Privacy policy

Access Self Storage ('we' or 'us') are a 'data controller' for the purposes of the GDPR.  This means we are responsible for, and control the processing of, your personal information. The person responsible for how we handle personal information is Alastair Bishop (dataprotection@accessstorage.com).

Personal information provided by you

We collect personal information about you (such as your name, postal address, email address, phone numbers, date of birth, payment details) when you sign up to participate in or receive a service from us, such as getting an online quote, live chat, make a telephone enquiry, reserve a unit online, manage your account online, check-in online, or face to face if you come to our site to sign a storage agreement. We may also collect personal information when you contact us, send us feedback, complete customer surveys and participate in any competitions. Our website also uses cookies (see “Use of cookies” section below) and collects IP addresses (which means a number that can uniquely identify a specific computer or other device on the internet).

Personal information provided by third parties

Occasionally we may receive information about you from other sources, which we will add to the information we already hold about you in order to help us provide services to you and to improve and personalise our service to you.

Personal information about other individuals

If you give us information on behalf of someone else, you confirm that the other person has appointed you to act on his/her behalf and has agreed that you can:

• give consent on his/her behalf to the processing of his/her personal data;

• receive on his/her behalf any data protection notices; and

• give consent to the transfer of his/her personal data abroad.

Sensitive personal information

We will not usually ask you to provide sensitive personal information. We will only ask you to provide sensitive personal information if we need to for a specific reason, for example, if we believe you are having difficulty dealing with your account due to illness. If we request such information, we will explain why we are requesting it and how we intend to use it.

Sensitive personal information includes information relating to:

• your ethnic origin

• your political opinions

• your religious beliefs

• whether you belong to a trade union

• your physical or mental health or condition

• whether you have committed a criminal offence

We will only collect your sensitive personal information with your explicit consent.

Children We do not knowingly collect personal data relating to children under the age of 16. If you are a parent or guardian of a child under the age of 16 and think that we may have information relating to that child, please contact us at customerservices@accessstorage.com. We will ask you to prove your relationship to the child but if you do so you may (subject to applicable law) request access to and deletion of that child’s personal data.

We gather information directly from you and also via our websites and mobile applications or ‘Apps’ and other technical systems. If you visit a storage facility, some personal data may be collected from monitoring devices and systems such as closed circuit TV (CCTV) and door entry systems at the site.

We may monitor and record communications with you (such as telephone conversations and emails).  We may do this for a number of reasons, such as to check the quality of our customer service, for training purposes, to prevent fraud or to make sure we are complying with legal requirements.

A cookie is a small text file which is placed onto your computer (or other electronic device such as a mobile telephone or tablet) when you use our website. We use cookies on our website and may also use other similar tracking technologies such as web beacons, action tags, Local Shared Objects (‘Flash cookies’) or single-pixel gifs on our website. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify you individually. We use analysis software to look at IP addresses and cookies to improve your experience as a user of our website. We do not use this information to develop a personal profile of you. If we do collect personally identifiable information, we will be up front about this. We will make it clear when we collect personal information and will explain what we intend to do with it.

You can set your browser not to accept cookies and the websites below tell you how to remove cookies from your browser. However, some of our website features may not function as a result.

For further information on our use of cookies, including a detailed list of your information which we and others may collect through cookies please see our Cookie Policy.

For further information on cookies generally visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.

We collect information about you for a number of reasons.

So that we can take steps to enter into a contract with you and provide services to you once that contract is in place, we collect personal information to:

• identify you and manage any accounts you hold with us;

• contact you for reasons related to the service you have signed up for or to provide information you have requested;

• deal with payment for our services;

• notify you of any changes to our website or to our services that may affect you;

• do a credit check—see 'Credit checking' section below;

• resolve disputes or collect overdue payments;

We also collect personal information to comply with our legal obligations, for example to comply with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing requirements.

So that we can make sure we give a high quality service, we collect personal information to:

• conduct research and analyse website visitor behaviour patterns;

• customise our website and its content to your particular preferences;

• improve our services;

• provide information that has been requested by you e.g. password reminders

• detect and prevent fraud;

• carry out security vetting;

• prevent offensive, inappropriate or objectionable content being sent to or posted on our sites or to stop any other form of disruptive behaviour; and

• promote competitions and offers through various marketing campaigns

• promote current or new products and/or services

If you agree, we will contact you to let you know about other products or services that may be of interest to you—see 'Marketing’ section below;

If we propose to use your information for any other uses we will ensure that we notify you first. If we need your consent to use your information for these other purposes, we will give you the opportunity to opt in or to refuse.  If you opt in, you will be able to opt out at any time.

We would like to send you information by post, email, telephone, text message (SMS) or automated call about products and services, competitions surveys and special offers which may be of interest to you.

