This Privacy Policy was last updated on August 16, 2023. Recent updates include clarification of wording and:

• More detailed examples of where you may give us your personal data and where else we may acquire it;
• More detailed examples of how we may use your data;
• More examples of how we may legally share your data;
• Information about how we work with Google products.

Mark Allen takes the privacy of your personal information very seriously and is committed to safeguarding your privacy and your personal information. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use and share your personal information.

The Mark Allen group is made up of several different companies. This Privacy Policy is issued on behalf of Mark Allen group so that when we mention “Mark Allen”, “Mark Allen group”, “we”, “us” or “our” in this Privacy Policy, we are referring to the relevant company in the Mark Allen group responsible for processing your personal data (being the “data controller”). The Mark Allen group comprises:

• The Airports Publishing Network Ltd
• MA Agriculture Ltd
• MA Business Ltd
• MA Dentistry Media Ltd
• MA Education Ltd
• MA Exhibitions Ltd
• MA Financial Media Ltd
• MA Healthcare Ltd
• MA Music, Leisure & Travel Ltd

This Privacy Policy relates to our websites, apps and other services, including subscriptions and events, that refer to or link to this Privacy Policy (each, a “Service”). By using a Service, you are subject to the terms and conditions of this Policy. This Policy may be supplemented by different or additional privacy statements, terms or notices applicable to a specific product or Service.  If those terms conflict with this Privacy Policy, the terms specific to the product or Service apply instead.

The Mark Allen group company that owns or administers the Service, as identified therein, is the data controller of your personal information provided to, or collected by or for, the Service.

This Privacy Policy will explain the following:

• What personal information we collect
• How we use your information
• How we share your information
• Your personal account
• Administrator data
• Your communication preferences
• Accessing and updating your information
• Data retention
• Data security
• Location of processing
• Changes
• Contacts

Information you provide to us

The types of personal information that we collect directly from you depends on the content and features of the Service you use and how you otherwise interact with us, and may include:

• Contact details, such as your name, email address, postal address and phone number;
• Account login credentials, such as usernames and passwords, password hints and similar security information;
• Other account registration and profile information, including educational, professional and other background information, such as your field of study, current position, practice area and areas of interests, gender, ORCID ID;
• If applying for a role with us or accessing our job sites, your CV and job preferences;
• Content that you upload and share or store in your account, such as annotations, comments, contributions and replies;
• Payment information, such as a credit or debit card number or bank account details;
• Information that you communicate to us, such as questions or information you send to customer support;
• Data that you provide to us as part of interacting with the Service, such as your favourites and search queries; and/or
• Communications preferences, such as the frequency, type and format of the alerts you sign up to receive.

Please note that not all of the information we request is mandatory to provide you with the Service. You are not required to provide any optional information.

Event filming and photography: We may photograph, film, broadcast or record our events in which case we may process information such as your voice, likeness and image if you are identifiable from such photograph, film, broadcast or recording.

Financial information: We will keep a record of any financial transaction you make with us. Online payments made through our websites are processed securely by the following third party payment providers: SagePay, Stripe, WorldPay, and Paypal. Please refer to SagePay’s Privacy Policy at https://www.sagepay.co.uk/policies/privacy-policy; Stripe’s Privacy Policy at https://stripe.com/en-gb/privacy; WorldPay’s Privacy Policy at https://www.worldpay.com/en-us/privacy-policy; and Paypal’s Privacy Policy at https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-prev for details of how your payment card data is processed by them.

We do not directly collect or process your debit or credit card information, except in limited circumstances where you provide us with a written order form, or provide debit or credit card details over the phone, and we update SagePay with these details. In such circumstances, we do not retain a copy of your debit or credit card details once the relevant payment has been processed.

Data from your institution or organisation

We may receive information about you from the institution or organisation with which you are employed or affiliated. This could be in order to activate and manage your access to and use of the institution’s subscription to the Service; to register you for an event; or to register you to receive one of our publications. The data received may include:

• Contact details, such as your name and institutional email address, postal address and phone number;
• Other account registration information, such as job title; and/or
• Institutional user ID.

Information collected through automated technologies

We may automatically collect certain information when you use our Services, either directly or through our third-party analytics providers. This information may include Internet Protocol (IP) address, browser type and settings, device identifier details, internet service provider (ISP), referring and exit pages, the Site content you interacted with, operating system, clickstream data, location data, or other usage information. We (and third parties acting on our behalf) may collect this information through certain tracking technologies, including first and third-party cookies, web beacons (also known as tracking pixels or pixel tags), embedded scripts, location-identifying technologies, device recognition technologies, and session replay software. We may combine the information collected through these technologies with other information we collect about you. We use this information to enable website functionality, understand website interaction trends, gather demographic insights about our user base, personalize your experience on our Services, and otherwise administer and improve our sites and Services. 

