If you complete the “Contact Us” form on the site, then you will be providing us with your name and email address, and whatever details you choose to submit with your enquiry.  We use this information only to respond to your request and your personal information is not added to any marketing lists.  After responding to you, we will not store or use this data unless you ask us to.

You may be offered the choice to subscribe to our Newsletter – and it is up to you whether you wish to do so or not.  This is covered later in this document.

Once registered with an Account, when you contact us – either using the messaging service which is built into the platform, or through normal email – you may be giving us additional information about you such as phone number (for example this might appear in your auto-signature), the contents of the message and/or attachments you may send us, and any other information that you attach or embed.  We may also receive a confirmation when you open an email from us.

We may store that information until and unless you tell us to delete it.

In order to read/watch/explore the modules and lessons, we need to register you on our platform site, and then enrol you into that specific programme or package of resources.  This guarantees that the package is secure and private, and only you (as invited person(s)) can see what you are studying and discussing.  When we register you into an Account, we ask for your most basic contact information, including items such as name, company name (if relevant), and email address.

When you first enter the Academy platform, you are given the opportunity to add further personal information into your Profile – but there is no requirement for you to do so with the exception of changing your password to a more secure, complex one.  There is no need to add any financial or other personal information in order to access a sample module or a paid-for corporate programme.  If you are planning to access the ‘pay to use’ elements on the platform, you will be required to submit payment details to do so. How our site handles commercial transactions is covered later in this document/page.

If you are registering as part of a corporate programme, you may have already given your permission (via email) for us to upload your details for you as part of your group, with information provided by your employer.  Once you are logged in, you have control over your own Profile.  We ask you to immediately change your password to a complex one to protect the security of the whole site.  We normally ask for your phone contact details for the dedicated Programme Manager, so that they can contact you to offer support if you find yourself having difficulty with any element for example.  It is your right to choose not to give us this information.

We do not use your email address or phone number for any purpose other than to administer the programme for which you have been registered – unless you ask us to!

You have the opportunity to upload a Profile photo, but are not obliged to do so.

Your User Profile is not visible to anyone except you and the platform administrator(s), but the photo you upload to it will be visible to others in your programme group, with whom you may share a Discussion Group.  You may choose to upload other media to accompany Assignments if requested by the nature of the exercise.  Media submitted to the My Profile and Assignments areas of the platform are not public.

If you leave a comment or review on the site while logged in, then your User Profile photo will be attached to this – and this will be in the public domain. Therefore, if you upload images to the website, including your User Profile photo, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included.  Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website should they be within the public pages of the site.

As is true of most websites, our e-platform gathers certain information automatically and stores it in log files.  This serves the purpose of speeding up access, simplifying procedures such as repeated logins, and remembering what stage you have reached in the consumption of the module, if you do not work through it all in one sitting. 

Also:

• If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
• When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
• If you edit or publish an article or post via our site, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

In addition, when you use this service from a range of different devices, we may collect certain information automatically from those devices – again, as all websites do.  This information may include internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, clickstream data, landing page, and referring URL. To collect this information, a cookie may be set on your computer or device when you visit our Services.

Many browsers have an option for disabling cookies, which may prevent your browser from accepting new cookies or enable selective use of cookies.  You may also use Google Incognito.  Please note that, if you choose not to accept cookies or use Google Incognito, some features and the personalisation of our Services may no longer work for you.

By default WordPress (which underpins our platform) does not collect any personal data about visitors, and only collects the data shown on the User Profile screen from registered users.  However, some of our customised functions, plugins and embedded elements may collect personal data from technical processes such as contact forms, comments, analytics, and third-party streams of video or audio materials (see below).

In compliance with GDPR, the information referenced above in this paragraph may be considered personal information.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in the form of cookies.  These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment, and for us to help spam detection.  These cookies will last for one year.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it.

