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Fair processing notice
At Flex Engine, we respect your personal data. This Fair Processing Notice explains how we will use your personal data when you:
- Visit the website
- Make an enquiry or
- Download resources
Your information will be filed securely on our computers and any paper copies (if applicable) will also be securely stored.
Flex Engine
6 Handel Mead, Old Farm Park, Milton Keynes, MK7 8QA
ICO Registration Number: ZB745736
Our data protection officer is Michael Dubicki who can be contacted on info@flexengine.co.uk
What personal data to we collect about you? How will we use it?
When you use our website, we will collect the following personal data about you:
- IP Address / MAC address when you browse our website
- Your name, company name, telephone number and email address when you fill in the “Your Information” form
When you download gated resources from our website, we will collect your name and email address. We will use your email address to keep you updated about newly-published resources, articles and new website features as they are created. You may unsubscribe at any time.
When you fill in the “Your Preferences” form, we will collect and process information about your preferences. This will include whether you want to deal with an agency owner, whether the size of agency is important to you, the size of office space you are looking for, the location(s) you are interested in, your industry sector and specific character traits you wish to see in your flexible office broker.
When you fill in the “Your Information” form, we will collect and process your name, company name, telephone number and email address. We will also process the urgency of your office search as you select it.
This is so that we can pass your details and preferences on to your chosen office broker(s). They will then contact you by phone and / or email.
We will also use the email address you provide to newly-published resources, articles and new website features as they are created. You may unsubscribe at any time.
We will also use the email address you provide to communicate with you after you connect with your chosen office broker(s) to request your feedback on the quality of interaction with the office broker(s) you select, and to ask you about the progress and outcomes of your office space search.
Once you have connected with your chosen office broker(s) they will get in touch with you to qualify your requirements for office space in greater detail. This is so they can represent you as their client. Office brokers will introduce your office space search to providers of office space in order to qualify for a fee position from those office providers when you enter into a contract for office space. They will seek to arrange viewings on your behalf and negotiate terms, and some may pass your contact details to the office operators directly so they can get in touch with you too.
The office brokers listed on our website are not employees of Flex Engine and each of their companies will have their own privacy policy and fair processing terms. You should be mindful of this and familiarise yourself with these when speaking with them for the first time.
We want to ensure that the quality of service we offer you is the best that it can be through the personal information that you share with us. Ultimately, we want to offer you the best service by using your data to:
- Ensure that the content on our website is up-to-date, relevant, informative and functions adequately
- Make sure that you are updated with newly-published resources, articles and new website features as they are created.
- Share our content that will help to provide useful information for our customers.
Cookies and tracking
We will process your personal data where we have a;
- Legal requirement to do so, or
- To perform a contract with you, or
- We feel we have a legitimate interest to do so.
By interacting with our website, staff or agents we believe that we have a ‘legitimate interest’ in informing you of the latest products and services that we have available that may be of relevant interest. Where we use legitimate interest as our lawful basis we will process your data for a period of up to five years since your last interaction with us. An interaction could include (but may not be limited to) visiting our website, speaking to our staff or agents, or opening or clicking a link via one of our emails.
- If you accept cookies on our website and continue to browse, we will process your IP and MAC address and use this information for analytical and retargeting purposes. This is on the basis of our legitimate interest, but you have the ability to change the settings on your browser or social media channels.
- When you fill in the “Your Preferences” and “Your Information” forms, we will process your data under the legal basis of ‘contract’ as you have used our platform to search for and / or connect with your chosen office broker(s)
- If you choose to unsubscribe at any time, we will keep your details on a suppression list so that we don’t accidentally email you again.
- If you use our platform to connect with an office broker(s), as part of our contract with you, we will send you emails with further information and / or update requests and to make sure that everything has gone to plan. You have the right to unsubscribe to marketing at any time. If you choose to unsubscribe, we will keep your email address on a suppression list so that we don’t email you again by accident.
Do we have a statutory or contractual requirement to process your personal data?
There is a contractual requirement for us to process your personal data if you are one of our customers as we need to fulfil our contractual responsibilities.
Do we use any automated decision making?
