Privacy Policy explained

We take your privacy extremely seriously. This policy describes what, why and how we collect and use your personal information, how we protect it and how you can contact us.

Privacy Policy

Sony UK Technology Centre Limited (“Sony“, “we” or “us”) is the Sony group company responsible for data processing in connection with manufacturing of consumer electronics, photographic and cinematographic equipment and repair of electronics products. We are registered in the United Kingdom

This policy explains the types of information that we may collect and hold, how that information is used and with whom the data is shared (See section Sharing Information about you). It also sets out how you can contact us if you have any queries or concerns about this information. Some of our services also have their own privacy policy which provide details of the use of your information by that service.

Please note that other companies in the Sony group are responsible for data processing controlled outside of Europe, such as Sony Corporation in Japan.

Information that we collect

In short

What personal information does Sony collect and where does this information come from?

Sony may collect information about you in several different ways, for example: when you complete text fields or upload documents.

Information that you provide us

Whenever you interact with Sony, you may be asked to provide us with information relating to you. For example:

• Some of our services require you to create an account. When creating your accounts, we may ask you to provide a range of information, such as your name, contact details, account and newsletter preferences
• When you purchase, register, send for repair or return one of electronics products online, we may record the call and/or ask you to provide information such as your contact details, delivery date and place of purchase and payment information
• When you participate in one of our prize draws or competitions, we may collect your name, address, age, artistic input,
• When you visit us at a public event, such as trade show or exhibition or participate in one of our surveys, we may ask for information, such as your business card, name, contact details, interests and preferences
• When you enquire about or purchase our services, or partner with us for a project or visit our premises we may receive your contact details or take a video recordings or photographs ,

• Information we may collect from other sources

We may also collect information from publically available sources and third parties, including:

• When you seek to make a purchase from us, we may carry out credit and financial checks to ensure payment is not made fraudulently and that you have a suitable credit rating
• When carrying out business to business sales calls, we may use business contact details that are publically available

Information we may collect in relation to social networks

If you use any of our social network applications, pages or plugins or you use one of our products or services that allow interaction with social networks, we may receive information relating to your social network accounts.

For instance:

• If you log-in to one of our websites or services using your social network account, we may receive basic details from your social network profile. The basic details we receive may depend on your social network account privacy settings, however, they might include your social network ID, name, profile picture, gender and locale. We may also receive additional information from your profile if you give us permission to access it
• If you click on a ‘like’, ‘+1’ or ‘tweet’ or similar button in one of our websites or services, we may record the fact that you have done so. In addition, the content that you are viewing may be posted to your social network profile or feed. We may receive information about further interactions with this posted content (for example, if your contacts click on a link in the posted content), which we may associate with the details that we store about you
• If you ‘like’, ‘+1’ or similar one of our pages on a social network site, we may receive information about your social network profile, depending on your social network account privacy settings

For more information and for details about how you can control access to your social network profile, you should view the privacy policy and other guidance available on your social network’s website.

Information we may collect when you use websites, products and services from Sony

Some of our websites, internet-enabled products and online services provide Sony with information about your use of them, including:

• Details of the content that you view and interact with. For example, when you use our website, we may collect information about your visit, such as your browser software, which pages you view and which items you ‘clicked’ on or added to your shopping basket
• Service, product or server logs, which hold information about your use of our service, product or websites, such as your IP address, browser information (including HTTP user agent strings), HTTP client request information and the time and location of your activities, domain, device and application settings, errors and hardware activity
• Device information such as your device ID(s) and/or information about where your device is physically located. For example, when you are using a geo-location service or application and you have provided consent to your location being shared
• Interests and preferences that you specify during setup of the Internet enabled product or service

Details of your linked Sony accounts and when and how you used them (for more information about linked Sony accounts, see the “Linked Sony accounts section below).

• Emails communications that you have with our call centres or other Sony personnel may be monitored and logged.

In general, this information is collected using digital identifiers such as a device number, browser cookie or your IP address. These identifiers are used to distinguish the information provided by your browser or device from that of another user’s browser or device,

We may associate the collected information with one of your accounts, if for instance you are logged into a service when the information is collected. Please see our Cookie policy for further details.

