Privacy policy

Who we are

Parcelforce Worldwide is a division of Royal Mail Group Limited (registered company number 04138203, whose registered address is 100 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0HQ) and we are responsible for the privacy of the personal information we hold about you.

We know that your privacy is very important to you.  We make it our business for it to be as important to us. We aim to be as clear as possible about how and why we use information about you on this website.  If your questions are not fully answered by the information below, please contact us.  We’ll be happy to help.  See the section below headed “Maintaining the information we hold about you” for our contact details.

What information about you we collect

We may collect the following types of information about you:

• Your first and last names;
• Your email address and Parcelforce account details;
• Your home address and home telephone number if booking a parcel collection at your home address;
• Your company’s name, your position in the company, the company’s address and telephone number if booking a parcel collection at your company’s address;
• Your payment information such as credit or debit card details;
• Your use of this website (see section 10 headed “Personalisation and Website Analytics” below.)

So that you may benefit from our online services, it is essential that you provide us with certain information (including your name, email address and if you have an account with us, your account details).  Other information may not be mandatory (for example your position in the company).  Mandatory fields are indicated with a *.

How we collect information about you

We collect information from you in three ways:

• Directly from you. Sometimes we’ll ask you for information about yourself, for example in our registration form, when you make a purchase on our website, or when you call our customer service desk.
• From third parties. We may ask for information about you from third parties, for example when we get authorisation for a payment you make using a credit or debit card.
• From what you do on our site.  This can show us for example which products you use most and least.

How we use information about you

• To provide you with services you may request including online services. Each service has different information requirements. Therefore the information we need, and what it is needed for, can differ. For full details please refer to the terms and conditions for each service. 
• To improve our website and to enhance or improve your experience on our website. When you indicate your preferences through our registration forms or through your use of our site, we may contact you to find out what you think of our website.
• To provide you with information about products and services that we, or third parties we have carefully selected, believe will be of interest to you.  We will only do this with your consent. You give us your consent by choosing to opt in on the registration form when you register as an account customer with us, or if you do not have an account with us, when you sign-up to receive retail offers and discounts.  You can change your mind in relation to the receipt of further information from us, if you have an account with us - by removing or adding your consent at any time through the Edit your profile page. If you do not have an account with us, we will give you the opportunity to unsubscribe to the receipt of further information in every email we send you. We will endeavour to comply with your request as soon as we are reasonably able to do so. If information has been passed to third parties with your consent you may need to contact them if you change your mind in relation to their use of information about you.
• To minimise the risk of unauthorised access to your information, we use some of your information to authenticate you when using the website and our customer service helpdesk.

Who sees your information?

The information we collect through our website will be used within the Royal Mail group of companies, for example, we may disclose information about you to Royal Mail and/or the Post Office.  Exactly who sees your information depends on the context in which you provided it and the purpose referred to above for which it is being used.

Sometimes we’ll share your information with carefully selected third parties outside the Royal Mail group.  We may do this for the following reasons:

• To provide you with a service. Some of our services are provided in conjunction with our business partners, and we’ll need to disclose your information to them to provide you with the services. We make it clear in the terms and conditions for each service whether information will be passed to third parties or not and who these third parties are.
• For our daily operations.  We use the services of third parties to provide some of our business and operational functions
• To provide you with information about special promotions and offers. If you have given your consent by choosing to opt in, we may share some of your information with carefully selected third parties so that they can provide you with information about products and services that may be of interest to you.
• To protect the Royal Mail group or others. We may share your information with third parties when we believe it is necessary to comply with the law or to protect our or another person’s  rights, property, or safety. This includes exchanging information with third parties to protect against fraud and reduce payment risks. 
• For market research purposes. Parcelforce Worldwide may provide information to third parties for the purposes of conducting market research but will only do so where the information has been properly aggregated or anonymised and will ensure that no customer personal data is passed to third parties for these purposes.

Your information may be processed outside the European Economic Area (EEA) where privacy laws may not provide protection to the same level as in England, but if so, we ensure that the processing is carried out to standards equivalent to our own.

We will only deal with third parties that we trust to act in our customers’ best interests and who treat our customers’ information with the same stringent controls that we apply ourselves.

How long do we keep your information?

How long we keep your information collected through our website depends on the context in which you provided it and the purpose for which we use it. We will only retain it for as long as is necessary for such purposes.

In particular:

• We will keep information about you that’s necessary for us to provide you with a service you have requested or purchased for as long as it takes us to provide that service.
• We will keep your contact details for as long as you are registered on our website.
• We will keep your contact details for marketing purposes for as long as we have your consent to send you marketing information and/or pass your contact details to third parties.
• We will keep records of any transactions you enter into or services you receive for up to 13 months.  This is so that we can respond to any complaints or disputes that arise in that period.  We may, however, retain certain information indefinitely, including invoices and service reports. This may assist you to access details of your previous and current transactions.
• We will keep other information about you if it is necessary for us to do so to comply with the law or to protect our or another persons interests.

Maintaining the information we hold for you

Where you have registered an account with us, you can see information you have provided to us through the website by accessing the Edit your profile page. You can also use this page to change or delete this information including the consents you have given us through the opt in process and we encourage you to do so to ensure the information we hold about you is up-to-date.

You can be deleted from this website’s databases by logging into your account at www.royalmail.com and selecting the option for deregistration. This will not delete information held about you on other Royal Mail databases that was not provided through this website or royalmail.com or which we need to continue to hold for the purposes specified in the above section “How long do we keep your information” or on third party databases.