For more information about cookies, please refer to our Cookie Policy.

Data from other sources

We may obtain contact details and other information about you from third parties, such as: business partners and data processors in technical, payment and/or delivery services; advertising, marketing, digital and social media agencies; data brokers; analytics providers; academic institutions; journal owners, societies and similar organizations; search information providers; third parties who may recommend you as a potential author, reviewer, editor or contributor; and credit reference agencies.

If you choose to register and sign in by using a social media or other third-party account as an identity service (such as your Facebook or Google account), the authentication of your account is managed by that third party. Mark Allen will collect your name, email address and any other information that you agree to share with us at the time you give permission for your Mark Allen account to be linked to your third-party account.

We may also receive information about you from publicly accessible content, such as public databases or social media platforms. When we do collect publicly available data about you, we will abide by this Privacy Policy when we store and process it.

You should be aware that personal data (such as your name, social media handle, image, avatar, email address, or other identifier) that you voluntarily make publicly available by posting online to other users (e.g., on social media, forums, comments, or in chat rooms) could be collected and disclosed by others. Mark Allen cannot prevent or monitor the collection or disclosure of publicly available personal data you post online.

In accordance with United Kingdom data protection legislation, we will only process your personal data where we have a lawful basis for doing so. These bases are:

• where it is necessary for the performance of a contract we have with you;
• where it is necessary for us to comply with a legal obligation that we are subject to;
• where applicable, where you have provided your consent; or
• where it is in our (or a third party’s) legitimate interests, as described in the sections below, and where such interests are not overridden by your interests or fundamental rights and freedoms.

We are committed to delivering a relevant and useful experience to you. Depending on how you interact with us and the Service, we use your personal information to:

• Provide, activate and manage your access to and use of the Service (necessary for a contract and legitimate interests, of us and our customers, to ensure a good quality of service and security);
• Process and fulfil a request, order, download, subscription or other transaction (necessary for a contract);
• Register you for events and administer those events, including informing the venues where our events are hosted of any dietary or access requirements you may have told us about (necessary for a contract and necessary to comply with our legal obligations);
• Send you personalised communications which you have requested or may be of interest to you, where it is in our (or a third party’s) legitimate interests. These may include information about publications, webinars, events, surveys, product and service developments, promotions of our associated brands’ products and services.
• Verify your identity and details of your payment method or credit card amount (where payments are required) (necessary to comply with our legal obligations);
• Offer you customized content and other personalization to make the Service more efficient for you and more relevant to your interests and geography (legitimate interests, of us, to show you the most relevant content);
• Enhance and improve the Service, such as add new content and features (legitimate interests, of us, to enhance our service to you);
• Notify you about changes, updates and other announcements related to the Service (necessary for a contract and legitimate interests, of us, to ensure our customers are up to date with necessary information);
• Deliver targeted advertisements, promotional messages, and other information related to the Service, other services of ours and third parties, and to your interests (legitimate interests, of us and our partners, so that we can show you the most appropriate adverts);
• Provide technical, product and other support and help to keep the Service working, safe and secure (necessary for a contract);
• Meet legal, regulatory and compliance requirements (necessary to comply with our legal obligations);
• Aggregate information about you with other users (legitimate interests, of us, to better understand what services our users will be interested in);
• Identify usage trends and develop data analysis, including for the purposes of research, audits, reporting and other business operations, such as to pay royalties and license fees to third-party content providers, determine the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns, evaluate our business performance (legitimate interests, of us, so we can better understand those that use our products and services and improve our products, services, events and marketing practices), or in other ways pursuant to a customer agreement (necessary for a contract).

We may also use your personal information to:

• Respond to your requests, enquiries, comments or concerns (necessary for a contract);
• Invite you to submit or review manuscripts or otherwise participate in our publishing programmes (legitimate interests, of us, so we can maintain and improve our journals and magazines);
• Issue payments and statements, such as for royalties and editorial fees (necessary for a contract);
• Conduct and administer user testing and surveys (legitimate interests, of us, in helping us improve our services);
• Conduct and administer competitions and similar promotions (legitimate interests, of us, in offering an engaging product to our customer) and to deliver prizes (necessary for a contract).

We share your personal information in the following ways and contexts.

Our group companies and service providers

Depending on the Service provided, we share your personal information with our:

• Affiliates and companies within the Mark Allen group of companies; and/or
• Suppliers and service providers, including editors, reviewers, payment processors, customer support, website and platform hosting suppliers, email service providers, event venues and service providers, mailing houses, shipping agents and IT service providers;

to process the information as necessary to provide the Service, complete a transaction or fulfil your request or otherwise on our behalf. Before we share your personal data with any service provider, they must agree to comply with applicable laws, maintain strong data security, and only process personal data as we instruct.

