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.

 Compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998 underlies all of our personal information privacy practices. We also have a set of guiding principles which govern how we use the information that we collect about you on this website.  These principles are:

• We aim to continuously improve our website for you.  We use information about you to help us to do this.
• We give you control over the information that we hold about you, who is allowed to see it and how it is used.
• We will not use your information for any other reason unless you specifically allow us to by choosing to select the opt in boxes on our registration form.
• We take all reasonable care to safeguard your information through security policies and secure business processes.

• To provide you with 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 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 will use this information to personalise the site to better meet your needs.  
• 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.  You can change your mind and remove or add your consent at any time through the Edit your profile page.
• To keep your information secure. 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.  

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 or when you make a purchase in the Shop
• 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.  We will use this information to personalise the site to better meet your needs and, where you have given us your consent by choosing to opt-in on the registration form, to provide you with information about our products and services we believe will be of interest to you.

The information we collect through our website will be used within the Royal Mail group of companies. Exactly who sees your information depends on the context in which you provided it and whether or not you have opted in on the registration form. You can change your mind about the opt ins at any time through the Edit your profile page.

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.
• 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 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.   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 we keep your information collected through our website depends on the context in which you provided it and whether or not you have opted out on the registration form.  You can change your mind about the opt-ins at any time through the Edit your profile page.

In particular:

• We will keep your information that's necessary for us to provide you with a service you have requested or purchased through this website for as long as it takes us to provide that service
• We will keep your contact details 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 on this website for up to six years.  This is so that we can respond to any complaints or disputes that arise in that period
• We will keep other information about you if it is necessary for us to do so to comply with the law

We aim to give you control over the information we hold about you. You can see the 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.

You can be deleted from this website's databases by accessing the option for ‘My profile’ once you have logged on to the website.  Here you can select the option for deregistration where you can cancel your registration with us. This will not delete information held about you on other Royal Mail databases that was not provided through this website, or on third party databases.

Please note, we can only delete information about you that we don’t need to hold for legal reasons. (i.e. the type of information described in the last two bullet points under “How long do we keep your information?”).

You can request details of all the information Royal Mail 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:

Royal Mail Group Ltd, PO Box 341, ALDERSHOT, GU11 1WW

You can of course request at any time that we correct any information we hold about you.

You can allow us 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 your registration form.  You can change your mind and remove or add your consent at any time through the Edit your profile page.

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'. We are actively investigating the integration of these opt ins for your convenience.

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

 At the moment we do not personalise the site 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.  We only do this with your consent.  You give us this consent by choosing to opt in on the registration form.

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 personal information we have under our control, 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. (See the How you can help keep your information secure. section below).          
• Off-line, your information is kept securely in our databases and offices. 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.  
• We do not store payment card details from this website, except those collected through the SmartStamp service for the purpose of regular payments.  

We will take all reasonable steps to protect your information, but data can never be guaranteed 100% secure. Please note that we will not be liable for any breach of security unless we have been negligent.

As you would expect of us, we will take all reasonable measures to ensure that the information you provide through our website is held and managed securely.  However, there is a lot that you can do to help keep your information safe - not just on our website, but whenever you provide information online.

Here are some simple ways you can improve the security of your information:

Use a strong password
Read our advice on choosing a strong password. This will help you choose a password that will be difficult for other people to guess but easy for you to remember.

Use a secure password hint
Do not make your password hint the same as your password! Your password hint should not give away your password to someone you know well, for example 'my road' or 'my dog's name'.

Keep your password private and secure
Your password is a key to your personal information and online identity. Don't tell anyone your password or write it down. If you are concerned that somebody else knows your password, you can change it on our website by going to the Edit your profile page. We recommend that you change your password from time to time.

Use a secure browser

Modern browsers are more secure than older versions, so always keep your browser up to date. If you browse with Internet Explorer, set Windows to update itself automatically to keep your private data safe.

Want to learn more about online security?
Visit our dedicated resource for online safety tips

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.

The table below explains the cookies our website uses and what they do.

Of these cookies only the Website Analytic cookie 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 Site 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.

Website analytics

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 use a marketing company called Omniture 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, which of our products and applications most interest our customers, and what kinds of offers our customers like to see (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.

Although Omniture logs the information for us, it is only 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.

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.

If you call any of the customer service telephone numbers quoted on this website, or use any of our 'Phone me' services, 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.