Privacy Policy & Cookies

Updated: 01 March 2022

Who we are

We are Social Firefly, a limited company based in Brighton & Hove, England, our registered company number is 10335520.

We run this website (www.socialfirefly.co.uk) and its sub-domains. We also use third party services to keep in touch with you and monitor the performance of our website and social media accounts. On this page you will find information about the data we collect about you and how we use it.

If you have any questions about this policy or want to know about the data we may have collected about you please email hello@socialfirefly.co.uk.

Our website is run on servers owned by SiteGround. You can read their privacy policy here.

What data we collect, why we collect it and how long we keep it

To help us understand how well our website is performing, provide you with the best experience possible, and keep in touch with you we collect some data, but we only do so with your knowledge and permission.
Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site (such as on our blog) we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

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. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

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.

Contact forms

When contacting us via our website’s contact forms we will receive the information you enter into the form – email, name, phone number and message – which is sent to our email address and managed via GMail. We do not store this data beyond replying to your contact request and subsequent emails.

Cookies

This site uses cookies – small text files that are placed on your device to help the site provide a better user experience. In general, cookies are used to retain user preferences, store information for things like shopping baskets, and provide anonymised tracking data to third party applications like Google Analytics and Facebook.

As a rule, cookies will make your browsing experience better. However, you may prefer to disable cookies on this site and on others. The most effective way to do this is to disable cookies in your browser. We suggest consulting the Help section of your browser or taking a look at the About Cookies website which offers guidance for all modern browsers.

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

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behave 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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website. If you are concerned about the data another website collects about you please contact the owner of that website.

Videos found on our website are embedded from and hosted by YouTube. You can read YouTube’s privacy policy here.

Analytics and advertising

We track visitors to our website using Google Analytics, which logs your activity on our website. This helps us work out how we can improve the site. We store the data collected indefinitely, so we can see how use of our website changes over time. You can read more about the information Google Analytics collects on their website here and read their privacy policy here.

We use Facebook Pixels to enable us to ‘re-target’ website visitors with Facebook and Instagram adverts, and help us understand the effectiveness of those ads. The Facebook pixel is small piece of JavaScript code that we have incorporated into each of our web pages, this piece of code provides a series of functions for transmitting application-specific events and user-defined data to Facebook – basically it tells us that you’ve visited our website and in some cases whether you’ve taken an action, like downloading something if clicking a button.

If you’d like to revoke permissions for us and other advertisers to use your data to target you with Facebook pixels you visit Facebook’s ad preferences page here.

You can read Facebook’s privacy policy here.

Our monthly round-up email

If you sign up to receive our monthly round-up with the latest social media news and tips we will hold your email address and name for as long as you wish to continue receiving it. You can unsubscribe whenever you wish, if you do we will delete you information.

To send this email and maintain our subscriber list we use Mailchimp. As well as enabling us to send send our emails and keep our list up to date it also tracks whether an email has been opened, clicked on, bounced from a recipient or been marked as spam.

Each month awe make sure information about unsubscribed email addresses is deleted.

You can read Mailchimp’s privacy policy here.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account with WordPress and 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.

Our social media

We have a number of social media accounts to which we publish our blog posts, other pages of our website, and news from others. We may also direct you to follow our accounts.

These accounts are:

– Social Firefly on Twitter (Privacy Policy)

– Social Firefly on Instagram (Privacy Policy)

– Social Firefly on LinkedIn (Privacy Policy)

– Social Firefly on Facebook (Privacy Policy)

Each month we use the analytics tools of these platforms to understand what works well and what our audiences like to see and don’t like to see – this helps us develop the content we use and provide you with a better experience across all of our communication channels.