We do not permit our third-party service providers to use the personal information that we share with them for their marketing purposes or for any other purpose than in connection with the services they provide to us.

Partner organisations

We may share your personal data with certain partners, including:

• If you access the Service through a subscription administered by your institution or organisation, we may share with them information about your usage of the Service, such as the number of items you downloaded, the results of any assessments, and other information you may enter into the Service (legitimate interests, of your institution/organisation, so they can understand how their staff/students/members are making use of the Service they have purchased);
• Where you have participated in a course or event in which we partner with third parties (such as a webinar or conference), we may share your information with the sponsor of the activity;
• When you visit an exhibition stand or attend a conference session at one of our events and allow your badge to be scanned, we may share your information with the stand owner/conference session provider;
• Where you a declare an affiliation to a funder, institution, and/or consortium, we may share your information with that organization and their service providers, at their request, necessary to the fulfilment of any of our services of which that organization is customer;
• Where your information is part of the published content to which Mark Allen is providing access;
• Where we have partnered with advertising partners to serve ads and/or collect certain information when you visit our Sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of greater interest to you; and/or
• Where, even if not described above, you have consented to such disclosure or we have a legitimate business interest in making the disclosure.

With other third parties

We may share your personal data where we have a good faith belief that disclosure is necessary to comply with the law or with legal process, to protect and defend our rights and property, to protect the safety or property of our users or the general public, or protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our Services. We may also share your personal data in connection with a corporate transaction, such as a transfer of a journal or other assets, merger, acquisition, consolidation, change of control, or other corporate combination.

Ad targeting

Digital advertising helps us fund our news and content and enables us to keep some of our content free to access. We and third-party advertisers may display digital advertising on our sites that is tailored to your interests and preferences so the online adverts you see are more relevant to you. We work with third-party advertising networks to fill unsold advertising space on our sites.

The ad networks exchange information through cookies, which allow them to recognise you when you visit any site that they work with (not just Mark Allen sites). Where we use cookies on our sites for advertising purposes, we ask for prior consent via the ‘cookie banner’ you are presented with on your first visit to our sites. The cookie information will be used along with other information we hold about you to display digital advertising that is more relevant to you. Where you do not provide your consent for digital advertising you will still see digital advertising on our sites, but this will not be tailored to your interests and preferences.

It is important to note that these ad networks will not know who you are: they will not know your name, or your email address, or your phone number (we may know those things because you’ve given them to us in other contexts, but we never share that information with them). The targeting is based on an anonymous profile that they create that we never see.

Data matching

Our websites use Google Analytics, a web analysis service provided by Google. In addition, our websites may use Google Adwords conversion tracking and remarketing and Google Signals, both services by Google. Google Analytics uses cookies to analyse and improve our websites based on your usage behaviour. Google Adwords uses cookies to measure the performance of advertisements and, where you have consented to personalised advertising, to show you individualised advertisements on websites that partner with Google. Google Signals compiles for us multi-platform data reports on Google users who have enabled personalised advertising. These reports are based on randomly sampled, aggregated, pseudonymised data, so your identity is not known to us or Google.

In addition, when you browse some of our websites or use our mobile applications and when you provide your email address on these (either to log in, or sign up to a newsletter, or similar) we may share it, in hashed, pseudonymised form with Google. Google uses this information to create a secure online identification code for the purpose of recognising you for cross-channel advertising. This code does not contain any personal information about you, and will not be used by Google or third parties to identify you. The code may be shared with our advertising partners and other third-party advertisers for the purpose of enabling interest-based or targeted advertising on our and other sites. 

You have the right to withdraw your consent or opt-out to the processing of your personal data in this way at any time via our Cookie Management Platform accessed via the ‘cookie settings’ link at the bottom of every webpage, or via your Google account.

Marketing communications

We may from time to time contact you by email, SMS, telephone or post about our products and services (including from all our brands within our business) that may be of interest to you (legitimate interests, of us, to promote our products and services, and of our customers, to keep them up to date with promotions, events and subscriptions which may be relevant to their professions and job roles). Further information about such marketing is below.

From the brand with whose website or event you registered, or the associated magazine/publication: We will also use your personal information to send you marketing about products, services and events of the brand with whose website or event you have registered.

From other brands within our business: We may also send you marketing about relevant products, services and events of other brands within our business which we think may be of interest to you.

Third-party data sharing

We may also share your personal information with sponsors, joint venture partners and other third parties with whom we have a commercial relationship, including entities for which we are acting as an agent, licensee, application host or publisher, that wish to send you information about their products and services that may be of interest to you, in accordance with data protection legislation (legitimate interests, of us and our partners, to promote our products and services, and of our customers, to keep them up to date with promotions, events and subscriptions which may be relevant to their professions and job roles).