How Sony uses the information that it collects

In short

How Sony uses the information that it collects and what the legal basis for this is

Sony may use the information it collects for the following purposes:

Service provision

When we use personal information to offer our products and services to you, the processing is based on an agreement between you and Sony. In this context, we may use personal information to:

• Provide you with a product or service you have requested, including checking that a payment is not made fraudulently, delivering your purchase to you or ensuring that you benefit from any relevant special offer or promotion (and fulfil its obligations under any other agreement it may have with you)
• Provide customer care, warranty, returns and other after sales services
• Facilitate and process your searches and requests for information when you contact us about Sony and its products and services

Product and service development

We work constantly to improve our products and services. We base this processing on our legitimate interests to develop our products and services to better meet customer requirements, to ensure data quality, to develop identity management, and to strengthen network and information security. In this context, we may use personal information:

• For staff training and quality assurance purposes, particularly in relation to our customer relations staff at our call, email and other support centres
• To measure our performance or ask for your opinions on Sony products and services and conduct product surveys
• To develop and improve new and existing Sony products and services, recommendations, advertisements and other communications and learn more about customers’ shopping preferences in general.

Marketing

When we use personal information for marketing purposes, either, we base the processing on our legitimate interests to know our customers, keep you up-to-date about Sony’s latest products and services, and to personalise your customer experience, or on your prior consent, e.g. for sending marketing messages.

In particular, we may collect, store, track and profile your information to:

• To provide you with newsletters and other communications by email, if you have provided your prior consent or we are otherwise permitted to do so under applicable law. See the Marketing communication section below for more details.
• Conduct prize draws, contests and other promotional offers
• Show you personalised content, recommendations and advertisements and more effectively target Sony stores, services, content, recommendations, adverts and communications. You may notice this personalisation and targeting when you use Sony products and services, when we contact you with marketing communications and when you visit our and third party websites and services that show advertisements from us or our advertising partners (for example, you might see an advertisement for a product that you have recently viewed on one of our websites). The personalisation and targeting that you see on our websites or in our online advertisements and communications may make use of cookies set by us or our third party advertising partners. Please see our Cookie policy for more information. In other cases, our services may have specific settings to control personalised content and you should consult the privacy policy of the relevant service for more information.
• Create anonymous, aggregated statistics about the use of our websites, products, services and loyalty programs, which we may share with third parties and/or make available to the public.
• Use product reviews, comments or content you have uploaded to our websites or services and made publically visible to link to, publish or publicise elsewhere including in our own advertisements. Each time you create or reply to a post or thread on a website forum from Sony, in addition to providing this forum service, we may also record the forum name and the time and date of your post or thread with your account details. We do this to better understand the ‘typical users’ of our forums and to select or tailor our marketing communications to reflect your forum activity. We do not use the content of your forum posts or threads for these additional purposes.

Security

We may use information collected from monitoring our websites, online services and emails for security purposes. This information may be passed to the police or to other appropriate authorities. We base this processing on our legitimate interests to protect you and our company, systems, employees and partners, or on a legal obligation to cooperate with competent authorities.

Fraud prevention and investigation

Sony may use personal information to prevent fraud and to investigate violations or our policies. For example, we may use your information such as your device ID(s) to ensure that any vouchers or discounts relating to any promotions or campaigns are not being redeemed fraudulently, and to check that a payment is not made fraudulently. In this case, we base the processing of personal information on our legitimate interest to prevent fraud and to provide benefits only to our customers.

We may also use personal information to comply with applicable laws, regulations and court orders and to comply with valid legal information requests from such bodies. We may use your personal information to enforce or defend the legal rights of any Sony group company or the terms and conditions of any Sony product or service. In this case, we base the processing on a legal obligation to which Sony is subject or on our legitimate interest to defend our legal rights.

Other purposes

Combining the information we collect

We may link or combine the information that we collect from the different sources outlined above in the “Information that we collect” section above (including information received from other Sony group companies about your use of other Sony group products and services). Information may be linked via a unique identifier, such as a cookie or account. Alternatively, we may decide to combine two or more databases into a single database of customer information.

We may do this for your and/or our convenience (for example, to allow you to more easily register for a new service), to allow us to provide a more seamless customer support whenever you contact us and to provide you with better, personalised services, content, marketing and adverts.

