Privacy Policy

IMPORTANT NOTICE

Our APECS mission is to invest our experience to consistently provide our customers with superior quality hardware products that satisfy their needs and exceed expectations. That mission covers all activities that we do on the daily basis, and extends to our off-line and online.

APECS cares about your privacy. For this reason, we collect and use personal data only for us to deliver to you our products and services, and we promise to never disclose your information to a third party. We conform fully to the Data Protection Act of 1998 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of 2018.

Our Privacy Policy (“Policy”) describes how how and what data we collect, and how and why we use your personal data. It also describes options we provide for you to access, update or otherwise take control of your personal data that we process.

This Policy outlines the legal basis on which we process your Personal Data and provides other information required by the GDPR. We encourage you to read this Policy as well as our Terms and Conditions of Use (referred to throughout as our "Terms").

If at any time you have questions about our practices or any of your rights described in the Policy, you may reach our internal dedicated manager by contacting us at privacy@apecs.co.uk. This inbox is actively monitored and managed so that we can deliver an experience that you can confidently trust.

Likewise, we’ve also created a Privacy Center to provide you with quick links to access your APECS Newsletter Account Settings, APECS Trade account setting.

Who We Are

We are APECS Consult Ltd. (referred to herein as "APECS", "we", "us", or "our"). We design, manufacture and distribute door hardware and locks, for example, ("Products"): locks, cylinders, door accessories and etc.

What information do we collect?

This Privacy Policy relates to data about you, your devices, and your interaction with our Products and Services.

"Personal Data" is information that can be used to identify you, directly or indirectly, alone or together with other information.

Your personal data includes information such as:

Full name
Address
Telephone number
Date of birth
Email address
APECS Trade Account registration number
Other data collected that could directly or indirectly identify you

We collect information so that we can provide the best possible experience when you use our Products and/our Services. Much of what you likely consider personal data is collected directly from you when you:

create a Trade Account or purchase any of our Products/Services (ex: billing information, including name, address, credit card number);
request assistance from our customer service team (ex: phone number);
subscribe to newsletters or other information from us (ex: email);
complete contact forms at the industry events (ex: survey forms at the trade shows); or
participate in contests and surveys, apply for a job, or otherwise participate in activities we promote that might require information about you.

However, we also collect additional information when delivering our Products and Services to you to ensure that you receive the best service possible. These methods of collection may not be as obvious to you, so we wanted to highlight and explain below a bit more about what these might be (as they vary from time to time) and how they work:

Trade Account related information
may include name, address, phone number, username, email address, date of birth, payment information, name of your business and address. As well as history of purchases, information requests, and customer service requests and notes or details explaining what you asked for and how we responded. We use this data to create your account, enable you to make purchase orders from us and to provide the products and services and improve your experience of using our products and services. We also use this data for internal purposes related to certain research, analytics, innovation, testing, monitoring.
Cookies and similar technologies
We may collect certain Personal Data using cookies and other technologies such as web beacons, device IDs, advertising IDs, geolocation, HTML5 local storage, Flash cookies, and IP addresses. We specifically use browser cookies for different purposes, including cookies that are strictly necessary for functionality and cookies that are used for personalization, performance/analytics, and advertising. This allows us to provide you with more relevant product offerings, a better experience on our site, and to collect, analyze and improve the performance of our Services. We may also collect your location (IP address) so that we can personalize our Services. For additional information, and to learn how to manage the technologies we utilize, please visit our Cookie Policy. It also contains more information and options to control or opt-out of certain data collection or uses.
Online advertising
We may collect your Personal Data when you click on advertisements, interact with our social media pages, submit content, leave reviews, or otherwise enter information into comment fields, blogs, events, and other types of advertising sponsored by or affiliated with APECS.
Data about Usage of Services
is automatically collected when you use and interact with our Services, including metadata, log files, cookie/device IDs and location information. This information includes specific data about your interactions with the features, content and links (including those of third-parties, such as social media plugins) contained within the Services, Internet Protocol (IP) address, browser type and settings, the date and time the Services were used, information about browser configuration and plugins, language preferences and cookie data, information about devices accessing the Services, including type of device, what operating system is used, device settings, application IDs, unique device identifiers and error data, and some of this data collected might be capable of and be used to approximate your location.
Supplemented Data
may be received about you from other sources, including publicly available databases or third parties from whom we have purchased data, in which case we may combine this data with information we already have about you so that we can update, expand and analyze the accuracy of our records, identify new customers, and provide products and services that may be of interest to you. We may combine your Personal Data with data we obtain from third parties to enhance your experience and improve the products that we offer to you.

When we aggregate or centralize data.

