PRIVACY POLICY

Your Privacy

At Matthews Opticians, we are committed to the highest privacy standards. However you choose to interact with us, we will only collect data that is necessary for us to deliver the best possible service and ensure you are reminded about appointments or anything else relevant to your ongoing care. This policy provides detailed information on when and why we collect your personal information, how we use it and the very limited conditions under which we may disclose it to others.

Collection of your Personal Information

In addition to your basic contact information (name, date of birth, telephone numbers and your addresses) we will collect other relevant details including current and past health and medication information, your examination results, payment details and lifestyle information. We may also store associated information received from other health care professionals as part of your ongoing care.

How we use this information

The information we collect about you is used to ensure we provide you with the best and most appropriate products and services. In addition to your ongoing eye care, we will remind you when appointments are due and suggest relevant products or services that we believe would be of interest. We use your contact information to respond to queries from you, and where appropriate your bank details to collect Direct Debit payments as agreed. We may occasionally contact you to ask for your feedback on the services we have provided and to offer the opportunity to trial new products.

Our policy on storage, processing, and retention of your information

To provision and manage our services, your data is stored and processed by Optix Software Ltd within their UK facilities that are certified to ISO27001. If we collect Direct Debits from you these payments will be processed by Eyecare Payments Ltd. Any third-party company is only permitted to process your data for the specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

We retain your information for as long as reasonably necessary to provide our products and services and to maintain records to satisfy tax and other legal requirements.

How and when we may share your personal information

Where necessary we may disclose your information to health care professionals including the NHS. We may also pass information to external agencies and organizations, including the police, for the prevention and detection of fraud and criminal activity. Should any claim be made, we may pass your personal information to our insurers and if our business is wholly or partially transferred to a third party, your personal information may be one of the transferred assets.

Your rights with respect to the Personal Information we hold

You are entitled to access the personal information that we hold on you; any such request should be made using our contact details below. If any data we hold is inaccurate, this will be corrected promptly on request. In certain circumstances, you can request that we erase your data which we will do where this would not prevent us from meeting our legal and regulatory obligations.

Updating your communication preferences

You may ask that we do not send you communications using any of the contact details we hold on our records, this may include your email, SMS, telephone and postal information. You may also request we restrict our communications to clinically necessary messages. Your personal preferences can be changed at any time by using the link at the end of every email and SMS message we send or by using our contact details below.

Use of cookies

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site. The table below explains the cookies we use and why.

Cookie: Cookie preference

Name: CookieControl

Purpose: This cookie is used to remember a user’s choice about cookies on ico.org.uk. Where users have previously indicated a preference, that user’s preference will be stored in this cookie.

Cookie: Language selection

Name: language

Purpose: This cookie is used to remember any selection a user has made about language on ico.org.uk, using the language selector, so that the site will be shown in their chosen language when returning to the site.

Cookie: Universal Analytics (Google)

Name: _ga, _gali, _gat & _gid

Purpose: These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our website. We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the website. The cookies collect information in a way that does not directly identify anyone, including the number of visitors to the website and blog, where visitors have come to the website from and the pages they visited.

Cookie: YouTube cookies

Name: PREF*, VSC*, VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE* & remote_sid*

Purpose: We embed videos from our official YouTube channel using YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode. This mode may set cookies on your computer once you click on the YouTube video player, but YouTube will not store personally-identifiable cookie information for playbacks of embedded videos using the privacy-enhanced mode.

PREF - * Expires after eight months

VSC - * expires at the end of your session

VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE - *expires after eight months

remote_sid - * expires at the end of your session

Cookie: Vimeo cookies

Name: player - vuid

Purpose: We embed videos from our official Vimeo channel. When you press play Vimeo will drop third party cookies to enable the the video to play and to collect analytics data such as how long a viewer has watched the video. These cookies do not track individuals.

Cookie: HotJar

Name and Duration:

_hjClosedSurveyInvites - 365 days

_hjDonePolls - 365 days

_hjMinimizedPolls - 365 days

_hjShownFeedbackMessage - 365 days

_hjid - 365 days

_hjRecordingLastActivity - Session Length

_hjTLDTest - Session Length

_hjUserAttributesHash - Session Length

_hjCachedUserAttributes - Session Length

_hjLocalStorageTest - Under 100ms

_hjIncludedInPageviewSample - 30 Minutes

_hjIncludedInSessionSample - 30 Minutes

_hjAbsoluteSessionInProgress - 30 Minutes

Purpose: These cookies are used to track the customers experience and use of the website. We use this information to improve the functionality of the website and improve the customer experience. The cokkies do not collect information that would directly identify anyone.

Cookie: Wix

Name and Duration:

XSRF-TOKEN - Session Duration

hs - Session Duration

svSession - 2 Years

SSR-caching - 1 Minute

_wixCIDX - 3 Months

_wix_browser_sess - Session Duration

consent-policy - 365 days

smSession - Session Duration

TS* - Session Duration

bSession - 30 minutes

fedops.logger.sessionId - 365 days

wixLanguage - 365 days

Purpose: wix - These cookies are used to maintain and improve the customers experience of the website. We uuse the information to identify registered members, monitor and analyze performance, operation and effectiveness of the platform and ensure the security and safe use of the platform.

Cookie: Facebook Pixel

Name:

c_user – 365 days

xs – 365 days

fr – 90 days

_fbp – 90 days

oo – 5 years

dpr – 7 days

wd – 7 days

presence – session duration

sb – 2 years

dbln – 2 years

csrf – 24 hours

Managing cookies

You can remove any cookies already stored on your computer and you can control how your web browser deals with cookies by changing your browser settings. However this may prevent you from using parts of our website.

Many browsers give a range of options for managing cookies, including obtaining consent for every cookie, blocking certain types of cookie and blocking cookies from unrecognised websites. Finally, you can set your browser to block all cookies however you should be aware that many sites will not work as smoothly as you are used to and some basic functionality that is dependent on cookies will not work at all.

The following links go to the relevant help sections for the major web browsers and explain how to manage your cookies:

Chrome
https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95647&p=cpn_cookies

Safari OS X
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Safari/5.0/en/9277.html

Safari iOS
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1677

Internet Explorer
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows7/How-to-manage-cookies-in-Internet-Explorer-9

Firefox
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Cookies?s=cookies&r=0&e=es&as=s

Android
http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=169022

Blackberry
http://help.blackberry.com/en/blackberry-q10/10.3.1/help/mwa1334238823957.html

Windows phone
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/howto/wp7/web/changing-privacy-and-other-browser-settings.aspx

We reserve our right to make any changes and updates to this privacy policy without giving you notice as and when we need to. Our most up to date privacy policy is always available on our website.

Last updated: November 2022

Contacting us

You can reach us using the contact details here.