See the Gravatar service privacy policy for more information – Click here for the Gravatar privacy policy webpage

After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Lessons and Programmes on this site will nearly always include embedded content (eg videos, images, articles, pointers to third-party internet resources).  Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.  These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Many of our lessons use interactive content that contains a video that is hosted on YouTube (third-party) or Vimeo (third-party and our own videos).  Both Vimeo and YouTube will set cookies on your computer.  They use these cookies to help them and their partners to analyse the traffic to their websites.  It is important that we embed videos from these sources as it improves modern and engaging delivery of our content and broadens your learning opportunities.  Unfortunately, we are only able to control things advertising attachments on our OWN Vimeo channel (on which there are no adverts!).  There may be times when a third-party video we are embedding for legitimate educational reasons has an advertisement attached to it which we would have preferred not to be associated with.  If you notice something like this, please report it to us immediately.

• You can find out more – Click here to go to the Vimeo Privacy Policy
• And for YouTube and other Google services – Click here for Google and YouTube

If we create a lesson which contains a Twitter or other social media feed, Twitter (etc) will set a cookie on your computer.  Twitter (etc) uses these cookies to help them and their partners to make their advertising more relevant to you.  Please consult Twitter’s Privacy policy for details.  It is our legitimate interest to use Twitter from time to time, because it can be a source of important interactive content and we would not be able to provide you with it otherwise.  We are unable to have any control over adverts or other aspects of social media feeds that you might witness in the course of following one of our embedded feeds.

• You can find out more here – Click here for the Twitter Privacy Policy

Some of our lessons may use interactive content that contains speech recognition, Google Cloud will process your voice for converting it to text.  Please consult Google’s Privacy policy (above) for details. It is our legitimate interest to use Google Cloud, because we need their services and would not be able to provide you with speech recognition features otherwise.

• Provide, operate, and maintain our Platform/Services.
• Improve, personalise, and expand our Service to you.
• Understand and analyse how you use our Services – which is information that is both of use to us to improve delivery, and also anonymised analytics may be made available to your paying company sponsor if your programme is part of a corporate project. We never disclose learning content or personal information, but may, for example report statistically on progress of the group, and patterns that are emerging which may be useful information within the broader consultancy or change contract.
• Develop new products, services, features, and functionality of direct relevance to you.
• Communicate with you, including for customer service, to provide you with updates and other information relating to the Service.
• Process your transactions (if relevant).
• Find and prevent fraud.
• For compliance purposes, including enforcing our Terms of Service, or other legal rights, or as may be required by applicable laws and regulations or requested by any judicial process or governmental agency.

Any information you provide us with will not be sold or distributed to any third party and will not be used by Lacerta for anything other than the original purpose you intended.

Members of our team have access to the information you provide us. For example:

• Your User Profile (Site Administrator(s) responsible Data Manager only).
• Your comments, discussion items and assignments (Teaching Faculty on your programme, and your Programme Manager only).
• Customer information like your name, email address, and phone number if you have given it to us – all Lacerta staff when and where it is relevant to the work.
• Other team members may have access to limited user information to help fulfil orders, process refunds and support you from time to time.

We retain personal information we collect from you where we have an ongoing legitimate business need to do so (for example, to provide you with a service you have requested or to comply with applicable legal, tax, or accounting requirements).

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will delete it on your request or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely.  This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

If you register on the site, we also store the personal information you provide in your User Profile and participant actions on the platform.  All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except you cannot change your username).  Lacerta Academy administrators and programme managers can also see and edit that information.  We keep this data indefinitely, until and unless you ask us to delete it.

If you ask us to delete your User Profile and all associated data, it will take with it all the collected information about your username, password, account and personal details.  If you ask us to delete your record, you will no longer have access after this point and any student records, assignments etc cannot be reconstituted.

European data protection law requires data about European residents which is transferred outside the European Union to be safeguarded to the same standards as if the data was in Europe.  The server system on which our platform is based is located in the United States of America.  This means that data is transferring between you (wherever you are) and the USA and the UK.

We will take appropriate measures to ensure that any partner recipient of data protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law.  These measures include:

• In the case of US based entities, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them, or ensuring they have signed up to the EU-US Privacy Shield
• In the case of entities based in other countries outside the EEA, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them.

Impact of Brexit

Because the Lacerta Academy Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us, or third party data processors like our platform architects, Academy of Mine.  Since Brexit has been enacted, Lacerta itself is sadly no longer an EU citizen!  How this will impact new data laws over time is, at present, anyone’s guess.  But we intend to maintain or exceed the strict standards required in the EU as a matter of best practice.

