Privacy policy

This privacy policy explains how Guardian Automotive Limited (“Guardian Automotive”, “we”, “us” or “our”) collects, uses, stores and shares personal data when you:

• visit or use our website at www.guardianauto.co.uk;
• create or use an online account;
• enquire about, purchase or use our products or services;
• communicate with us; or
• otherwise deal with us in connection with our business.

Guardian Automotive is the controller responsible for your personal data. Guardian Automotive Limited is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 01813873 and registered office at Minster Park, West Moors, Ferndown, Dorset, BH21 6QF.

We have not appointed a data protection officer. If you have questions about this policy or wish to exercise your privacy rights, you may contact us at:

• Email: [email protected]
• Post: Minster Park, West Moors, Ferndown, BH21 6QF

“Personal data” means information relating to an identified or identifiable individual. Depending on how you interact with us, we may collect, use, store and share the following categories:

• Identity data, including name, title, username and job title.
• Contact data, including business, billing and delivery addresses, email address and telephone number.
• Account and profile data, including online-account details, passwords, purchase history, preferences, feedback and survey responses.
• Financial and credit data, including bank details, payment-card information, credit information, credit-check results and credit limits.
• Transaction data, including quotations, orders, invoices, payments, deliveries, returns, warranty claims and communications concerning our products and services.
• Technical data, including internet protocol (IP) address, device identifier, browser type and version, operating system, time zone, login data, and information contained in server logs.
• Usage data, including information about how you use our website, online account, products and services. Where you log in to your account, this can include basket activity, orders and abandoned carts.
• Marketing and communications data, including your marketing preferences and engagement with marketing communications, such as email opens and link clicks.
• Verification and fraud-prevention data, including records of verbal confirmation of bank-detail changes, including the name or role of the person confirming the change and the date of confirmation.
• Delivery data, including proof-of-delivery information, recipient names, addresses and delivery photographs.

We may also create, use, share and receive aggregated or anonymised information, such as statistical data. This is not personal data if it no longer identifies you.

We do not intentionally collect special-category personal data or criminal-offence data in the ordinary course of our business.

Our website and services are not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data relating to children.

We collect personal data in the following ways:

Information you provide directly

You may give us personal data when you:

• contact us by phone, email, post, social media or through our website;
• request information, a quotation or product support;
• create or use an online account;
• place or receive an order;
• make a payment;
• submit a warranty, return, refund, complaint or other request;
• take part in a promotion, competition or survey; or
• subscribe to or interact with our marketing communications.

Automated technologies

When you use our website, we may automatically collect technical and usage data through cookies, server logs and similar technologies. Please see our Cookie Policy for further details, including how to manage your cookie preferences.

We do not make decisions that have legal or similarly significant effects on individuals solely by automated means.

Third parties and public sources

We may receive personal data from third parties, including:

• Experian, where we carry out credit checks;
• couriers and delivery providers, including proof-of-delivery information;
• our website, hosting, IT, cloud, email and customer-management service providers;
• payment providers, including Cardnet;
• analytics and business-intelligence providers, including Phocas;
• debt-collection providers;
• public sources, where relevant; and
• providers supporting our telematics and video-recording products and related services.

We may also collect information from publicly available sources where reasonably necessary for our business.

We will only use your personal data where data-protection law allows us to do so. Most commonly, we use it where:

• it is necessary to perform a contract with you or take steps at your request before entering into a contract;
• it is necessary for our legitimate interests or those of a third party, provided those interests are not overridden by your rights and interests;
• we need to comply with a legal obligation; or
• you have given consent, where consent is required.

Our legitimate interests include operating and developing our business; supplying and improving our products and services; managing customer and supplier relationships; recovering debts; preventing fraud; maintaining effective IT systems and security; and protecting or enforcing our legal rights.

Purposes for which we use personal data

We have set out below, in a table format, a description of all the ways we plan to use the various categories of your personal data, and which of the legal bases we rely on to do so. We have also identified what our legitimate interests are where appropriate.

We may send marketing communications about our products and services by email and through our social-media channels. We may use information such as your role, purchasing history, stated preferences, website activity and engagement with communications to help make our communications more relevant.

Where required by law, we will obtain your consent before sending electronic marketing. Otherwise, where permitted by law, we may send marketing to business contacts on the basis of our legitimate interests in promoting and developing our business.

You can opt out of marketing at any time by:

• using the unsubscribe link in an email from us; or
• emailing [email protected].