You can request details of all the information Parcelforce or any Royal Mail group company holds about you, including on this website’s databases, by contacting the “Data Protection Act Services Team”  at Royal Mail. They will send you an application form which you should complete and return. The charge for this service is £10 for each request.

You can contact the team by:

• writing to: The Information Rights Team (Data Protection Act), Royal Mail Sheffield, 4th Floor, Pond Street, Sheffield, S98 6HR
• email to: foi@royalmail.com
• by telephone on: 0114 241 4217
You can of course request at any time that we correct any information we hold about you, free of charge.

Important information about opting-in and opting-out

Please note:

• Selecting to opt out on this website will not prevent you from receiving information about specific services you have expressed an interest in. For example, if you opt out through registration or the ‘Edit your profile’ page, and you use the Shop diary function, you will continue to receive event reminders via email.
• When you choose to opt in through this website, this opt in will only apply to the information stored about you on this website’s databases. If you have provided information to a business in the Royal Mail group through another channel, the use of that information will not be affected by the opt ins you select on this website. 
• There are some opt ins on this website that are specific to individual services. These are independent of the registration opt out and currently cannot be changed through the ‘Edit your profile page’. 

Please also note that the opt ins on this website cover all information sent to you, including by email and/or SMS text message.

Keeping your information secure

We know that your privacy is very important to you and that you take the security of your information seriously.

We’ve implemented technology and security policies, rules and measures to protect the information we hold about you, both on and off-line, from improper access, use, alteration, destruction and loss.

Here are some of the ways we protect your information:

• Access to our online services is protected by something called SSL 128 bit session encryption. Encryption is the process through which sensitive information is scrambled before it is transmitted so that it remains private even if it is intercepted. 128-bit encryption is the strongest encryption currently used commercially. However, unless your Internet browser supports 128-bit encryption you will not be able to take advantage of this level of security.  Please click here for tips on how you can help keep your information secure. 
• Most of your information is stored in secure online databases.  Any information stored off-line is kept securely on password-protected computers. We only allow our employees and trusted contractors access to your information, and then only if they need it for a specific authorised task. The computers on which we store your information are kept in a secure environment.

Although we will take reasonable steps to protect your information, please be aware that data can never be guaranteed 100% secure.

How we use cookies

A cookie is a small text file that is saved to the hard drive of your computer when you use a website.

Our website uses both persistent and session cookies.  Persistent cookies are cookies that stay on your computer permanently until you “manually” delete them.  Session cookies delete themselves automatically when you leave a website and go to another one or shut down your browser.

Of these cookies only the Website Analytic cookie (see the section headed “Personalisation and Website Analytics” below) can be deactivated through our website.  For the other cookies you can change the preferences on your browser so that your computer doesn’t accept cookies from our website or allow them to be updated.  Alternatively you can make your browser give you an accept or reject option each time our website tries to create or update a cookie on your computer.  Please note:

1. Neither of these options will remove cookies that have already been placed on your computer or prevent them from being read.  To delete existing cookies you will need to search your hard drive for the relevant cookie files and delete them.  But please note - a deleted cookie will often be replaced the next time you visit the website that put it there.

2. If your browser is set up to reject application session cookies, some applications on our website will not work.

3. Because the website cookie may contain or refer to some of your personal information we recommend you do not register for our website from a publicly available computer.

For more information about cookies, including how to change your browser settings and find and delete cookies on your hard drive, please visit www.aboutcookies.org. For further information about how we use cookies, please click here.

Personalisation and Website Analytics

At the moment, we do not personalise this website based on your previous activity. We expect to introduce this feature shortly. However, we do use information collected through the Website Analytic cookie to provide you with information about our products and services we believe will be of interest to you.

The first time you visit our website a Website Analytic cookie will be saved on your computer.  Some pages of our website have web beacons - or “tags” - coded into them, and when you visit those pages, register or enter into certain transactions, the Website Analytic cookie will record that you have done so.  Over time the cookie will build up a history of the pages you visit and the applications you use on our website.

We may use a third party to log the information collected by the Website Analytic cookie.  This information, together with similar information from other users, helps us learn things like what kinds of customers our website attracts and which of our products and applications most interest our customers (called website analytics).  This in turn helps us make our website more effective and useful and, where you have given us your consent by choosing to opt-in on the registration form, we will also use this information to provide you with information about our products and services we believe will be of interest to you.

In the event that a third party logs the information for us, it would only be allowed to process the information according to our instructions. Nobody sees the information except us.

If you would prefer us not to collect your information for website analytics you can opt-out by clicking here. This will cause a “don’t use” instruction to be added to the Website Analytic cookie.  You should not delete the Website Analytic cookie from your hard drive because doing so will cause a new, active Website Analytic cookie to be saved on your computer next time you visit our website.

Please note that the opt-out will only work for the computer and browser you are using when you opt-out.  If you use more than one computer or browser you will have to opt out on each.

Links to other sites

This website includes links to other sites. We make every effort to provide links to high quality, reputable sites but we’re not responsible for their privacy practices or, site content, or the services they offer.

Telephone calls

If you call any of the customer service telephone numbers quoted on this website, we may record your call.  These recordings are used for training and quality control to ensure that we continuously monitor and improve our customer service standards.

How to complain

If you are not happy with the way in which your personal data is being handled by Parcelforce or any Royal Mail group company you can complain to the Information Commissioner at the following address:

Information Commissioner’s officeWycliffe HouseWater LaneWilmslowCheshire  SK9 5AF

Notification of changes

Please review this Privacy Policy periodically as we may update it from time to time.  Please refer to the ‘last updated’ date to see if the policy has changed.

Last updated: April 2010