Privacy Notice

Introduction

Welcome to Nominet’s privacy notice.

We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. This notice will:

  1. Inform you as to how we look after your personal data when you visit our websites (regardless of where you visit them from) and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you;
  2. Set out how we use registration data for domain names that we are responsible for administering; and
  3. Explain how we analyse .UK domain name usage.

1. Important information and who we are

This privacy notice aims to provide information about Nominet’s collection and processing of personal data.

This website is not intended for children and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children.

It is important that you read this privacy policy together with any other privacy policy or fair processing policy we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal data about you so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data. This privacy policy supplements other notices and privacy policies and is not intended to override them.

We collect information about you in three ways: directly from your input, from third-party sources (such as your registrar), and through automated technologies.

Controller

Nominet UK (registered in England and Wales, company registration number 3203859) is the controller of and is responsible for this website.

We have appointed a data protection officer (DPO) who is responsible for overseeing questions in relation to Nominet’s privacy policies. If you have any questions, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact the DPO using the details set out below.

Contact details

By post: Nominet UK, Minerva House, Edmund Halley Road, Oxford Science Park, Oxford OX4 4DQ.

By email: [email protected]

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact us in the first instance.

Changes to the privacy notice and your duty to inform us of changes

This version was last updated on 13 June 2023. We reserve the right to make further changes at any time without further notice to you.

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us.

Third-party links

Our websites may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for them. When you leave our websites, we encourage you to read the privacy notice and terms of use of every website you visit.

2. The data we collect about you

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified.

We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data which we have grouped together as follows:

  • Identity Data includes first name, maiden name, last name, username or similar identifier, marital status, title, date of birth and gender.
  • Contact Data includes billing address, delivery address, email address and telephone numbers.
  • Financial Data includes bank account and payment card details.
  • Transaction Data includes details about payments to and from you and other details of products and services you have purchased from us.
  • Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access this website.
  • Profile Data includes your username and password, purchases or orders made by you, your interests, preferences, postings and opinions written by you in the Community, feedback and survey responses.
  • Usage Data includes information about how you use our website, products and services.
  • Marketing and Communications Data includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences.
  • Access, mobility data and dietary preferences when you register to attend events (either in person or remotely)

We also collect, use, and share aggregated statistical or demographic data. Aggregated data may be derived from your personal data but is not considered personal data in law as this data does not directly or indirectly reveal your identity. For example, we may aggregate your Usage Data to calculate the percentage of users accessing a specific website feature. However, if we combine or connect aggregated data with your personal data so that it can directly or indirectly identify you, we treat the combined data as personal data which will be used in accordance with this privacy notice.

Other than optional diversity monitoring questionnaires for recruitment or event attendance, we do not collect any special categories of personal data (this includes details about race or ethnicity , religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about health and genetic and biometric data). Nor do we collect any information about criminal convictions and offences.

If you fail to provide personal data

Where we need to collect personal data by law, or under the terms of a contract we have with you, and you fail to provide that data when requested, we may be unable to perform the contract we have or are trying to enter into with you (for example, to continue to provide you with a domain name registration). We may have to cancel your contract, but we will notify you if this is the case at the time.

3. How your personal data is collected

We use different methods to collect data from and about you, including through:

  • Direct interactions. You may give us your Identity, Contact and Financial Data by filling in forms or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email or otherwise. Some examples of how your personal data is collected includes, but is not limited to includes personal data you provide when you:
    • Create a domain name registration with us, which includes, as a default provision, an account with us for online services via which you can manage your domain registrations;
    • Contact us to verify your Contact Data in relation to a domain name registration or where you submit a request to us under our data access policies;
    • Apply for a job with us;
    • Apply for one of our elected positions on our Board, advisory committees or volunteer roles;
    • Subscribe to our news alerts, marketing communications, Member Hub and Community;
    • Enter a competition, promotion or survey; apply for grant or funding
    • Register for an event
    • Give us some feedback.
  • Third parties or publicly available sources. We may receive personal data about you from various third parties and public sources as set out below:
    • From an authorised domain name registrar or reseller on the creation, renewal or amendment of any domain name registration for which we are the registry.
    • Domain name validation data via third party providers or publicly available data sets including Companies House and the Electoral Register.
    • Contact, Financial and Transaction Data from providers of technical, payment and delivery services.
    • Technical Data from the following parties:
      • (a) analytics providers such as Google;
      • (b) advertising networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook; and
      • (c) search information providers such as Chrome, Bing and Yahoo.
  • Automated technologies or interactions. As you interact with our website, we may automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, server logs and other similar technologies. We may also receive Technical Data about you if you visit other websites employing our cookies. Please see our cookie policy for further details.

