Privacy Policy

Welcome to the British Toy and Hobby Association (“BTHA“) privacy policy.. This privacy policy sets out the basis on which any personal information we collect from you, or that you provide to us, will be used and processed by us in all circumstances other than in the context of a current or former employment relationship with us.

In particular, this privacy policy applies to:

  • our main website (btha.co.uk);
  • our Toy Fair site (btha.co.uk/toy-fair/)
  • our Make Time 2 Play mobile application;
  • the Make Time 2 Play website (maketime2play.co.uk);
  • our social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram (although please note that this policy only applies to our use of personal information collected from you on our pages, please refer to the privacy policies of the social media site operators for information about how they and other third parties might use your personal information);
  • offline activities which involve the processing of member, supplier or partner personal information.

“Personal information” refers to information which does or is capable of identifying you as an individual.

For the purposes of data protection law, your data controller is the British Toy and Hobby Association Limited (company number: 00388895) of BTHA House, 142-146 Long Lane, London, SE1 4BS.

Please read this policy carefully and re-visit this page from time to time to review any changes that may have been made.

  1. What information do we collect from you?

1.1        Browsing: when you use this website, certain limited information (such as your browser type and IP address) will be collected by us automatically.   We may also collect information about your usage of this website as you browse our website (see section 6 (Cookies and analytics) below).

1.2        Membership: when you register for membership of the BTHA (either as an individual, or on behalf of an organisation) you will be asked to provide certain information about yourself (including your name and contact details along with optional contact details for officers within your organisation e.g. health and safety officer).  You will be assigned a username and password for secure access to the website, which you can later change if you wish – we store this information securely and do not routinely access it.

1.3        Communications with us: we may also collect information about you from messages you post to the website or emails or letters you send to us.

1.4        Make Time 2 Play app: when you use the app, we collect information about your device type (e.g. iPhone, Android etc.) as well as your search requests.  We do not collect any other personal information or use cookies or other tracking technologies on the app.

1.5        Social media pages: from time to time, we will organise competitions on our social media pages (including, but not limited to, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Instagram).  We use the personal information you provide us with (for example, name, email address and postal address) solely for the purposes of administering prizes to competition winners.

1.6        Events: we collect personal information (such as name, contact details, job title) from organisations which attend or exhibit at our events, including the Toy Fair.

1.7        Suppliers: if you are a supplier to a BTHA company, we may collect and store you contact details and job title in order to manage our business relationship with you.

2. What do we use your information for?

We use your personal information to:

  • provide you with access to the members’ area of our website;
  •  answer your enquiries and fulfil any requests you make to us;
  •  send you member information to you from time to time, including newsflashes regarding topics we think will be of interest to you or where appropriate the relevant officer within your organisation;
  • organise competitions and administer prizes;
  • organise and arrange events;
  • manage a business relationship with you; and/or
  • improve our services to you, our websites and our applications by conducting analytics (where appropriate by using anonymised or aggregated datasets)

We do not actively disclose your personal information or make it available to third parties , other than as set out in section 4 (Transfers and disclosure of your information) and in connection with the purposes set out in our disclaimer.

3. How long do we keep your information for?

3.1        We will retain the personal information provided by you for as long as is reasonably necessary for the purposes listed in this policy.

4. Transfers and disclosure of your information

4.1        The information you provide to us will be held on our computers in the UK and may be accessed by or given to our staff or to any member of the BTHA group for the purposes set out in this policy or for other purposes approved by you.

4.2        We may share your information with third party service providers, for example to provide us with IT services in relation to our websites or our applications, or to help with the organising or running of our events.  These third parties process your information on our behalf, subject to our documented instructions.

4.3        We may also pass aggregate information on the usage of our site and services onto third parties, but this will not include information that can be used to identify you.

4.4        We reserve the right to disclose your personal information as required by law, or when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, request from a regulator or any other legal process served on us. Should any BTHA company be the subject of a takeover, divestment or acquisition we may disclose your personal information to the new owner of the business.

5. Collection of information by third parties

Our site contains links to other sites whose privacy practices may be different to ours. Please consult the other sites’ privacy policies as we have no control over information that is submitted to, or collected by, these third parties. Our social media pages are hosted by third party sites, and the privacy policies of those third parties should be reviewed alongside this policy.

6. Cookies and analytics

6.1          Our websites use cookies. A cookie is a text-only string of information that a website transfers to the cookie file of the browser on your computer’s hard disk so that the website can remember who you are. A cookie will typically contain the name of the domain from which the cookie has come, the “lifetime” of the cookie, and a value, usually a randomly generated unique number. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our site and also allows us to improve our site and services.

6.2         We use cookies in the following ways:

6.2.1      where they are essential to make our site work;

6.2.2      to enable us to personalise the content of the site for you;

6.2.3      to compile anonymous, aggregated statistics that allow us to understand how users use our site and to help us improve and monitor the structure of our site. We cannot identify you personally in this way.

6.3        We use both temporary cookies (“session cookies”) and long-term cookies (“persistent cookies”).  Session cookies are automatically deleted at the end of each browsing session, whereas persistent cookies are stored in between browsing sessions so that we can remember things about you when you return to our websites and personalise or improve your browsing experience.

6.4         Disabling / enabling cookies

You have the ability to accept or decline cookies by modifying the settings in your browser. However, you may not be able to use all the interactive features of our site if cookies are disabled.  You can learn more about cookies and how they work at www.allaboutcookies.org or www.youronlinechoices.eu.

6.5        Our Make Time 2 Play application does not use cookies.

6.6        In addition to cookies, we may use third party web analytics services on our websites or applications, such as those of Google Analytics. To disable Google Analytics, please download the browser add-on for the deactivation of Google Analytics provided by Google at http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en, To learn more about privacy and Google Analytics, please consult the Google Analytics overview provided by Google at http://www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/privacyoverview.html.

7. Security

We employ proportionate security measures which aim to protect the information provided by you from unauthorised or unlawful access, use, loss, disclosure, destruction or damage. However, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our websites; any transmission is at your own risk.

8. Your rights

You have the right to request a copy of the personal information that we have collected and maintain about you.  If you think any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate, you may also request it is corrected. You also have a right, in certain circumstances, to require us to stop processing your personal information.  If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please email us at [email protected]. We may  charge a small fee to meet out costs in providing you with these details and we may ask for proof of your identity.

9. Changes to our privacy policy

We reserve the right to make changes to this policy at any time.  Any changes we may make to our privacy policy in the future will be posted on this page.

10. Contact us

All comments, queries and other requests relating to our use of personal information should be addressed the customer services team at [email protected] or by post to The British Toy & Hobby Association, BTHA House, 142-146 Long Lane, London, SE1 4BS.

Last revised 17/02/17