You have trusted us to take care of your eyes or your hearing needs. You can also trust us with your personal details. Our privacy policy means we respect any personal information that you give us, or that we gather from your eye or hearing tests, when you buy any of our products and services, or during any other interactions with us.
- Information about us
- What personal information do you collect?
- How and why do we use your personal data?
- How long do you keep my information for?
- Who do you share personal information with?
- How do you process my personal information?
- Our cookie policy
- How can I update or change my personal information
- What rights do I have?
- What choices do I have?
- Protecting personal information
- Updating our Privacy Policy
- Contact us
In this privacy policy, references to Specsavers, we, us or our means the members of the Specsavers group of companies (Specsavers Group) that process your personal information, including each of those listed below.
I am a store customer (optician or audiology), a corporate eye-care customer or I use the Specsavers website
- Each Specsavers store is a company within the Specsavers Group. Details of each store company are available in the relevant store.
- Ireland Specsavers Hearcare Limited (a company registered in Ireland with company number 425212 and its registered office is at 2 Argyle Square, Morehampton Road, Donnybrook, Dublin 4, Ireland).
- Ireland Specsavers Limited (a company registered in Ireland with company number 422918 and its registered office is at 2 Argyle Square, Morehampton Road, Donnybrook, Dublin 4, Ireland).
- Specsavers Ireland Hearcare Limited (a company registered in Guernsey with company number 45244 and it’s registered office is at La Villiaze, St Andrews, Guernsey GY6 8YP).
- Specsavers Ireland Limited (a company registered in Guernsey with company number 44874 and it’s registered office is at La Villiaze, St Andrews, Guernsey GY6 8YP).
- Specsavers Optical Superstores Limited (a company registered in England and Wales with company number 01721624 and registered office at Forum 6 Parkway, Solent Business Park, Whiteley, Hampshire.
- Specsavers Optical Group Limited (a company registered in Guernsey with company number 12294 and its registered office at La Villiaze, St Andrews, Guernsey, GY6 8YP).
- Specsavers Hearcare Group Limited (a company registered in Guernsey with company number 35965 and its registered office at La Villiaze, St Andrews, Guernsey, GY6 8YP).
Specsavers Group are data controllers of your personal information for the purposes of any data-protection legislation that applies. For the purposes of data protection, Specsavers has a nominated person within the European Union. This is our Data Protection and Privacy Manager based in Denmark. You can contact them via dataprotection@specsavers.com.
In this privacy policy, when we refer to you, we mean the person whose personal information we collect, use and process. This includes anyone who contacts us in connection with the products and services we provide or who otherwise interacts with us including, for example, on our website at www.specsavers.ie (the website) or in store.
We may collect and process information about you including:
- your name;
- your date of birth;
- your contact phone numbers (including mobile);
- your email and postal address;
- your relevant health details including (a) current and past eye or hearing health conditions, general health conditions and glasses, contact-lens or hearing prescriptions, (b) current medication details, and (c) correspondence between your optometrist or audiologist and your GP or ophthalmologist;
- your examination and test results;
- your payment details;
- your employment, lifestyle and driving information;
- details of any prescription supplied to you by your healthcare professional or medical practitioner;
- information that you provide by filling in forms on our website;
- details of your visit to the website and any transactions you carry out on the website;
- Your image through CCTV cameras or other safety and security systems, or by body cameras worn by our mystery shoppers when they interact with our staff;
- any other information you have voluntarily given us.
We mainly collect this information from you when you give it to us voluntarily, but we may also collect it from other sources if it is legal to do so. This includes from healthcare providers, institutions or people you have authorised to provide information on your behalf (for example, parents or guardians), third-party service providers, government, tax or law-enforcement agencies, and others. We can also combine this information with information from public sources.
We may also collect personal information about you from your use of other Specsavers Group websites or services.
Your personal data is processed for the following reasons, so that we can provide you with the best possible eye and hearing health care and customer experience. We will only process your information if we have a lawful basis to do so. The lawful bases we rely on are;
We rely on our legitimate interests to provide you with a professional eye and hearing service in the most secure and appropriate way:
- To perform eye and hearing examinations so we can understand your eye / hearing health and any medical conditions
- To determine your prescription for eyewear / hearing needs and dispense your eyewear / hearing aids.
- To book your eye / hearing tests.
- To confirm your appointment. We'll send you a confirmation if you book online and a courtesy reminder will be sent a short period before the appointment is due.
- To contact you about changes to our service that could affect or inconvenience you.
- To send you eye test reminders. Changes in your eyesight are usually very gradual, so regular eye tests are important.