We aggregate and centralize Personal Data for purposes of analytics, innovation, and to develop products and provide enhanced services to our customers.

When we comply with Legal Requirements or Obligations, Law Enforcement, and for Public Safety Purposes.

We may use Personal Data in order to comply with laws, regulations, court orders, or other legal obligations or to assist in an investigation, to protect and defend our rights and property, or the rights or safety of third parties, to enforce our Terms of Use, this Privacy Policy, or agreements with third parties, or for crime-prevention purposes.

You can manage your communication preferences by registering for and logging into your account at our Privacy Center.

Please note that regardless of your email settings, we may send you notifications pertaining to the performance of our Services, such as revision of our Terms or this Privacy Policy or other formal communications relating to Products or Services you have purchased or used.

How we use your Personal Information.

We strongly believe in both minimizing the data we collect and limiting its use and purpose to only that (1) for which we have been given permission, (2) as necessary to deliver the Services you purchase or interact with, or (3) as we might be required or permitted for legal compliance or other lawful purposes. These uses include:

Delivering, improving, updating and enhancing the Services we provide to you. We collect various information relating to your purchase, use and/or interactions with our Services. We utilize this information to:

Improve and optimize the operation and performance of our Services (our website)
Diagnose problems with and identify any security risks, errors, or needed enhancements to the Services
Detect and prevent fraud and abuse of our Services and systems
Collecting aggregate statistics about use of the Services
Understand and analyze how you use our Services and what products and services are most relevant to you.

Often, much of the data collected is aggregated or statistical data about how individuals use our Services, and is not linked to any personal data, but to the extent it is itself personal data, or is linked or linkable to personal data, we treat it accordingly.

Communicating with you. We may contact you directly regarding products or services you have purchased from us, such as necessary to deliver service related communications. We may also contact you with offers for additional services we think you’ll find valuable if you give us consent, or where allowed based upon legitimate interests. You don’t need to provide consent as a condition to purchase our goods or services. These contacts may include:

Email
Text (SMS) messages
Telephone calls
Direct mail

You may also update your subscription preferences with respect to receiving communications from us and/or our partners by signing into your account and visiting Privacy center or your Trade Account page.

If you make use of a service that allows you to import contacts (ex. using email marketing services to send emails on your behalf), we will only use the contacts and any other personal information for the requested service. If you believe that anyone has provided us with your personal information and you would like to request for it be removed from our database, please contact us at privacy@apecs.co.uk.

Sharing with trusted third parties. We may share your personal data with third parties with which we have partnered to allow you to integrate their services into our own Services, and with trusted third party service providers as necessary for them to perform services on our behalf, such as:

Payment for Goods and Services: When you authorize payment through our website we facilitate information sharing to confirm payment.
For shipment of goods: To deliver your goods we share data with shipping providers like DHL and Aspray to ensure fulfillment of your items.
Marketing and Advertising Operations: We share personal data with third parties for marketing and advertising e.g., Facebook, Inc. so they can assist APECS in promoting our goods and services to current and future consumers through targeted advertisements.
Surveys: We work with SurveyMonkey to send surveys and improve our products and services as a part of our mission.
Customer relationship management: We use Bitrix 24 to store your data
Consulting Services: We engage with consulting services to evaluate our processes, audit our systems, and assist in our overall operations.
Social Networks and Sharing: We use widgets and tools from social networks, for example, widgets from Facebook Inc. to enable sharing and other functions through social networks

We only share your personal data as necessary for trusted third party to provide the services as requested or as needed on our behalf. These third parties (and any subcontractors) are subject to strict data processing terms and conditions and are prohibited from utilizing, sharing or retaining your personal data for any purpose other than as they have been specifically contracted for (or without your consent).

Compliance with legal, regulatory and law enforcement requests. We cooperate with government and law enforcement officials and private parties to enforce and comply with the law. We will disclose any information about you to government or law enforcement officials or private parties as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate to respond to claims and legal process (such as subpoena requests), to protect our property and rights or the property and rights of a third party, to protect the safety of the public or any person, or to prevent or stop activity we consider to be illegal or unethical.

To the extent we are legally permitted to do so, we will take reasonable steps to notify you in the event that we are required to provide your personal information to third parties as part of legal process.

