Privacy Policy

Website Transparency Notice for W J Groundwater  

W J Groundwater Limited (‘the Company‘ or ‘we‘) is registered in England and Wales under company number 01586827 with registered office at Unit 5, Abbotts Business Park, Primrose Hill, Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, WD4 8FR.

What is the purpose of this notice?

• We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This transparency notice sets out the basis on which any personal data we collect about all users of our site (you), or that you provide to us through https://wjcanada.com/ (our site), will be processed by us.
• We are a data controller. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you, and for explaining this clearly to you.
• This transparency notice is applicable to all individuals whose personal information we process in the course of our business, including employees and representatives of our corporate clients and suppliers, prospective clients and suppliers, individual service providers and any third party with whom we deal on a personal basis.
• This transparency notice applies to visitors to our site who do not register as well as those who do.
• For the avoidance of doubt, if you are employed by or contracted to work for the Company, you should refer to the Staff Transparency Notice which is available in our Staff Handbook.
• Please read this transparency notice carefully to understand what we do with your personal information and what rights you have in relation to our activities.
• If you have any questions about the content of this notice, or to discuss how we use and protect your personal information, please contact gdpr@wjgl.com.

What is personal data and our lawful basis for processing

• Personal data, or personal information, means any information relating to an individual from which that person can be identified.  There are special categories of more sensitive personal information which require a higher level of protection (see further at section 4, below).
• We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to. Our principle lawful basis for processing is set out in the table below. However, some of our grounds for processing will overlap and there may be several grounds which justify our use of your personal information.
• We may only rely on our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) to process your personal information, if your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests. Where we rely on legitimate interests for our processing, we have set out the relevant interest, below.
• We will only use your personal information 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 we need to use your personal information 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 information without your knowledge or consent where this is required or permitted by law.

What information do we process and why?

Special Category information

• Certain special categories of particularly sensitive personal information require higher levels of protection (such as information relating to health or medical conditions, religious or political opinions, sexual orientation or criminal convictions).
• We do not process particularly sensitive personal information as part of our usual course of business. However, we may process information:
  • relating to a health condition or disability in order to meet our legal obligation to make reasonable adjustments in the provision of our services;
  • where it is needed to protect your interests (or someone else’s interests) and you are not capable of giving your consent;
  • where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim;
  • where you have manifestly made the information public; or
  • with your explicit consent.

Sharing your information

• We may have to share your personal information with third parties, including any other entities in our group, third-party service providers who provide services to us and other third parties who use your information, as data controller, for their own purposes.
• We will share your personal information with third parties where required by law, where it is necessary to administer the working relationship with you or where we have another legitimate interest in doing so.
• Where we share information with other data controllers, they are responsible to you for their use of your information and compliance with the law. We share personal information with:
  • our regulators, Compliance Assessors and other governing bodies
  • our professional advisors and auditors;
  • HMRC or other government or law enforcement agencies;
  • our insurance provider; and
  • the British Drilling Association, CITB.
• We may share your personal information with other third parties, for example in the context of the possible sale or restructuring of the business.
• We use third-party service providers to provide us with IT services, including website support and maintenance, data storage and back up, advertising services and mailing house
• All our third-party service providers are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal information for their own purposes. We only permit them to process your personal information for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

If you fail to provide personal information

• You are required to provide the personal information set out in section 1 of the table we will not be able to provide our services to you.

Your duty to inform us of changes

• We want to be sure that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current.
• You can see what information we hold and update it by contacting gdpr@wjgl.com.

Automated decision-making  

• Automated decision-making takes place when an electronic system uses personal information to make a decision without human intervention.
• We do not envisage that any decisions will be taken about you using automated means, however we will notify you in writing if this position changes.

Data security

• We have put in place:
  • appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed.
  • procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.

Where will we store your personal information?

• All our personal information is hosted on servers located within the EEA. We do not transfer information outside the EEA during the normal course of our business.
• We may transfer your personal information outside the EEA where we use cloud service providers based outside the EEA. We only use service providers who we have determined have in place adequate level of protection for your personal information and on the basis of a formal written agreement.
• If we are required to transfer information to third parties outside the EEA we must have in place the appropriate measures to ensure that your personal information is treated by those third parties in a way that is consistent with and which respects the EU and UK laws on data protection.
• We use Google Analytics to evaluate the performance of our site and improve the service we offer you. We may transfer information about you outside the EEA for this purpose. We will only do so where permitted by law.
• Google Analytics complies with the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework as set out by the US Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use and retention of personal information from European Union member countries. It is subject to enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission. Google, including Google Inc. and its wholly-owned US subsidiaries, has certified that it adheres to the relevant Privacy Shield Principles, including for Google Analytics. For more information about this protective measure, please visit the following: https://www.google.de/intl/en/policies/privacy/frameworks/.

How long will we keep your personal information for?

• We will only retain your personal information for as long as is necessary to fulfil the purposes for which we collected it, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.
• To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal information, the purposes for which we process your personal information and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.
• Where a minimum retention period is required by law (such as retaining records for HMRC purposes), we comply with that minimum period plus up to 12 months to allow time for us to anonymise or delete information in accordance with our internal data management processes.

Your rights

You have the following rights:

• to be told what we are doing with your personal information. We do this by providing you with this transparency notice;
• to correct or update the personal information we hold about you;
• to object to the processing of your personal information;
• to request a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
• to ask us to delete the information that we hold about you where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it;
• to ask us to stop processing your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground;
• to ask us to restrict how we use your personal information for a period of time if you claim that it is inaccurate and we want to verify the position or in some limited other circumstances;
• to ask us to send your personal information to another organisation in a computer-readable format;
• to complain to the Information Commissioner’s office if you are unhappy with our use of your personal data: you can do this at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/. Do contact us straight away if you consider that we are not handling your personal information properly so we can try and sort the problem out.

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights).

Please note that if we delete your personal information or restrict our use of it, we will not be able to provide our services to you

If you want to exercise any of your rights, please contact  gdpr@wjgl.com .

Cookie policy

• Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site.

Information about our use of cookies

• A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive.
• You can block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. 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 site.
• Please note that third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.
• We use cookies
  • to manage your login to the website; and
  • to collect information about how visitors use our website. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the website and blog, where visitors have come to the website from and the pages they visited.

Google Analytics:

• We also use Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. Google Analytics sets a cookie in order to evaluate visitors’ use of our site.
• For more information on Google Analytics please go to https://www.google.com/analytics/analytics/#?modal_active=none.

Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) Registration Certificate

• WJ Groundwater are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office. Our certificate can be found here.