You can opt out of having your information shared with third parties at the point at which you share it with us and when you receive any subsequent communication from us.

The Service may let you post and share personal information, comments, materials and other content. Any such contributions that you disclose publicly may be collected and used by others, may be indexable by search engines, and might not be able to be removed. Please be careful when disclosing personal information in these public areas.

Job sites

Where you apply for a job via one of our websites we share your application with the recruiter/employer advertising that job (consent). Where you indicate that you are happy for your CV and contact details to be made available to all other recruiters who have signed up to use our job websites, we share that information with them (consent). If you no longer want to make your CV and contact details available to all recruiters you can contact us at contactpreferences@markallengroup.com or edit your account settings, but please note that recruiters who have already been given access to your CV prior to you changing your preferences may still contact you.

Other reasons

We may share your personal data with a third-party auditing organisation (ABC) so they can verify aggregated statistics about circulation and usage of our products or review our policies, processes and procedures for compliance with relevant standards. You can view their Privacy Policy by visiting https://www.abc.org.uk/privacy-policy

We process personal data about individuals who feature in our publications, content and products, including information we have researched from publicly available sources (legitimate interests and for journalistic purposes).

We also use publicly available sources to research prospective customers in order to send them marketing information about products and services relevant to them (legitimate interests, to grow our business).

If you are submitting personal data on behalf of another person or are submitting personal data which may be used publicly on our products, you should only do so where you have the consent of the individual and it will be your responsibility to ensure that the individual is made aware of this Privacy Policy and our processing of their personal data.

Mark Allen Group secures the personal information you provide on computer servers in a controlled, secure environment, protected from unauthorised access, use or disclosure. Mark Allen Group ensures personal information is protected through the use of encryption, such as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol, when transmitted to other websites. We aim to have all our websites using SSL protocol.

If you are an administrator of an institution or organisation with a subscription to a Service, we will use your details to communicate with you about your institution’s subscription and related services. If you supply us contact information of your colleagues, we may include a reference to you when we contact those individuals with communications about the Service.

You can customise your communication preferences in several ways. Our customers always have the right to let us know that they no longer want to be contacted for marketing purposes. If at any point you would like to opt-out of receiving such marketing communications from us, or would like to change the channels that we use to contact you, please click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any emails you receive, or visit https://contactpreferences.markallengroup.com, or email us, stating your preferences, at contactpreferences@markallengroup.com

We reserve the right to notify you of changes or updates to the Service whenever necessary.

The Service may allow registered users to directly access their account information and make corrections or updates at any time. Keeping such information up to date is solely the responsibility of the user. Registered users may also close their account by contacting the Service’s customer support.

Under the UK and European General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), you have certain rights relating to the data we hold about you:

• The right to be informed (which this Privacy Policy will assist with)
• The right to access, correct or request deletion of the personal information that we hold about you;
• The right to object to or restrict our processing of your personal information, including for automated profiling;
• The right to portability of your personal information.

If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact us by emailing dpo@markallengroup.com or click here to submit a Data Subject Access Request. We will respond to your request within 30 days. To protect your privacy and security, we may require you to verify your identity. You may designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf subject to proof of identity and authorization.

We retain your personal information for as long as necessary to provide the Service and fulfil the transactions you have requested, or for other essential purposes such as complying with our legal obligations, maintaining business and financial records, resolving disputes, maintaining security, detecting and preventing fraud and abuse, and enforcing our agreements.

For personal information used by us for our own direct marketing purposes, we will retain the data whilst accurate or responsive and if not, delete it after 5 years.

We take precautions to safeguard your personal information against loss, theft and misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration and destruction through the use of appropriate technical and organizational measures.

Your personal information may be stored and processed in your region or another country where Mark Allen or our service providers maintain servers and facilities, including the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Singapore, and the United States. These countries may have privacy laws that do not provide the same level of protection as those of your country of residence. However, we take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your information is treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy and all applicable data laws. If we transfer your information outside the United Kingdom or European Union, we implement appropriate safeguards in accordance with applicable law (such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement).

We will update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated revision date. If we make any material changes, we may provide notice through the Service or by other means.

If you have any questions, comments, complaints or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or our processing of your information, please contact the Mark Allen group's Data Protection Officer via email (dpo@markallengroup.com) or by post:

Data Protection Officer
Mark Allen Group Ltd
St Jude’s Church
Dulwich Road
London SE24 0PB
United Kingdom

If you reside in the European Union, contact:

By email: markallen@datarep.com

By post: DataRep
The Cube
Monahan Road
Cork
T12 H1XY
Republic of Ireland

Online: www.datarep.com/data-request

You may also lodge a complaint with the data protection authority in the applicable jurisdiction. In the UK, contact the Information Commissioner’s Office: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/