Website analytics. We use web analytics tools provided by service partners such as Google Analytics to collect information about how you interact with our website, including what pages you visit, what site you visited prior to visiting our website, how much time you spend on each page, what operating system and web browser you use and network and IP information. We use the information provided by these tools to improve our Services. These tools place persistent cookies in your browser to identify you as a unique user the next time you visit our website. Each cookie cannot be used by anyone other than the service provider (ex: Google for Google Analytics). The information collected from the cookie may be transmitted to and stored by this service partner on servers in a country other than the country in which you reside. Though information collected does not include personal data such as name, address, billing information, etc., the information collected is used and shared by this service provider in accordance with its individual privacy policies. You can control the technologies we use by managing your settings through our Cookie Policy or the ‘cookie banners” that may be presented (depending on URL of website visited) when you first visit our webpages, or by utilizing settings in your browser.

Targeted advertisements. Targeted ads or interest-based offers may be presented to you based on your activities on our webpages, and other websites, and based on the products you currently own. These offers will display as varying product banners presented to you while browsing. We also partner with third parties to manage our advertising on our webpages and other websites. Our third party partners may use technologies such as cookies to gather information about such activities in order to provide you with advertising based upon your browsing activities and interests, and to measure advertising effectiveness. If you wish to opt out of interest-based advertising click here. Please note you will continue to receive generic ads.

Third-party websites. Our website contains links to third-party websites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of third-party sites. Please read the privacy policy of any website you visit.

In certain cases, separate consent is not required, including for legitimate interests.

For example, the following areas include processing covered by Legitimate Interests, subject to applicable law:

Respond to Your Requests. To respond to your requests for technical support, online services, product information or to any other communication you initiate. This includes accessing your account to address technical support requests.
Surveys. To send you surveys in connection with our Services, unless commercial in nature. In those cases, a survey request may be sent to you if you have given us your consent to receive marketing from us.
Compliance with Law and Public Safety.To assist in the investigation of suspected illegal or wrongful activity, including in-store tracking and sharing information with other entities for fraud, loss, and crime prevention purposes. To protect and defend our rights and property, or the rights or safety of third parties.
Improvement and Development. To develop, provide, enhance, and improve our Services and your experience. In particular for internal purposes related to certain research, analytics, innovation, testing, monitoring, customer communication, risk management, and administrative purposes.
Merger or Acquisition. To support a contemplated reorganization or an actual reorganization of our business, in connection with financing, a sale, or other transaction involving the disposal of all or part of our business or assets, including for the purpose of permitting the due diligence required to decide whether to proceed with a transaction.

How you can access, update or delete your data.

To easily access, view, update, delete or port your personal data (where available), or to update your subscription preferences, please sign into your Trade Account or Newsletter Subscription Account or visit our Privacy Center for additional information and guidance for accessing, updating or deleting data.

If you make a request to delete your personal data and that data is necessary for the products or services you have purchased, the request will be honored only to the extent it is no longer necessary for any Services purchased or required for our legitimate business purposes or legal or contractual record keeping requirements.

If you are unable for any reason to access your Account Settings or our Privacy Center, you may also contact us by one of the methods described in the “Contact Us” section below.

How we secure, store and retain your data.

We follow generally accepted standards to store and protect the personal data we collect, both during transmission and once received and stored, including utilization of encryption where appropriate. We have certain procedures in place to detect, report and investigate a personal data breach.

We retain personal data only for as long as necessary to provide the Services you have requested and thereafter for a variety of legitimate legal or business purposes. These might include retention periods:

mandated by law, contract or similar obligations applicable to our business operations;
for preserving, resolving, defending or enforcing our legal/contractual rights; or
needed to maintain adequate and accurate business and financial records.

If you have any questions about the security or retention of your personal data, you can contact us at privacy@apecs.co.uk.

‘Do Not Track’ notifications.

Some browsers allow you to automatically notify websites you visit not to track you using a “Do Not Track” signal. There is no consensus among industry participants as to what “Do Not Track” means in this context. Like many websites and online services, we currently do not alter our practices when we receive a “Do Not Track” signal from a visitor’s browser. To find out more about “Do Not Track,” you may wish to visit www.allaboutdnt.com.

Changes in our Privacy Policy.

We reserve the right to modify this Privacy Policy at any time. If we decide to change our Privacy Policy, we will post those changes to this Privacy Policy and any other places we deem appropriate, so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. If we make material changes to this Privacy Policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page, at least thirty (30) days prior to the implementation of the changes.

Contact us.

By Email:
If you have any questions, concerns or complaints about us by email at privacy@apecs.co.uk. We will respond to all requests, inquiries or concerns within thirty 3 working days.

By Post:
Compliance Team, Apecs Consult Ltd., Unit 4, Navigation Point, Golds Hill Way, Tipton, DY4 0PY

We will respond to all requests, inquiries or concerns within thirty 3 working days.

If you need to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office, you can find their contact details on their website at www.ico.org.uk

APECS Privacy Policy