We use the combination of your chosen preferences to serve office broker profiles to you to ensure you see those most-closely matching your needs at the top of the search results. We will amend this search logic periodically in line with the total number of office broker profiles to strike a balance between the specificity of your preferences and the total number of office broker profiles served.
Where your preferences do not match broker profiles exactly, we will look to serve profiles that are the closest match based on the preferences entered even if all of your preferences do not match those on the broker profiles in question.
Who do we share your personal data with?
- Companies that provide services to us. Our telephone service providers will get to see your phone number if we call you and our broadband supplier who could see your email address (but not the content of what you send us, if you encrypt it).
- Cloud service & IT providers. We use a number of cloud service & IT providers, such as our CRM, project management systems and web hosting. We also share with IT professionals who not only ensure that our systems run smoothly but are also committed to the highest standards of data protection compliance.
- We will share your data with office brokers that list their profiles on our website when you choose to connect with them via our search platform
- We use a digital marketing consultancy and an email service so that we can update you with the marketing emails you receive from us.
- It is possible, though unlikely, that we might be forced to disclose your information in response to a court order.
- We may process your Personal Data for direct marketing purposes or share it with third parties for them to carry out marketing on our behalf. Where we do this, you can exercise your right to object at any time to such processing without having to provide any specific reason for such objection. Individuals have the right to choose (opt-out) whether your personal data is (i) to be disclosed to a third party or (ii) to be used for a purpose that is materially different from the purpose(s) for which it was originally collected or subsequently authorised by you
Do we transfer your personal data outside of the EU or EEA?
We use a number of cloud-based services some of which may be based outside of the EU / EEA. We ensure that adequate safeguards are in place or appropriate agreements are in place to protect your personal data.
How long do we keep your personal data for?
- When you visit our website, we have set our retention period for cookies at 12 months.
- If you connect with an office broker(s), we will keep your details and then delete after 5 years.
- If you are on our email marketing list, you are welcome to unsubscribe at any time, but we will keep your personal data in a suppression list so that we don’t email you again by accident. We regularly cleanse our list and will delete your personal data if you haven’t responded to emails after 5 years.
You have rights in respect of our processing of your personal data which are:
- To access your personal data and information about our processing of it. You also have the right to request a copy of your personal data (but we will need to remove information about other people).
- To rectify incorrect personal data that we are processing.
- To request that we erase your personal data if:
- We no longer need it;
- If we are processing your personal data by consent and you withdraw that consent;
- If we no longer have a legitimate ground to process your personal data; or
- We are processing your personal data unlawfully.
- To object to our processing if it is by legitimate interest.
- To restrict our processing if it was by legitimate interest.
- To request that your personal data be transferred from us to another company if we were processing your data under a contract or with your consent and the processing is carried out by automated means.
If you want to exercise any of these rights, please contact us.
If you’re concerned about how your data is processed then we’d prefer you contact us in the first instance, but you also have the right to lodge a complaint about our processing by contacting the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office
Cookie Policy
What personal information is collected?
Certain cookies contain personal information – for example, if you click to ‘remember me’ when logging in, a cookie will store your username. Most cookies won’t collect information that identifies you, and will instead collect more general information such as how users arrive at and use our websites, or a user’s general location.
What sort of cookies does our website use?
Generally, our cookies perform different functions:
1. Essential cookies
Some cookies are essential for the operation of our website. For example, some cookies allow us to identify subscribers and ensure they can access the subscription only pages. If a subscriber opts to disable these cookies, the user will not be able to access all of the content that a subscription entitles them to.
2. Performance cookies
We utilise other cookies to analyse how our visitors use our websites and to monitor website performance. This allows us to provide a high quality experience by customising our offering and quickly identifying and fixing any issues that arise. For example, we might use performance cookies to keep track of which pages are most popular, which method of linking between pages is most effective, and to determine why some pages are receiving error messages. We might also use these cookies to highlight articles or website services that we think will be of interest to you based on your usage of the website.
3. Functionality cookies
We use functionality cookies to allow us to remember your preferences. For example, cookies save you the trouble of typing your username every time you access one of the websites, and recall your customisation preferences, such as which regional edition of the website you want to see when you log in.