Sharing information about you

In short

How is information about you shared within Sony and with 3rd parties?

Sharing of information by Sony

In general, Sony does not sell, rent or otherwise disclose information about you to third parties without your consent. However, there are exceptions:

Other Sony group companies

We may disclose information about you to other Sony group companies. They may combine this information with other details they hold about you. Unless they provide you with their own privacy policy, they may use your personal details for the purposes explained in this policy.

Our service providers

We may use third party service providers (either data processors or data controllers) to process your personal information for the purposes outlined above. For example, for fulfilling orders, delivering packages, sending postal mail and emails, sending text messages (SMS), providing marketing assistance, processing credit card payments, providing fraud checking services and providing customer services.

Our data processors operate only in accordance with our instructions, in line with this policy, and are subject to appropriate confidentiality and security obligations.

Legal and business purposes

We may use and/or disclose to third parties information about you:

• To government bodies and law enforcement agencies to prevent fraud, to comply with the law and to meet a reasonable request from such bodies
• To third parties (including professional advisors) to enforce or defend the legal rights of any Sony group company or the terms and conditions of any Sony product or service
• To a third party purchaser or seller, and its and our professional advisors, in connection with a corporate event such as a merger, business acquisition or insolvency situation

Anonymous statistics

We prepare anonymous, aggregate or generic data (including “generic” statistics) for a number of purposes as outlined above. As we consider that you cannot reasonably be identified from this information, we may share it with any third party (such as our partners, advertisers, industry bodies, the media and/or the general public).

News, competitions and offers from Sony

You may be offered the opportunity to sign up to receive information about Sony group news, competitions and offers. If you do, companies in the Sony group may send you their news, competitions and offers and may use your linked Sony accounts details to make this information more relevant to you.

International transfers of your information

In short

How does Sony transfer information about you to other countries?

Sony is part of the Sony group, which is a global organisation. For the purposes explained in this policy, your information ) may be transferred to Sony group companies (including service providers operating on their behalf) and other third parties in countries which do not have the same level of data protection laws as those in the country where you are located.

Sony uses a variety of legal mechanisms, including EU Standard Contractual Clauses, to help ensure that your rights and protections will travel with your data. This is why each of those Sony group companies (and their authorised data processors) will comply with Sony’s internal policy relating to processing of personal information which complies with the key data protection principles of fair handling of personal information and ensuring adequate level of protection of personal information.

Please contact us if you want to receive further information regarding international data transfers. You will find contact information at the end of this policy.

Marketing communications

In short

How does Sony use your personal information to send you marketing communications and how can you change your marketing preferences?

When you provide us with contact details, such as when you purchase a product, contact our customer support call centres or create an account for one of our services, you may be given the opportunity to opt-in to (or in certain cases where applicable law allows, opt-out of) receiving various newsletters and other communications by post, email, telephone and/or text message (SMS) from Sony and/or other Sony group companies. These communications may include, for instance, details about the latest Sony products and services, including upgrades and special offers in which you may be interested.

Sony may also use your information to personalise and to target more effectively its marketing communications as set out in this policy. When we use customer profiles for direct marketing purposes, you have the right to object to this kind of personal information processing at any time you wish to do so. You can contact us using the details in the “Contact us” section below to change your preferences.

You can change your marketing communication preferences at any time:

• If you would like to unsubscribe from an email sent to you, follow the ‘unsubscribe’ link and/or instructions placed (typically) at the bottom of the email. But note that:
  • If you use more than one e-mail address to shop or contact Sony, you will need to unsubscribe separately for each email address
  • This method will only unsubscribe for newsletter or other communication that you have received and you should use one of the other methods if you wish to opt-out of all our marketing communications
• You can contact us using the details in the “Contact us” section below in order to change your marketing communication preferences

Please note that we may occasionally send you important information about Sony products and services that you are using or have used (such as order confirmations, product safety announcements and service changes) or your accounts. These emails are not affected by your marketing communication preferences.

Security of your information

In short

How does Sony protect your personal information and what can you do to protect yourself?

