Privacy Policy

Midland Ancestors is the public face of the Birmingham and Midlands Society for Genealogy and Heraldry, also known as the BMSGH.

Background

The BMSGH is registered under the UK Data Protection Act (1998), registration number Z7183215.

The UK Data Protection Act was replaced by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on 25th May 2018. 

The privacy and security of your personal data is extremely important to us. This privacy policy explains why we collect your personal data, why we need it, how we process it and your rights under the GDPR.

Personal data

This online shop is registered as processing your personal data using lawful contract, this means that when you place an order, we need to use your personal data in order to fulfil our contractual obligations to you.

Information regarding your login details, name, address, telephone number, email address, IP address and order details will be stored on a secure server. This information will only be used by the BMSGH and authorised partners(see below). We need to collect and process personal information as follows:

  • email address - This is  your login id and is also used to communicate progress on your order
  • Name and Address - This is used to take payment using one of our payment partners and also to post out goods if physical goods are ordered
  • Telephone number - This will be used to communicate with you should we have a query with your order, if you do not want us to contact you by telephone, just enter 00000000000
  • IP address - We are required by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) VAT MOSS regulations to record your IP address, for EU Countries, we use your order details to submit a VAT MOSS return to HMRC quarterly by country, we only have to provide personal customer details on request from HMRC.

We do not share any personal data with any other organisations except as described in the Payments and the Other Partners sections listed below.

If you order a new membership or renew an existing membership, your personal details will be copied from the shop order to the members database. Your address will be used to post out the quarterly magazine, unless you opt for delivery by email/download. Personal details on the membership database can be updated at any time and you have the right to remove personal data by contacting the subscriptions secretary.  You may be contacted occasionally by post, email or telephone regarding your membership, especially during the membership renewal process, unless you ask us to remove one or more of these communication options.

Payments

Online payments from this website are made via our preferred payment partners, Worldpay and Paypal, and as such no banking, debit or credit card details are stored on BMSGH servers. We will pass your name, address, email and order details to card processing partners in order for them to process your payment, there is a link to their Privacy Policy on their own payment processing page.

Other Partners

We sell items in our shop for preferred partners, we have a Data Processing agreement in place with each partner which limits their use of your personal data to the processing of your order only. They are not allowed to use your personal details for any other purpose.

Links to other websites

We have a number of links to other websites within the shop, once you leave this website, our privacy policy no longer applies, you should view the target sites own privacy policy.

Your rights

All shop accounts remain active unless you ask us to delete them. We may not be able to delete your account if details are required to be kept for legal purposes, eg sales are part of our financial accounts, VAT and Gift Aid details have to be kept for HMRC. If this is the case, we will disable the account. 

You can at any time update your personal details by logging in and editing your account details. 

The shop has a newsletter facility, you can subscribe or unsubscribe at any time by again updating your account preferences.

Cookies

In order to process orders, cookies(small data files) will be stored on customers computers.  This is normal practice for an  online Shop with a shopping cart and online payment facilities. The BMSGH shop does not use cookies for advertising purposes.

Security

This website uses a secure SSL certificate to provide a secure link between your device and our shop server, thereby protecting passwords and card payment details. For more details, click on the padlock icon in the address bar.

The shop also uses Captcha technology to stop robots from using the site.

Statistics

Visits to this website are also recorded by Google Analytics in order to provide anonymous statistics to assist us in website capacity planning and to assist with decisions on which products to make available in the shop . The following lists some of the information recorded..

  • Country/Town visiting (we need to add postal rates by Country so need to ensure all Countries are included) 
  • Number of visits and pages viewed (this indicates areas of interest which we may expand at a later date)
  • How customers came to our site, ie via a Google search, referral from another site, other search engines, or direct
  • Keywords used in search engines (this helps us to decide which product ranges we may expand in the future)

Note that none of the above Google Analytics data can be traced back to an individual Computer.

This privacy policy was last updated on 4th May, 2018


The Birmingham and Midland Society for Genealogy & Heraldry         Charity Registration No. 505916

A Society affiliated to the Birmingham & Midland Institute

Member – The Family History Federation                  Member – National Council for Voluntary Organisations