4. How we use your personal data

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

  • Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you.
  • Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.
  • Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.

Generally, we do not rely on consent as a legal basis for processing your personal data other than in relation to sending third party direct marketing communications to you via email or text message. You have the right to withdraw consent to marketing at any time by contacting us.

Purposes for which we will use your personal data

We have set out below, in a table format, a description of all the ways we plan to use your personal data, and which of the legal bases we rely on to do so. We have also identified what our legitimate interests are where appropriate.

Note that we may process your personal data for more than one lawful ground depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your data. Please contact us if you need details about the specific legal ground we are relying on to process your personal data where more than one ground has been set out in the table below.

Purpose/ActivityType of dataLawful basis for processing including basis of legitimate interest
To register you as a new customer(a) Identity

(b) Contact
Performance of a contract with you
To register your attendance at in person and virtual events(a) Identity

(b) Contact
Necessary for our legitimate interests (to organise events in a safe and orderly manner)
Recruitment(a) Identity

(b) Contact
Necessary for our legitimate interests (to evaluate your application)
To process and deliver your order including:

(a) Manage payments, fees and charges

(b) Collect and recover money owed to us
(a) Identity

(b) Contact

(c) Financial

(d) Transaction

(e) Marketing and Communications
(a) Performance of a contract with you

(b) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to receive payment due to us)
To manage our relationship with you which will include:

(a) Notifying you about changes to our terms or privacy policy

(b) Asking you to leave a review or take a survey
(a) Identity

(b) Contact

(c) Profile

(d) Marketing and Communications
(a) Performance of a contract with you

(b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation

(c) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to keep our records updated and to study how customers use our products/services)
To enable you to partake in a prize draw, competition or complete a survey(a) Identity

(b) Contact

(c) Profile

(d) Usage

(e) Marketing and Communications
(a) Performance of a contract with you

(b) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them and grow our business)
To administer and protect our business and this website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data)(a) Identity

(b) Contact

(c) Technical
(a) Necessary for our legitimate interests (for running our business, provision of administration and IT services, network security, to prevent fraud and in the context of a business reorganisation or group restructuring exercise)

(b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation
To deliver relevant website content and advertisements to you and measure or understand the effectiveness of the advertising we serve to you(a) Identity

(b) Contact

(c) Profile

(d) Usage

(e) Marketing and Communications

(f) Technical
Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them, to grow our business and to inform our marketing strategy)
To use data analytics and customer interaction information to enhance and improve our website, products/services, marketing, customer relationships and experiences, such as adding new content and features(a) Technical

(b) Usage

(c) Transaction
Necessary for our legitimate interests (to define types of customers for our products and services, to keep our website updated and relevant, to understand how our services are used, to develop our business and to inform our marketing strategy)
To make suggestions and recommendations to you about goods or services that may be of interest to you(a) Identity

(b) Contact

(c) Technical

(d) Usage

(e) Profile
Necessary for our legitimate interests (to develop our products/services and grow our business)

Marketing

We strive to provide you with choices regarding certain personal data uses, particularly around marketing and advertising.

Promotional offers from us

We may use your Identity, Contact, Technical, Usage and Profile Data to form a view on what we think you may want or need, or what may be of interest to you. This is how we decide which products, services and offers may be relevant for you (we call this marketing).