4. Behaviourally targeted advertising cookies
We (and our advertisers) use cookies to serve you with advertisements that we believe are relevant to you and your interests.
5. Google Analytics
Our website uses google analytics, for more information about this, please see Google’s help pages and privacy policy:
Google have developed the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on for the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, dc.js).
If you want to opt-out of Google Analytics you can download and install the add-on for your web browser. For more information, click here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en.
- Google AdWords –We may use Google AdWords to measure the pages that you visit on our website, as well as basic metrics including the number and nature of page URLs viewed and whether you click on specific office broker profiles. We also measure the amount of time spent on each page. This information is then used to show targeted banner ads to visitors via the Google Display Network and to customize search ads found in Google’s Search Engines Result Page.
- All this information is gathered by Google’s Remarketing Tag and is therefore anonymized and aggregated by Google before we can use it for remarketing purposes.
- Bing Adcenter –We may use Bing’s UET tag to measure the number of visitors and enquiries after visiting the website via our ads run via Bing Ads. From this we can then count the number of enquiries generated via Bing Ads.
- All this data is aggregated and anonymised by Bing Ads before we can use it for measurement purposes.
- Yahoo Gemini –We may use Yahoo Geminis tags to measure the number of visitors and enquiries generated via any Yahoo Gemini ad activity. Yahoo Gemini tags are also used to track the pages viewed on our site site and the numerical ID’s for office broker profiles viewed. This information is then used to show targeted banner ads to visitors via the Yahoo Display Network and the Bing Ads Display Network.
- All this data is aggregated and anonymised by Yahoo Gemini before we can use it for remarketing and measurement purposes.
- Criteo – We may use Criteo’s OneTag product for Re-marketing Purposes in a very similar way our other remarketing tags. The tag tracks the pages viewed on our site site and the numerical ID’s for office broker profiles viewed. More details about how Criteo does this can be found here. The tag is also used to measure the number of enquiries generated via Criteo activity. All this data is then used to show targeted banner ads to Visitors via Criteo’s own Display Network, the Google Display Network, Facebook’s Display Network and Bing/Yahoos Display Network.
- All this data is aggregated and anonymised by Criteo before we can use it for remarketing and measurement purposes.
- More Information About How Criteo Handles Your Information and how they achieve GDPR compliance here.
- Facebook – We use Facebook to better understand our customers, and as part of this we may use Facebook cookies to gather personal information on our website visitors, as well as those who interact with our content on Facebook. This personal information is then stored securely within Facebook and used to provide you with a personalised messaging experience via advertising, insights and measurements.You can find out more information on Facebook’s cookie policy here. If you do not use the Facebook platform, then you will not have these cookies placed on your device.
- Twitter – We may use Twitter to enhance the experience that you, and other visitors, have upon interacting with our website. If you use Twitter and have interacted with our website, you will have Twitter cookies set to your device. We will use these cookies to collect your personal information and store it in a secure location. This allows us to serve personalised messages, and gain insights into your preferences to improve your experience with us. If you do not use the Twitter platform, then you will not have these cookies placed on your device. You can find out more information on Twitter’s cookie policy here.
How to delete and block cookies
Cookies help you to get the most out of our websites. However, if you do wish to disable our cookies then please follow the instructions below.
Please remember that if you do choose to disable cookies, you may find that certain sections of our websites may not work properly.
You can easily remove any cookies that have been created in the cookied folder of your browser. For example, if you are on a Windows machine, here are the steps on how to use Windows Explorer to erase cookie files:
Click on ‘Windows Explorer’
Select the ‘Search’ button on the tool bar
Enter “cookie” into the search box field for ‘Folders and Files’
Choose ‘My Computer’ in the ‘Look In’ drop down menu
Click on ‘Search Now’
Select and open the folders that are retrieved
Click to highlight any cookie file
Click the ‘Delete’ key to erase the cookie file
If you don’t have Windows Explorer, click the ‘help’ function on your ‘start’ button and enter ‘cookies’ to search for information on how to locate the folder. Further information can be found at the links below:
You can also block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies initally. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our website.
If you use different computers in different locations you will need to ensure that each browser is adjusted to suit your cookie preferences.
