Privacy Policy

By submitting your details to askaboutgames.com via this website, you are deemed to have accepted these uses of your personal information.

Information we collect from you when you visit this site

We collect personal information from those visitors to www.askaboutgames.com who email us with consumer enquiries and complaints about traders, games, or publishers, with comments and complaints about askaboutgames.com, and with feedback on the site. Information collected may include personal details such as names and addresses, email addresses and details of individual queries. In addition, we collect information on the use of the site itself.

How we protect your privacy

Any personal information you provide will be held securely by askaboutgames.com in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998. This Act protects your personal information and ensures that:

• we only hold and process your information for purposes that we make clear to you in advance,

• we keep your information only for as long as we need to carry out these purposes,

• we will put in place appropriate measures that ensure your information is held and processed securely and confidentially.

How we use the information

Consumer enquiries and complaints

If you email askaboutgames.com with a consumer enquiry or complaint, we will use the information you have provided to advise you of your rights as a consumer, how to avoid consumer problems and how to address any problems you may have encountered. We may need to pass information you have provided to a partner organisation to address a problem you have encountered; we also share data with partner organisations to assist in the monitoring of trading activities and practices.

Comments and complaints about askaboutgames.com

If you have a comment on the service you have received - good or bad - we will use the information you provide to help us maintain and enhance our service to all our customers.

If you have a complaint about askaboutgames.com itself, we will use the information you provide to investigate your complaint. If your original enquiry or complaint was passed on to a partner organisation, we may also need to pass details of your complaint to them to help them investigate your complaint further.

Cookies and visitor statistics

Cookies are short files that a website can store on your computer when you visit the website. These files contain information about your use of a website and may contain personal details. Askaboutgames.com uses cookies to gather statistics on visitors' use of the site. We will use this information to make improvements to the layout of the site and to the information in it, based on the way that visitors enter, move around and leave the site.

When we might disclose information to parties outside askaboutgames.com and the DTI

Askaboutgames.com works with a wide range of partner organisations who monitor trading activities, help individuals to avoid consumer problems and/or resolve consumer problems they have encountered. We provide data on queries received to bodies which enforce consumer and other legislation (for example Local Authority Trading Standards Services and the Office of Fair Trading), and may provide your personal details to these organisations as part of this data.

If we wish to provide information to an organisation which does not have an enforcement role (for example a Citizens Advice Bureau), we will specifically request your consent before passing on your details.

This disclosure will take place in order that partner organisations can monitor trading practices, act to address a problem on your behalf, or so that they can identify problem traders and new scams. Any information about you that we pass to a partner will be held securely by that party, in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998, and used only to provide the services highlighted above.

In certain cases prosecutions may be taken by these partner organisations; in these cases they will contact you to seek permission to use information about you in these circumstances.

Please note that you are not required to provide your personal details to use the askaboutgames.com service, though if you choose not to this may affect the way we handle your query or complaint.

Askaboutgames.com may also use the data collected to produce statistical reports and information, which may be shared with partner organisations. Information on complaints will also be collated, and askaboutgames.com may use the combined data internally, or share it with any of the partner organisations listed above. We will not include your personal details in this combined data.

What you can do if you wish to see the information we hold about you

You have a right to request a copy of your personal details at any time to check the accuracy of the information held by askaboutgames.com. If you wish to do this, please write (explaining that your interest is in personal data maintained by askaboutgames.com) to the

Data Protection Officer,
Department of Trade and Industry,
Open Government and Data Protection Unit,
1 Victoria Street,
London SW1H 0ET

Links to other sites from the Askaboutgames.com website

Our website contains links to other websites, mainly those of other Government departments, but also to those of our partners and other organisations. This privacy policy applies only to our website. The DTI is not responsible for the privacy practices within any of these other sites. You should always be aware of this when you leave the www.askaboutgames.com site and we encourage you to read the privacy statement on any other website which collects personal information.