A brief outline of the Data Protection Act
The Data Protection Act (1998) protects personal information
held about individuals and implements part of the European
Convention on Human Rights. It applies only to information
about individuals (such as names, addresses, personal
reference numbers, income, entitlement to benefits).
It does not apply to non-personal data, such as that
relating to businesses and limited companies. You have
a right to know what information is being held about
you, that such information is not kept for longer than
the purpose for which it was supplied requires it to
be, that it is relevant and required for the purpose
and that it is kept up to date. No sensitive data that
is either excessive or irrelevant to the purpose should
be either requested or held. Examples of sensitive
information about an individual might include information
about racial or ethnic origin, political opinions,
religious or other beliefs, membership of a Trade Union,
physical or mental health or condition, sexual life,
alleged or actual commission of any offence, proceedings
for offences committed or alleged to have been committed
and their outcomes.
Your right to privacy - how we implement the requirements
of the Act
NVC is registered under the Data Protection Act 1998
and therefore conforms to all its requirements to protect
your personal information both physically and by not
releasing it to any other party without your explicit
consent. These principals apply whether you are a current
customer of NVC, have been a customer in the past or
have simply made an enquiry with us.
Where information about you is required by us it might
be on one of our which
we have sent to you by email, fax or post, or which
you have completed online on our website, or from
our website and completed on your desktop. Inevitably,
we will also have gathered some information that you
have given during telephone conversations, on emails,
faxes or in letters.
What forms you might be required to sign
When one of our forms requires your signature it is
always stated clearly and explicitly if you are thereby
giving your consent for us to pass this information
on to another party, and that it is necessary in order
for us to be able to provide the service you require
of us. The Act in fact requires that consent must be
both explicit and necessary. Therefore, requests for
your consent are restricted to applications for finance
made to us by you. In these cases alone, the information
provided on the form has to be passed on to the finance
company, who will in turn use it to check your creditworthiness
with a , the most commonly used of which are listed
below along with other useful addresses. We only use
major, well-known and reputable finance companies that,
in turn, only use well-known and reputable credit reference
agencies that are bound by, and implement rigidly,
the same principals of Data Protection as us.
Where explicit consent has not been requested to pass
information about you to another party, it is because
there is no need in this context to do so and therefore
none of this information is disclosed.
We do not sell or otherwise make available any information
to marketing, or data collecting organisations whatsoever.
Sometimes, if demand for our services is in excess
of our ability to cope with it, we employ agents or
sub-contractors to process information requests. They
are subject, by virtue of this relationship with us,
to exactly the same requirements of the Data Protection
Act as us, and to the terms of our privacy policy,
to which they have agreed. Where this happens, we have
previously vetted all agents or sub-contractors employed
by us and we hold copies of both their registration
under the Data Protection Act and their Consumer Credit
Licence.
There are some rare exceptions to the enactment of
our Privacy Policy for which the Act allows and which
the legitimate authority would have to justify in terms
of the existing legislation, but with which we would
be Legally bound to comply. These are defined under
a link entitled 'Principals of Data Protection' available
from the government Data Protection website at - http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk (Copy
and paste the URL into your browser's address bar)
. These mainly concern the administration of justice,
the enforcement of law and issues of substantial public
interest
Our website does not capture or store personal information,
other than logging the computer's IP address and session
information, for example, the duration of the visits
and the types of browsers used. The server recognizes
these anonymous data items and only uses them for system
administration and to provide crude statistics used
to evaluate the overall use of the site. An example
of the need to carry out these functions would be to
ensure that the site is always equipped to be able
to cope with current web traffic levels. We do not
use cookies for collecting user information from the
site.
Your information rights and procedures for checking
your own credit file are available from the government
Data Protection website (see link above).
The act itself can be read, if you wish, at - http://www.hmso.gov.uk (Copy
and paste the URL into your browser's address bar)
You might also like to read our page
on
