Privacy Policy (GDPR)

Company Information

Online Property Auction Group Ltd trading as Online Property Auctions Scotland.

1008 Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow, G41 2HG

We are a member of the Property Ombudsman Scheme.

We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.

We comply with the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR)

This policy explains how we collect and treat any information you give us.

Please read this privacy policy carefully to understand our views and practices and your rights regarding your personal data. By visiting any of our websites, portals or applications (“our sites”) or by otherwise providing us with your personal data, your personal data will be processed as described in this policy:

Contents

• What information do we collect?
• Why do we collect this information?
• How long do we keep hold of your information?
• Marketing
• Who might we share your information with?
• International transfers
• How is your information stored and kept secure?
• What are your rights?
• Cookies
• Changes to this policy
• Contact us

What information do we collect?

Personal data means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified or that relates to an identifiable individual. We may collect and process the following data about you:

Information you give us

• name;
• address;
• telephone numbers;
• email addresses;
• financial and payment information;
• details of proof of identity/age;
• job title and employer;
• details of proof of ownership of goods offered for sale including descriptions, provenance, images of goods offered for sale;
• bidding history; and
• details of transactions when you purchase any of our products or services.

Information we collect from your use of our sites and services including:

• technical information, such as the Internet Protocol (IP) address used to connect your device to the Internet, your login information, browser type and version, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform;
• a record of details of your visit to our site, including: the pages of our site that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data;
• delivery information;
• payment information;
• information about the effectiveness of our advertising and your interactions with it;
• analytics information on your use of our services, used to produce statistical information.

We collect this information by using cookies and similar technologies. For further details about cookies and our use of them, please see the Cookies section below.

Information we collect from other sources

• relationship with social networks, such as Facebook, which may provide us with information where you access our sites through your social network account and allow the social network to share information with us to auto-fill forms;
• relationship with search engine providers, such as Google, which may provide us with information about what devices are used to access our sites; and
• credit reference agencies which provide financial information.

Why do we collect this information?

We process your personal data for the following reasons:

Pursuant to a contract in order to:

• provide you with our goods and services or otherwise fulfil our contractual obligations;
• provide you with information you request from us in order to take steps to enter into a contract;
• process payments;
• arrange and carry out collection or delivery of goods;
• enforce the contractual terms;
• maintain business and service continuity; and

send service communications so that you receive a full and functional service and so we can perform our obligations to you, including notifications about invoicing, payments and changes to our sites and services. These may be sent by email or post.

On the basis of your consent:

If you have consented to receive marketing from us, for example if you have signed up to our marketing list, then we will provide you with marketing communications, as described in the Marketing section below.

Where we rely on your consent for processing this will be brought to your attention, or will otherwise be apparent from the context, when the information is collected from you.

Where we process your personal data on the basis of your consent, you have the right to withdraw this consent at any time. See the What are your rights? section below for more details.

In our legitimate interests of providing the best service and improving and growing our business we will process information in order to:

• where you are an existing customer or client of ours, make suggestions and recommendations to you about similar goods or services we think may interest you, as described in the Marketing section below;
• improve our products and services;
• use functionality, analytics and marketing cookies on our sites;
• keep our sites and systems safe and secure;
• conduct market research;
• ensure content from our sites will be presented to you in the most effective manner for you and your computer;
• provide you with a personalised service;
• allow auto-fill functions on forms filled out by you when you access our services through Facebook or other third party platforms;
• understand our customer base and purchasing trends;
• understand the effectiveness of our marketing;
• verify your identity and prevent fraud and forgery; and
• defend against or exercise legal claims and investigate and resolve complaints.

To comply with legal requirements relating to:

• the provision of goods and services;
• accounting, including, CGT, Inheritance tax, DACS, VAT and any other applicable tax;
• data protection;
• health and safety;
• anti-money laundering;
• fraud investigations;
• assisting authorities and law enforcement; and
• any other legal obligations placed on us from time to time.

How long do we keep hold of your information?

We will only keep your information for as long as is reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements. We may retain your personal data for a longer period in the event of a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation in respect to our relationship with you.

Usually we will keep information about you for a maximum of [6] years after the end of our relationship with you unless legal obligations require otherwise or we are required to remove such data for our records.

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, regulatory, tax, accounting or other requirements.

Marketing

Online Property Auctions Scotland strive to provide you with choices around what marketing communications you receive from us.

Direct Marketing

You will receive marketing communications if either:

• you have signed up to our mailing list. Electronic marketing, such as email, is sent with your consent which you have the right to withdraw at any time. Postal and telephone marketing is carried out in our legitimate interests of promoting our business; or
• you are an existing customer and you have not objected to receiving marketing communications. You have the right to opt-out of marketing at any time.

Ad preferences

We work with Google and Meta to provide advertising on Google, Meta and their network of affiliate sites. This may involve us using our list of people who will receive marketing communications from us to instruct Google and/or Facebook to advertise our services to those individuals or to similar individuals. We carry out this processing in our legitimate interests to promote our business.

Changing your preferences

You can change your marketing preferences at any time by logging in and updating your preferences in the account section of our site.

Opting out of marketing

To withdraw consent for marketing or otherwise request that we stop processing your information for direct marketing purposes, including profiling, at any time you can opt-out of all communications by clicking ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘manage preferences’ in any of our emails, or by emailing site@opascotland.com, and we shall stop processing your information for those purposes.

