Privacy Policy

Ok, here goes. Grab yourself a coffee, read this through, and let us know if anything you see here makes you feel concerned. If it does, stop using this website and call us. (By the way, if you read this all to the end, we have a present for you).

At LMC, we’re committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We really are trying to do the Right Thing.

LMC is short for Liz Male Consulting Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales. Company number: 4708263.

The registered office is 4-5 Manor Courtyard, Sherington, Bucks, MK16 9PR, UK.

We are members of the PRCA.

Who are we really? Meet the team here and, better still, let’s meet for a cuppa and a chat. We can even discuss the finer details of GDPR if you want.

LMC is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office. Registration number: ZA257246.

Our data controller is the MD, Liz Male. She even has a data controller hat. You can contact her at [email protected] or telephone +44(0)1234 712279.

Good question, given the increasing concerns we all have about privacy. But we do it because without up-to-date and accurate data we’d be pretty crap at our job. But to ensure compliance with the GDPR, LMC uses one or more legal bases for processing your data:

1. As necessary to perform our contract with you. For example:

2. As necessary for our own legitimate interests and those of other persons and organisations, ie. where it is in yours and our legitimate business interests that we process your data, we’re using that data in ways you would reasonably expect, and this doesn’t materially affect your rights, freedom or interests and has a minimal privacy impact. For example:

3. As necessary to comply with a legal obligation. For example:

4. Based on your consent. For example:

We collect very little personal information from this website, other than anything you supply via the Contact form or in an email to us. We may collect information about your computer, such as your IP address, operating system, mobile device and browser type, but all of this sort of web data is anonymised, and we only get the usual insights provided by our analytics provider, nothing creepy.

Within LMC as a whole, the sorts of personal information we store might include your name, address, contact numbers, email address, IP address, social media accounts, job title and biography and photo.

We do record phone calls quite often. For training purposes, for record keeping, or to help us with later transcripts. We delete those recordings when they are no longer needed, eg. at the end of a contract or piece of work.

If you have applied for a job or internship at LMC, you are obviously supplying a lot of personal data, so we keep that safely and only use it for processing your application. For staff, we may collect more information and you will be asked for your consent for this.

If you are a journalist, we may collect information on what you’ve been interested in before, and what stories and topics you’ve covered in the past. This is so we can tailor our approaches to you as accurately as possible and not waste your time on stuff you’re just not interested in. We get this information mostly from our own research and from what you disclose to us. You may be on our media lists because you’re linked to our client and its business interests, we’re already connected or social media or we’ve been speaking about a possible story.

If you have given us your home address simply so we can send you our legendary Christmas card to that address, we will keep that safely on our database and only use it for that purpose.

If your home address is your primary contact address, we will be particularly careful to keep that private. No one wants stalkers.

If you have provided contact data and your personal views as part of a public consultation process for one of our clients, this will also be stored safely in order to provide a Statement of Community Involvement or similar legal documents as part of a planning process.

Only as long as we need it, and it’s still sufficiently up-to-date. If we’ve not been in touch with each other for a couple of years, it’s probably time to retire you, sorry.

Of course, we are legally required to hold some types of information to fulfil our statutory obligations, or to enforce or apply our terms of use or to protect the rights, property or safety of our staff and clients.

But otherwise we will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity, or for as long as is set out in any relevant contract you hold with us.

Very few, you’ll be glad to know.

LMC does have some wonderful associates, designers, photographers, videographers and freelancers who supplement our team from time to time. They may get access to your information so they can do the work we’ve asked them to do and to provide services to you on our behalf. They are required to keep that data safe and not use it for their own direct marketing.

If you’re a client (and especially if you’re the spokesperson for your organisation), we may provide your details to a journalist, industry representative or influencer who wants to contact you.

If you submit personal information to LMC as part of applying for a job or internship, we may share this information with third parties as necessary to evaluate your application and consider your appropriateness for work here.

The only other people we can think of are the police, courts or other authorities if we suspect something dodgy and we are required to share information by law, for example for the purposes of prevention of fraud or other crime.

You have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive information from us. For example:

Basically, you get the message. You’re in control, and can ask us to amend, update or delete and ‘forget’ your data at any time.

If you change email address, or you think any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, you can get us to update it by emailing us at [email protected].

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information LMC holds about you, we will not charge for this service.

When you give us personal information, we take steps to ensure that it’s treated securely. There are various firewalls, levels of encryption and backup data retention systems in place with our IT providers, so if you want more information on this contact [email protected]. We train all staff on data protection issues.

But obviously, due to the inherent open nature of the Internet, we cannot guarantee that communications between you and LMC, or information stored on site on or our servers, will be free from unauthorized access by hackers. As a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk.

We provide persona profiling and targeted communications advice to clients, so we’d be lying if we said we didn’t like data and its use in profiling. But we’re not doing it in a large-scale or dodgy way.We may analyse your personal information to create a profile of your interests and preferences so that we can contact you with information relevant to you. We may make use of additional information about you when it is available from responsible and ethical external sources to help us do this effectively.

Unlike the majority of websites, we do not use Google Analytics. We respect a visitor's digital privacy and this is why our analytics tool does not collect cookies. We do still collect website usage data but we do this completely anonymously, whilst being GDPR compliant.

Our website does contain loads of useful links to other websites run by other organisations.

This privacy policy applies only to our website‚ so we encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other sites even if you access them using links from our website.

In addition, if you linked to our website from a third-party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners and operators of that third-party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third-party site too.

We have kids ourselves, so we’re completely committed to protect the privacy of children aged 16 or under. If you are aged 16 or under‚ you probably won’t even bother reading this page. But if you are reading this, please remember to get your parent/guardian’s permission beforehand whenever you provide us with personal information. This is particularly important if you’re applying for work experience at LMC.

As part of the services offered to you through this website, the information which you provide to us may be transferred to countries outside the European Union. Yes, even after Brexit. For example, this could happen if any of our servers are from time to time located in a country outside of the EU. These countries may not have similar data protection laws to the UK.

By submitting your personal data, you’re agreeing to this transfer, storing or processing. If we transfer your information outside of the EU in this way, we will take steps to ensure that appropriate security measures are taken with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected as outlined in this policy.

If you use our services while you are outside the EU, your information may be transferred outside the EU to provide you with those services.

We really, really hope not too often.

But we may change this policy from time to time so please check this page occasionally to ensure that you’re happy with any changes.

By using our website, you’re agreeing to be bound by this policy.