You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU and we are happy to liaise with your GDPR representative at a company level to ensure confidence.

More information about our IT security is contained in our main company GDPR and IT Security Policy document which can be downloaded at the top of this page.

By default our platform does not share any personal data with anyone.

In the long term, should you choose to work with us on a project or programme, there may be occasions where we share information on and off platform with our close third-party Partners, Authors and Faculty Members.  This is because we operate through a wonderful set of Associates and collaborating Organisations to assemble the best possible team.  We will agree this with you at the time and no action is taken in this regard without your consent.

We may also share information to (i) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request; (ii) enforce this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations hereof; (iii) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, or technical issues; (iv) respond to your requests; or (v) protect our rights, property or safety, our users and the public.  This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for fraud protection and spam/malware prevention – for your protection and ours.

Under no circumstances will Lacerta sell or receive payment for licensing or disclosing your personal information or your users’ information on or from the platform.

Our platform uses the analytics provider Google Analytics.  Google Analytics uses cookies to collect non-identifying information.  Google Analytics customers are prohibited from sending personal information to Google.

• Google provides some additional privacy options regarding its Analytics cookies at Click here for Google Privacy and Analytics Policy

There are no third parties, including advertisers, on our platform importing data.

Our site does not process automated decision-making, AI or machine learning (for example, allocating credit or aggregating data for advertising).  No decisions are made about your data on our site without a human (us!) doing that work.

If you have signed up for our newsletter you may receive emails from us.  This includes but is not limited to transactional emails and marketing emails.  The following applies:

• We will only send emails which you have explicitly or implicitly (registration, product purchase etc) signed up to.
• On signup we collect your email address, your name and the current web address where you sign up.
• We send our emails via our own server – at Lacerta Consulting Services Ltd.  It may come from academy@lacertaconsulting.co.uk, or from one of the faculty email addresses in the same account.
• Once you get a Newsletter email from us, we track if you open the email in your email client, and if you click a link in the email.
• We respect your browsers “Do Not Track” feature if enabled, which means we do not track your interaction with our Newsletter emails.

While you visit or browse our site, we will track:

• Products you have viewed – we may use this to, for example, show you products you have looked at.
• Location, IP address and browser type – we will use this for purposes like estimating taxes and shipping.
• Shipping address – we will ask you to enter this so we can, for instance, estimate shipping (where relevant) before you place an order, and apply relevant taxes.
• We will also use cookies to keep track of ‘cart’ contents while you are browsing our site.

When you complete a purchase from us, we will ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number, credit card/payment details and for some purchases account information like username and password.  We will use this information for purposes, such as to:

• Send you information about your account and order.
• Respond to your requests, including refunds and complaints.
• Process payments and prevent fraud.
• Set up your account for our store.
• Comply with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes.
• Improve our store offerings.
• Send you marketing messages, if you choose to receive them.
• If you create an account, we will store your name, address, email and phone number, which will be used to populate the checkout for future orders.

We generally store information about you for as long as we need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it, and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.  For example, we will store order information for 7 years for tax and accounting purposes.  This includes your name, email address and billing and shipping addresses.

We will also store comments or reviews, if you choose to leave them.

Payments may be administered through PayPal or Stripe.  By using these services you may be sharing personal data with us and with an external service.  For more information about the privacy policies of these services see:

• PayPal – Click here for PayPal privacy and data policy
• Stripe – Click here for Stripe privacy and data policy

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us.  You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you.  This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

If you wish to access, correct, update, or request deletion of your personal information, you can do so at any time by emailing academy@lacertaconsulting.co.uk or caryn@lacertaconsulting.co.uk.

In addition, you can object to the processing of your personal information, ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information, or request portability of your personal information.

Should you opt into any of our marketing information options you have the right to opt-out of such communications we send you at any time. You can exercise this right by clicking on the “unsubscribe” or “opt-out” link in the marketing emails we send you.

Similarly, if we have collected and processed your personal information with your consent, then you can withdraw your consent at any time.  Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we conducted prior to your withdrawal, nor will it affect the processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.

You have the right to complain to a data protection authority about our collection and use of your personal information.  For more information, please contact your local data protection authority.

We respond to all requests we receive from individuals wishing to exercise their data protection rights in accordance with applicable data protection laws.