Privacy Policy

Updated: 16th March 2021

Personal Data: What information do we collect, why do we collect and what do we do with it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

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 Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

However, for Direct Trade’s website, we don’t allow commenting on our posts. This may change in the future.

Contact forms

We use contact form(s) on our website as a method of communication between our visitors / customers and our team. All data collected via the forms(s) is transmitted to us via SSL security (padlock in your browser) and is also stored on secure email servers. Here’s what we collect:

Name
Email address
Phone number

We don’t process this data for marketing material unless you’ve given us permission. However, we may contact you in regards to important company news, policy changes and other topics that require your attention.

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

Cookies, Analytics & Web Security

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.

We security auditing tools to monitor visitor behaviour and prevent malicious attacks from happening. These systems log information anonymously but include your IP address, web browser used, pages visited and time spent on these pages in order for us to track down the potential cause of a security vulnerability (if found). In addition to this, we create an automated log of each URL accessed in order to generate any required redirect from old links to new links. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Google Analytics is used alongside Google Search Console to track the performance of our website for when/if we utilise further marketing strategies. This policy will update with more information when/if these occur.

Cookies used:

Cookie	Description	Duration	Type
_ga	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to calculate visitor, session, campaign data and keep track of site usage for the site’s analytics report. The cookies store information anonymously and assign a randomly generated number to identify unique visitors.	1 years 11 months 28 days 23 hours 59 minutes	Analytics
_gid	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to store information of how visitors use a website and helps in creating an analytics report of how the wbsite is doing. The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages visited in an anonymous form.	23 hours 59 minutes	Analytics
_gat_gtag_UA_XXXXXXX_X	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics	—	Analytics
_abck	This cookie is used to detect and defend when a client attempt to replay a cookie. This cookie manages the interaction with online bots and takes the appropriate actions.	11 months 29 days 23 hours 59 minutes	Necessary
bm_sz	This cookie is set by the provider Akamai Bot Manager. This cookie is used to manage the interaction with the online bots. It also helps in fraud preventions	3 hours 59 minutes	Necessary
ak_bmsc	—	1 hours 59 minutes	Other
_mcid	—	11 months 29 days 23 hours 59 minutes	Other

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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Who do we share your data with?

We don’t unless necessary.

Information collected via Google Analytics and security systems are shared with our web team in order to diagnose potential issues with our web platform. These issues may result in performance improvements and design changes in the future.

Our web team First Class Design does not use this data for marketing purposes on their behalf, but may use this data for marketing on our (Direct Trade’s) 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.

Contact form submissions are stored securely within third party email accounts that require the information to deal with requests. Form submissions are also stored on our website securely to deal with any request. The submissions stored on the website should be deleted after 60 days.

After we’ve dealt with any form submissions, it’s either archived, stored for later use or deleted immediately.

What rights you have over your data

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.

Where do we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. This also applies to our login pages not intended for public use. The data is sent securely to our web servers that are managed by First Class Design. They do not access this data unless required to.