See What are your rights? section below for further information about your rights.

Who might we share your information with?

For the purposes set out in the Why do we collect this information? section above, we will share your personal information with the following categories of third parties:

• suppliers and sub-contractors who we appoint to provide services such as our auction platforms, CRM and other software providers, delivery contractors, online payment providers, email providers, marketing automation platforms and providers of marketing services;
• professional advisers including lawyers, bankers, consultants, auditors and insurers who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance and accounting services;
• estate agents;
• analytics and search engine providers that assist us in the improvement and optimisation of our site;
• customer survey providers in order to receive feedback and improve our services;
• social media companies that assist us to ensure that you receive relevant advertising ;
• HM Revenue & Customs, regulators and other authorities;

Additionally, we will disclose your personal information to the relevant third party:

• If we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we will disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets.
• If we are acquired by a third party, in which case personal data held by us about our customers will be one of the transferred assets.
• If we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data to comply with any legal obligation or a properly executed court order; to enforce or apply our terms of use and other agreements; to protect the rights, property, or safety of our customers, our regulator, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and prevention of money laundering and credit risk reduction.

Links to other websites

Our sites may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of our partner networks, advertisers, affiliates and social networking pages. If you follow a link to any of those websites, please note that they will have their own privacy policies and we do not accept any responsibility or liability for those policies. Please check through the third-party website Privacy Policy before you submit any personal data to those websites.

International transfers

We may transfer your data outside the European Economic Area (“EEA”). We will only do so if adequate protection measures are in place in compliance with data protection legislation. We use the following protection measures:

• transferring to Commission approved countries;
• using Commission approved model contractual clauses; and
• requiring companies we transfer data to in the USA to be signed up to Privacy Shield certification.

More information on international transfers, including a copy of the safeguards, is available by contacting us.

How is your information stored and kept secure?

Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access. All information that you provide to us will be stored on secure servers. The computers that store the information are kept in a secure facility with restricted access and we use secure firewalls. All staff computers are password protected.

What are your rights?

Where processing of your personal data is based on consent, you can withdraw that consent at any time.

You have the following rights:

• to withdraw your consent at any time, where processing is based on consent (see Why do we collect this information? above);
• to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes. We will inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for such purposes or if we intend to disclose your information to any third party for such purposes;
• to ask us not to process your personal data where it is processed for legitimate interests provided that there are no compelling reasons for that processing;
• to ask us not to process your personal data for scientific or historical research purposes, where relevant, unless the processing is necessary in the public interest;
• to request from us access to personal information held about you;
• to ask for the information we hold about you to be rectified if it is inaccurate or incomplete;
• to ask for data to be erased provided that the personal data is no longer necessary for the purposes for which it was collected, you withdraw consent (if the legal basis for processing is consent), you exercise your right to object, set out below, and there are no overriding legitimate ground for processing, the data is unlawfully processed, the data needs to be erased to comply with a legal obligation or the data is children’s data and was collected in relation to an offer of information society services;
• to ask for the processing of that information to be restricted if the accuracy of that data is contested, the processing is unlawful, the personal data is no longer necessary for the purposes for which it was collected or you exercise your right to object (pending verification of whether there are legitimate grounds for processing); and
• to ask for data portability if the processing is carried out by automated means and the legal basis for processing is consent or contract.

Cookies

Our sites use cookies and similar technologies to distinguish you from other users.

A cookie is a small data text file sent by a web server (a device where one or more websites are stored) to a web browser, they are then stored by the browser. The cookie is then sent back to the web server each time the web browser requests a page from the web server. This enables the web server to identify and track the web browser and provide richer user experiences for visitors to a web site.

We use the following cookies for the following purposes:

• Strictly necessary cookies: : these are cookies that are required for the operation of our sites. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our sites.
• Analytical/performance cookies: they allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our sites when they are using them. This helps us to improve the way our sites work, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
• Functionality cookies: these are used to recognise you when you return to our sites. This enables us to personalise our content for you and remember your preferences.
• Targeting cookies: these cookies record your visit to our sites, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our sites more relevant to your interests.

We use Google Analytics to analyse the use of our sites. Google Analytics generates anonymous statistical and other information about website use by means of cookies, which are stored on users’ computers. The information generated relating to our website is used to create reports about the use of the website. Google will store this information. Google’s privacy policy is available at: www.google.com/privacypolicy.html

How do I change my cookie settings?

Cookies can be controlled by your web browser settings. Whether our cookies are used will depend on your browser settings, so you are in control. For example, in Internet Explorer you can refuse all cookies by clicking: “Tools” > “Internet Options” > “Privacy”, and selecting “Block all cookies” using the sliding selector. This choice will, however, have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites, including this one.

Most browsers provide tools so you can see what cookies have been set and manage and delete them. Please use the following links for more information on popular browsers:

Google Chrome

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Mozilla Firefox

Apple Safari (OS X) (Apple Mac, etc)

Apple Safari (IOS) (iPhone, iPad)

Google Chrome

Disabling cookies or javascript may restrict some of the functionality of our web site. You can learn more about cookies at AboutCookies.org.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to our privacy policy. This Privacy Policy was last updated in June 2024.

Contact us

If you have any questions about this privacy policy, please contact us at site@opascotland.com, or in writing to: Data Protection Officer, Online Property Auctions Scotland, 1008 Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow, G41 2HG.