You will receive marketing communications from us if you have requested information from us or purchased goods or services from us or if you provided us with your details when you entered a competition or registered for a promotion and, in each case, you have not opted out of receiving that marketing.

Third-party marketing

We will get your express opt-in consent before we share your personal data with any company outside the Nominet group of companies for marketing purposes.

Opting out

You can ask us or third parties to stop sending you marketing messages at any time by following the opt-out links on any marketing message sent to you or by contacting us at any time.

Where you opt out of receiving these marketing messages, this will not apply to personal data provided to us as a result of registering a domain name in a registry that we administer.

IP addresses and cookies

We use cookies (small files placed on your computer) in order to improve the performance of our websites, the services we offer, and provide tailored advertising. In particular we use Google’s analytics products and features including:

  • Remarketing
  • Display Network Impression Reporting
  • Demographics and Interest Reporting

We also use cookies to track the analytics of our websites and provide tailored advertising. You can see the cookies used on each website and how we use them and how you can opt out in the cookie policy available on each site.

We also collect information about your computer, such as IP address, operating system and browser type, and we may also track which pages on our website you visit and how long you spend on each page.

Analysing .UK domain name usage

So we can monitor usage of .UK domains, Nominet collects data, on a regular basis, on whether .UK domain names resolve, where they are hosted, whether they are used for email and whether a website is in place. As part of this, we collect information about the landing page and About Us or Contact Us pages of your website so that we can categorise the website type (e.g. blog, parking page etc). We may also check whether you have an SSL certificate and whether there is a matching domain name in a different top level domain (e.g. .com), and collect similar information about them in order to see how they differ from the .UK domain name. We also collect information on which content management systems (CMS) websites are using along with version numbers in an attempt to identify security vulnerabilities. The information we gather is used to help Nominet better understand the .UK market, identify security vulnerabilities and identify changes over time. To keep bandwidth to a minimum, we will restrict the number of times we visit websites which use the same IP address. Any information gathered is used to help Nominet better understand how .UK domains are used by registrants.

If you want to, you can stop us from collecting data about your website(s) by adding the following to a “robots.txt” file:

User-agent: https://nominet.uk/privacypolicy
Disallow: /

You can find more information about “robots.txt” files at robotstxt.org.

N.B. .UK refers to all those within the .UK domain name family, including .co.uk and .me.uk

Change of purpose

We will only use your personal data for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If you wish to get an explanation as to how the processing for the new purpose is compatible with the original purpose, please contact us.
If we need to use your personal data for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.

5. Disclosures of your personal data

We may disclose your personal data to third parties with a legitimate interest in accordance with our data release policy.

We will not share your information with any third parties for the purposes of direct marketing.

In order to fulfil the purposes set out in the table in Section 4 above, we may use data processors who are third parties who provide elements of the services for us. We have contracts in place with our data processors. This means that they cannot do anything with your personal information unless we have instructed them to do it. They will not share your personal information with any organisation apart from us. They will hold it securely and retain it for the period we instruct. When it is necessary for us to transfer your personal information outside of the UK this will only be done in accordance with the UK GDPR. In addition, we will share your personal data where we are under a legal obligation to do so.

6. International transfers

We may transfer and store personal data outside the European Economic Area (EEA). It may also be processed by staff operating outside the EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers. Such staff maybe engaged in, among other things, the processing or fulfilment of applications, and the provision of support services. We will take all steps necessary to ensure that personal data is handled lawfully and securely and in accordance with this privacy notice.

7. Data security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

8. Data retention

How long will you use my personal data for?

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

9. Your legal rights

You have the right to:

  • Request access to your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
  • Request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us.
  • Request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we may have processed your information unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. Note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.
  • Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground as you feel it impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes. In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which override your rights and freedoms.
  • Request restriction of processing of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios: (a) if you want us to establish the data’s accuracy; (b) where our use of the data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it; (c) where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or (d) you have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.
  • Request the transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party. We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.
  • Withdraw consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal data. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us by filling in the web form here.

No fee usually required

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

What we may need from you

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

Time limit to respond

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

 

Last revised: December 2023