1. What information do we collect about you and how do we collect it?
You are not required (by law or by any contract with us) to provide personal information to us when you visit our website. We will only require you to provide personal information to us where it is necessary for us to provide you with a service at your request, such as when you contact us, register an account on our website or undergo an online consultation and purchase our products.
1.1 Information you provide to us
We may collect personal information about you whenever you use our services, such as by doing the following:
- Enquiring about our products or service
- Undergoing our online clinical consultation
- Purchasing our medicines or other products or services
- Supplying us with your products or services
- Using and browsing our website
- Telephoning, texting, writing by post or emailing us.
- Enquiring about, or applying for, job vacancies.
This information may include the following:
- Normal identification information, such as your full name and title, date of birth, age, gender, and marital status
- Contact information, such as your postal address, email address and telephone numbers
- Information about your health, including your current health and wellbeing status, your medical history and records, and details of any medicines or treatment that you are receiving
- Correspondence or information provided by you in your patient area (such as prescriber chat messages, pharmacy chat messages or messages you send to our customer care team)
- Information about your purchase (including your purchase history with us)
- Payment information (this is securely collected and processed by our payment service provider)
- Additional information relevant to your use of our website and services, such as your marketing preferences, survey responses and feedback
We understand that any information concerning your health is particularly sensitive (known as “special categories” of personal data). We take extra precautions to ensure that any special category data is kept secure and confidential and we will only retain this data for as long as necessary for the purposes for which we collect it.
1.2 Information we collect about you on our website
We collect information using cookies and other similar technologies to help distinguish you from other users of our website. These can streamline your online experience by saving you from re-inputting some information and allow us to make improvements to our website and analyse user statistics. For more information about how and why we use cookies, please take a look through our Cookie Policy.
When you visit our website we may collect the following information:
- Which pages you view and which links you follow
- Your IP address and general location
- Details of the hardware and software that you are using to access the website
- Any passwords that you use on our website
- A device identifier (cookie or IP address) for fraud prevention
- Details of your visits to our website and the resources that you access, including, but not limited to, traffic data, location data, web logs and other communication data
You must be at least 18 years old to use our website and services. We do not knowingly collect any personal data relating to children.
1.3 Cookies
1.3.1 What is a cookie?
A cookie is a small text file that is sent by a website server to your browser and stored on your computer. Cookies allow website operators to accumulate useful information, such as whether the computer (or its user) has visited the site before. Cookies are needed for a number of functions which make websites work, or work more efficiently, and they can provide information to website owners about how you use their website. Cookies can also be used to show you adverts that are relevant to you, based on your browsing habits, to personalise your user experience.
1.3.2 How do we use cookies?
We use cookies to monitor how people use our website, including estimating audience size and patterns of use, to help us provide you with a better service. Cookies also make it easier for you to use the website on future visits, and allow us to personalise the content of the website to you by recording information about your preferences.
We use both persistent cookies (which expire on a specified date) and session cookies (which expire when you close your browser).
The cookies used on this site have been categorised based on definitions given in the ICC UK Cookie Guide. We use the following cookies:
- Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. Without these cookies services you have asked for cannot be provided.
- Functionality cookies. These are used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region – or your cookies and marketing preferences).
- Analytical/performance cookies. These allow us to recognise and count our website’s visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily. We use Google Analytics as well as our own first party cookies to provide anonymous statistics on how our site is used. Some of our performance cookies may be managed by third parties.
- Targeting or advertising cookies. These cookies are used to help us show you adverts that are more relevant to you and your interests. We also use these to cap the number of times you see an advertisement and assist us in analysing the performance of advertising campaigns. They are usually placed by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. They remember the sites you have visited and this information is shared with other organisations such as advertisers. These cookies will typically be linked to site functionality managed by the other organisation.
Please note that third parties (including, for example providers of external services like web traffic analysis services such as Google Analytics, or advertising services and vendors) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.
We also use services provided by Google and Facebook that work in a similar way to interest-based cookies used in marketing and targeting. These help us to show you adverts when you interact with these platforms, and display our content to existing or potential users of our site. To do this, we share a masked ID, which is an encrypted alias of your email address to ensure you remain anonymous unless additional data about you is provided (which we do not share). This masked ID is linked with a unique code created by Google and Facebook, to help us ensure you receive advertising that is relevant to you. You can opt out of our marketing communications and these adverts will no longer be shown to you on these networks. It’s possible that you will still receive interest-based cookies displaying products and services we offer based on market segments.
We also receive aggregate data from Facebook that allows us to see in which cities users are located, what platforms they are using, how many times a user visited our site and whether or not they used our service. You can opt out of these at any time.