Opting out of marketing will not affect service, account, order, delivery, payment or other essential communications.

We do not share your personal data with third parties for their own direct-marketing purposes.

We may share personal data with the following recipients where necessary for the purposes described in this policy:

• our staff, agents and contractors who need the information to perform their duties;
• website, hosting, IT, cloud, cybersecurity, software, account-management and support providers;
• email-service providers, including SendGrid for transactional emails and Mailchimp for marketing emails;
• payment providers, including Cardnet;
• couriers, delivery providers and proof-of-delivery providers;
• credit-reference agencies, including Experian;
• our finance provider in connection with the assignment, financing and administration of our receivables;
• debt-collection providers;
• analytics and business-intelligence providers, including Phocas;
• professional advisers, including lawyers, accountants, auditors, insurers and banking advisers;
• regulators, law-enforcement bodies, courts and public authorities where required or permitted by law;
• third parties to whom we may choose to sell, transfer or merge parts of our business or our assets (and their professional advisors). Alternatively, we may seek to acquire other businesses or merge with them. If a change happens to our business, then the new owners may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this privacy policy; and
• other third parties where you have asked us to do so or where we are otherwise permitted to do so by law.

We require service providers acting on our behalf to protect personal data and to process it only in accordance with our instructions, unless they act as independent controllers.

Some of our service providers, group companies or their sub-processors may process personal data outside the United Kingdom.

Where we transfer personal data outside the United Kingdom, we will ensure that an appropriate safeguard is in place, such as:

• a UK adequacy regulation;
• the UK International Data Transfer Agreement;
• the UK Addendum to the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses; or
• another transfer mechanism recognised by UK data-protection law.

You may contact us using the details in section 1 if you would like further information about the safeguards used for a particular transfer.

Some products supplied by us, such as telematics, dashcam or mobile digital-video-recording products, may be capable of processing personal data, including vehicle-location information or video footage.

Where a customer uses these products, the customer is generally responsible for ensuring that its own use of the product and any associated personal data complies with applicable data-protection law, including providing any necessary privacy information to drivers, employees, visitors or other affected individuals.

Where we provide or arrange associated services, we may share limited relevant information with the relevant technology or hosting provider to provide support and maintain the service. The specific privacy arrangements applicable to a product or platform may also be notified separately.

We have appropriate technical and organisational measures in place to protect personal data from accidental or unlawful loss, misuse, unauthorised access, alteration or disclosure.

Access to personal data is limited to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know it. They are subject to confidentiality obligations and must process personal data only as permitted by applicable law and, where appropriate, our instructions.

We retain personal data only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes for which it was collected, including to meet legal, accounting, tax, regulatory and reporting requirements.

In particular, we will generally retain customer, supplier, financial and transaction records for at least six years after the end of the relevant relationship or transaction, unless a longer period is required or justified. We may retain information for longer where there is a complaint, dispute, investigation or a reasonable prospect of legal proceedings.

We may retain marketing-suppression information for as long as necessary to ensure that we respect an opt-out request. We may anonymise personal data for statistical or business-analysis purposes and use that anonymised information without further notice.

Subject to applicable law, you have the right to:

• request access to the personal data we hold about you;
• request correction of incomplete or inaccurate personal data;
• request deletion of your personal data in certain circumstances;
• object to processing based on legitimate interests, including profiling based on legitimate interests;
• object at any time to direct marketing;
• request restriction of processing in certain circumstances;
• request transfer of certain personal data to you or another organisation, where technically feasible; and
• withdraw consent at any time where we rely on consent.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us at [email protected].

We may ask for information to verify your identity before dealing with a request. We aim to respond within one month, although this may take longer for complex or multiple requests; if so, we will keep you informed.

If you have a concern about how we use your personal data, please contact us first so that we can try to resolve it.

Once we receive your complaint, we will:

• acknowledge receipt of your complaint within 30 days; 
• log and investigate your complaint without undue delay; and
• make appropriate enquiries to investigate the issues you have raised.

If we need further information to progress our investigation, we may contact you. We will keep you informed of the progress of our investigation where appropriate and will provide you with the outcome of your complaint without undue delay. 

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commission, the UK regulator for data-protection matters. Further information is available at www.ico.org.uk.

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. The latest version will always be available on our website and will show the date it was last updated.

Please let us know if your personal data changes during your relationship with us so that we can keep our records accurate.

Our website may contain links to third-party websites, plug-ins or applications. We do not control those third parties and are not responsible for their privacy practices. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy policy of the relevant third party.