- To send you eye and hearing health communication regarding eye health and vision correction and how you can look after this.
- To send you direct marketing communications about our products, offers and discounts by post, email, sms, telephone and social media. You can opt out of these communications at any time.
- Survey and feedback requests to help us improve our service to you and make our services and products more relevant to you.
- To improve our products and services to you, we use data collected through the use of customer surveys, cookies and research. We carry out analytics on the information we hold about our customers to help us understand who our customers are, how they use our services, purchasing behaviours, and how people interact with us. This enables us to plan and optimise our business - for example, appointment attendance, maximise the effectiveness of our advertising, products, services and understand how our business is performing.
- If you are browsing our website, we will not collect any information which will identify you by name. However, we will collect information using cookies or traffic data which uses IP addresses or other numeric identifiers, which analyse how people use our website. See Cookies policy.
- To communicate with you as well as send you healthcare information, details of special offers and discounts relevant to you.
- So we can respond to complaints, queries and any claims made against us.
We rely on contractual obligations when we process your information to fulfil an arrangement, we have made with you:
- Administration of your online account
- To process any transactions when you purchase our goods and services
- To payment card processors to process credit and debit card payments and store payment information; for example Worldpay and Paypal
- So we can provide our products and services to you
- To meet our contractual obligations
We rely on legal obligations where we have a statutory or other legal obligation to process the information, such as for the investigation of crime:
- We may need to make your personal data available to other optometrists, medical practitioners, health and social care providers or the NHS
- Regulators may request information when carrying out their functions
- Other third parties who have a legal right to access personal data eg the police our insurers, external auditors and investigators
- Other companies who provide us with updated personal information e.g. changes to your contact information, deceased indicators
- If you choose to exercise your data rights e.g. a subject access request
- So we're able to meet our obligations as registered and dispensing optometrists and audiologist
- So we can respond to any complaints or claims we receive from regulators or other third parties
- Fraud prevention and detection
- Health and safety of members of the public, our staff and our customers
- Corporate requirements including mergers and acquisitions
- In addition, as permitted under applicable data protection law, we will also de-identify (anonymise) your personal data so that it does not directly or indirectly identify you for the following purposes: analytics, research, and publication, develop and improve future treatments, core healthcare technologies and related products and medicines.
We rely on your consent and ask you to provide explicit permission to process your data:
- To process your personal data within the Specsavers Group of companies
- When you enter a Specsavers competition
- When using facial scanning services to deliver personalized experiences eg Framestlyer in store and ‘Try on’ online
We and other members of the Specsavers Group will keep personal information for as long as is reasonably necessary (or as defined under healthcare laws and regulations which apply) to provide products and services, including aftercare services, and to maintain records as needed to satisfy tax and other legal or regulatory requirements, as well as to protect and defend against claims. Once it is determined that there is no longer a legal basis to retain your Personal Data, it may be deleted or anonymised where it can no longer be used to identify you directly or indirectly.
We de-identify (anonymise) your personal data so that it does not directly or indirectly identify you for the following purposes; concerning health for future scientific and historical research purposes, analytics, and statistical purposes to develop and improve new treatments and programs of healthcare, related services, and products.
We may share your personal information with other members of the Specsavers Group for any of the purposes set out in this privacy policy.
Each Specsavers store is operated by a company within the Specsavers Group. When you place an order for products or services in a store, the data controller of the personal information will be that store. Specsavers Optical Group will process that information, including any health information, on behalf of the store. Specsavers Optical Group also provides and processes IT, marketing and other services for each store and any associated personal information.
We may reveal your personal information to other people, including in the following circumstances.
- We use other organisations to help us process personal information but they are not allowed to use it for other purposes. We may use the information we receive from other organisations to add to and improve our databases of customer details.
- We may reveal personal information to health authorities or national equivalent bodies.
- We may pass personal information to external agencies and organisations, including the police and other law-enforcement agencies to prevent and detect fraud (including fraudulent transactions) and criminal activity. These external agencies may check the information we give them against public and private databases and may keep a record of those checks to use in future security checks.
- If a claim is made, or could be made, against us or other members of the Specsavers Group, we may pass personal information to our insurers.
- If we sell or buy any business or assets, we may reveal personal information about you to the prospective seller or buyer of that business or the assets.
- If we (or substantially all of our assets) are bought or taken over by another organisation (or there is a reorganisation within our corporate group), personal information we hold about customers will be one of the assets transferred.
- We may pass certain personal information to your employer, if you have been referred to us as a corporate eye-care customer.
- We may pass your personal information to others to keep to any legal obligation (including court orders), to enforce or apply our terms and conditions of use of website or other agreements we have with you, or to protect our rights, property and safety or those of our customers, employees or others.
- We may share an anonymised version of your email address to third-party social media sites, such as Facebook, to enable us to display marketing to you. When we do this, we use a process called ‘hashing’ to protect your details. This is where we scramble the plain text of your email address into a unique and irreversible collection of numbers and letters so that your email address cannot be recognised. When we do this, social media providers are only allowed to use your information to display our marketing to you through their site. You can update your social media privacy preferences on your own social media accounts.
- We may disclose an anonymised version of your personal information and/or clinical test results to third party equipment and technology suppliers or research institutions in order to help us (i) provide you with clinical care (including your eye or hearing test); (ii) to help us and those suppliers continually improve their products and test equipment (so we can in turn provide the best care for you); and (iii) for the purposes of clinical research.
Sometimes it may be necessary to share your personal information with our business partners (other organisations), or other members of the Specsavers Group who provide services for us. This may mean sharing your information outside of the UK, European Union (EU) and European Economic Area (EEA), including in the USA. Please note, when information is shared outside of the UK, EU and EEA, it may be handled according to local laws.
If we need to share your personal information outside of the UK, EU or EEA, we will make sure that the transfer is in line with data-protection law.
Our contracts with the overseas companies we share personal information with will include standard clauses which are approved by the European Commission for transferring information from the EU. Where necessary, we will put further measures in place to protect your information. These clauses, and any further measures, make sure that your information is protected in the same way as it would be in the UK, EU and EEA. If you would like a copy of our standard contractual clauses, please write to our Data Protection Officer at Data Protection Office, Forum 6 Parkway, Solent Business Park, Whiteley, Hampshire, PO15 7PA
Cookies are small pieces of information that are stored on your device when you visit a website or use an app. We use cookies to improve how our website runs.
You can update or change your personal information at your local Specsavers store, by signing in to your account (if you are a registered online customer), or by contacting customerservice@specsavers.co.uk.
You have certain rights under data-protection legislation, including the option to:
- access your personal information – we may charge a fee if we are allowed to do so by law;
- correct your personal information if it is inaccurate or incomplete;
- erase your personal information and prevent further processing in specific circumstances and where there is no other legal reason for us to continue keeping or processing that information. These include for example:
- if the personal information is no longer needed in relation to the purpose for which it was originally collected or processed;
- if you withdraw your permission;
- if you object to us processing your personal information;
- if you ask us to stop processing your personal information (although we are entitled to store your personal information, we cannot further process it if you ask us not to);
- if we move or transfer your personal information to another organisation; and
- if you object to us processing your personal information in the following circumstances.
- If processing is based on legitimate interests or carrying out a task in the public interest or when exercising an official authority.
- If information is processed for direct marketing.
- If information is processed for purposes of scientific or historical research and statistics.
To ask for any of the above rights, please contact your Specsavers store or if you are a registered online customer, contact customerservice@specsavers.co.uk or fill in an online form at https://www.specsavers.ie/news-and-information/customer-service/subject-access-request.
You have a right to complain to the Data Protection Commissioner. They can investigate whether organisations are keeping to data-protection law. See https://www.dataprotection.ie
We may use your personal information to contact you about our products and services.
If you do not want to receive marketing material, including special offers and discounts you can let us know in store, by emailing customerservice@specsavers.co.uk or phoning the customer service team on 01 506 0352.
You can choose to stop receiving marketing emails from us by following the unsubscribe link and instructions on the marketing emails we send you.
We use a variety of security technology and procedures to help protect your personal information from unauthorised access and use. Examples of these are shown below.
- Encryption, meaning that information is hidden so that it cannot be read without special knowledge (such as a password). This is done with a secret code or what’s called a ‘cypher’. The hidden information is said to then be ‘encrypted’.
- Using a different name for you so we can hide parts of your personal information from view.
- Controlling access to systems and networks as this allows us to stop people who are not allowed to view your personal information from getting access to it.
- Training our staff so we make them aware of how to handle information and how and when to report when something goes wrong.
- Regular testing of our technology and ways of working, including keeping up to date on the latest security updates.
We have no control over the contents of other websites or resources which are linked to our website. We accept no responsibility for them or the privacy practices they use, or for any loss or damage that arise from you using those websites or resources.
We may update our privacy policy from time to time. Any updates will take effect as soon as they are posted on our website.
If you have any questions about this privacy policy, or you would like to change any of the preferences you have chosen in store, online or write to our Data Protection and Privacy Manager based in Denmark via dataprotection@specsavers.com.
Last updated July 2023
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