What we do to protect your information

We take a number of steps to protect your information from accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure or access, including where appropriate:

• Using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption when collecting or transferring sensitive information, such as credit card details (SSL encryption is designed to make the data unreadable by anyone but us)
• Limiting access to the information we collect about you (for instance, only those of our personnel who need your information to carry out our business activities are allowed access)
• Putting in place physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards in line with industry standards

What you should do to protect your information

As general best practice on the Internet, it is recommended that individuals take great care with user accounts, and follow some basic rules:

• Do not use trivial passwords (such as single dictionary words)
• Do not use the same password for multiple accounts
• Do use very long passwords (at least 10 characters, but preferably much longer)
• Do use passwords which contain a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters e.g. $%^& etc.
• Do keep passwords securely (never written down, or shared with anyone) and changed periodically

Cookies and web beacons

In short

What are cookies and web beacons and how are they used?

Our websites use industry-wide technologies, such as “cookies” and “web beacons”, to collect information about the use of our websites and email communications. For instance, these technologies may tell us which visitors clicked on key elements (such as links or graphics) on a website or email and recognise your browser the next time you visit our websites. More information about our use of cookies and web beacons can be found in our Cookie policy.

Access to your information and your rights

In short

How can you access your personal information and what are your rights?

If you would like a copy of the personal information that we store about you in our customer databases, please contact us using the details given in the “Contact us” section below.

This is in addition to your legal rights, including the right to access a copy of your personal information, the right to request the deletion or updating of any inaccurate personal data and the right to object, in some cases, to our processing of your personal data. You can exercise these rights by contacting us using the details given in the “Contact us” section below.

Where we base processing on your consent, you have the right to withdraw consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal.

You may also have, for some data processed by us, a right to data portability, i.e. the right to receive your personal information in a structured, commonly used machine-readable format and transmit your personal information to another data controller.

You can exercise these rights by contacting us using the details given in the “Contact us” section below. You may be asked to provide some proof of identification so that we can verify that it is you making the request.

If you are concerned that we have not complied with your legal rights or applicable privacy laws, you may contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (www.ico.gov.uk) (which is the regulator responsible for data protection in the United Kingdom, where Sony is located). Alternatively, if you are located outside of the United Kingdom, you may contact your local data protection authority.

Retention of personal information

We will only retain your personal information for as long as is reasonably necessary for the various purposes set out in this policy or to otherwise comply with any applicable laws and regulations concerning the mandatory retention of certain types of information.

Links to other sites

In short

Does this privacy policy extend to websites visited when following links on our website?

Some of our websites may contain links to other websites that are not operated by Sony, including websites operated by other Sony group companies.

While Sony tries to link only to sites that share Sony’s high standards and respect for privacy, we are not responsible for the content, security or privacy practices of those other websites. You should view the privacy and cookie policies displayed on those websites to find out how your personal information may be used.

Children’s privacy

In short

How does Sony handle the personal information of children?

Sony considers a child to be anyone under the age of 16. We do not knowingly seek or collect personal information from or about children without the consent of a parent or guardian.

If Sony becomes aware that personal information that has been submitted to us relates to a child without the consent of a parent or guardian, Sony will use reasonable efforts to:

• Delete that personal information from its files as soon as possible
• Ensure, where deletion is not possible, that this personal information is not used further for any purpose, nor disclosed further to any third party

Any parent or guardian with queries regarding our processing of personal information relating to their child should contact us using the details provided in the “Contact us” section.

Contact us

In short

How can you contact Sony about your personal information?

Sony UK Technology Centre Limited, an English company with its business address atPencoed Technology Park, Pencoed, Bridgend, United Kingdom, CF35 5HZ, is the controller of your personal information.

You can contact us in the following ways:

1. Via our online web form:

sony.co.uk/support/en/contacts/pim/email

2. By email

You can contact us by emailing privacyoffice.SEU@sony.com.

3. By mail:

You can write to us at The Privacy Office c/o Sony Legal Department, The Heights, Brooklands, Weybridge, Surrey KT13 0XW, United Kingdom.

4. By telephone:

If you are calling from England, Wales & Scotland, please dial 0844 8466 555

9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday.

4p per minute from a standard BT line, charges from other networks may vary.

If you are calling from Northern Ireland or Eire, please dial (00 353) 1 413 1771 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday.