their privacy policy as we are not responsible for, and have no control over, information that is submitted to or collected by these third parties.

HOW LONG DO WE KEEP YOUR INFORMATION?

We are required by law to keep certain information about our customers (such as financial and transaction related data) for seven years after they cease being customers for tax purposes. We may then destroy such files without further notice or liability.

If any personal data is only useful for a short period (e.g. for a specific activity, promotion or marketing campaign), we will not retain it for longer than the period for which it is used by us.

If you have opted out of receiving marketing communications from us, we will need to retain certain personal data on a suppression list indefinitely so that we know not to send you further marketing communications in the future. However, we will not use this personal data to send you further marketing unless you subsequently opt back in to receive such marketing.

Our data retention periods depend on the context of the services that we provide to you and our legal obligations. To determine the appropriate period for which we keep your data, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of your data, the potential risk or harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process that data (and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means), and applicable legal requirements.

YOUR RIGHTS

You have specific rights regarding the personal data we hold about you, detailed below. Some rights are applicable only in certain circumstances, as outlined in more detail: When exercising your rights, we may need specific information from you to confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data. This is a security measure to prevent disclosure to unauthorized persons. We may also contact you for further information to expedite our response.

Your rights include:

1. Access: You can request access to the personal data we hold about you.
2. Correction: You have the right to request correction of any incomplete or inaccurate personal data we hold about you.
3. Erasure: You can request the deletion or removal of your personal data in certain circumstances, such as when it is no longer needed or when you withdraw your consent.
4. Objection: You can object to the processing of your personal data, including for direct marketing purposes.
5. Restriction: You can request the suspension of processing of your personal data in certain situations, such as contesting its accuracy or objecting to processing.
6. Data Portability: You can request to receive your personal data in a machine-readable format, or to have it transferred to a third party.
7. Non-Automated Decision Making: You have the right not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing, unless necessary for entering into or performing a contract.
8. Withdrawal of Consent: You can withdraw consent for processing your personal data at any time.
9. Complaint: If you have concerns about our privacy practices or how we handle your personal data, you can make a complaint.

We update this Privacy Policy periodically to reflect changes in our privacy practices. You may be notified of significant changes via email, but we encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically for updates. If changes are made, we will update the effective date at the top of the page.