Other businesses like Access Records Management or Box Storage For Me which are part of Access Self Storage Ltd within our group or which we have selected carefully may also send you similar marketing messages, depending on what you agree with us.

We will ask whether you would like us, our group companies and other businesses, to send you marketing messages by asking you to tick the relevant boxes when you complete our online enquiry form, come to our storage facility to sign a storage agreement or provide us with your contact details through another means.

If you have consented to such receive marketing from us, our group or other businesses, you can opt out at any time. See 'What rights do you have?’ below for further information.

We may contact you to let you know about any changes to the service you have signed up for or to provide information you have requested. Where you have opted to receive further information from us, we will invite you to participate in surveys about our services (but it is your choice if you wish to take part) and we will contact you for marketing purposes. You can tell us to stop contacting you for marketing at any time – see the section on your rights below. If you ask us to stop contacting you, you can also ask us to start again at any time.

When will we contact any other person about you?

If you provide us with details of any other person we can contact to discuss your account, we may contact that person and discuss and share the details of your account with that person and deal with that person in relation to your account as if that person was you.  We may particularly want to do this if we are unable to get in touch with you for any reason. If you change your mind, you can email or write to us and have this person taken off your account as an alternate contact person (see ‘How can you contact us?’ below).

We may disclose your personal data to:

• other companies within our group;

• service providers under contract with us to support our business operations, such as fraud prevention, debt collection, technology services and credit reference agents;

• our insurers and insurance brokers if you take out insurance cover through us;

• trade associations of which we are a member;

• law enforcement or government agencies in connection with any investigation to help prevent or detect unlawful activity;

• our business partners in accordance with the 'Marketing' section above;

• any person or agency if we need to share that information to comply with the law or to enforce any agreement we may have with you or to protect the health and safety of any person;

• any person who you have named as a person we can contact to discuss your account;

• any person who is your agent or representative, such as the holder of a power of attorney, a legal guardian or person administering a will;

• any person who we are negotiating with as a potential buyer of our business or property or if we are proposing to merge our business with another business;

• any person or agency deemed necessary to resolve disputes or collect overdue payments;

• credit card associations if specifically required;

If we pass data on to insurers, they may enter your data onto a register of claims which is shared with other insurers to prevent fraudulent claims. If we use an outside party to process your information, we will require them to comply with our instructions in connection with the services they provide for us and not for their own business purposes.

We will use technical and organisational measures to safeguard your personal data, for example:

• access to your account is controlled by a password and user name that are unique to you;

• we store your personal data on secure servers; and

• payment details are encrypted on the secure server.

We have strict security and confidentiality procedures covering the storage and disclosure of your information in order to keep it safe and to prevent unauthorised access.  We only allow certain authorised employees to have access to your personal information who need to use it to fulfil their job responsibilities. These employees are trained in the proper handling of customer information.  Employees who do not comply with our internal rules are subject to our usual disciplinary procedures.

While we will use all reasonable efforts to keep your personal data safe, you acknowledge that the use of the internet is not entirely secure and for this reason we cannot guarantee the security or integrity of any personal data that is transferred from you or to you via the internet. If you have any particular concerns about your information, please contact us (see ‘How can you contact us?’ below).

Our website contains links to websites and applications owned and operated by other people and businesses. These third party sites have their own privacy policies and use their own cookies and we recommend that you review them before you provide them with personal information.  They will tell you how your personal information is collected and used whilst you are visiting these other websites.  We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the content of these sites or the use of your information collected by any of these other sites and you use these other sites at your own risk.

What can I do to keep my information safe?

If you want detailed information from Get Safe Online on how to protect your information and your computers and devices against fraud, identity theft, viruses and many other online problems, please visit www.getsafeonline.org. Get Safe Online is supported by HM Government and leading businesses.

We may need to transfer your personal data to countries which are located outside the European Economic Area. Rest assured that we will always ensure any transfer is subject to appropriate security measures to safeguard your personal data.

We will hold your personal information on our system for as long as is necessary for the service you have requested or for the length of time set out in any contract between us, unless you have told us you want us to remove us from the system (see section “Right to be forgotten” below).

Right to request a copy of your information

You can request a copy of your information which we hold (this is known as a subject access request). If you would like a copy of some or all of it, please:

• email, call or write to us (see ‘How can you contact us?’ below)

• let us have proof of your identity and address (a copy of your driving licence or passport and a recent utility or credit card bill), and

• let us know the information you want a copy of, including any account or reference numbers, if you have them

We will not charge any fee for this service in most cases.

Right to correct any mistakes in your information

You can require us to correct any mistakes in your information which we hold free of charge. If you would like to do this, please:

• email, call or write to us (see ‘How can you contact us?’ below)

• let us have enough information to identify you (eg account number, user name, registration details), and

• let us know what information is incorrect and what it should be replaced with

Right to ask us to stop contacting you with direct marketing

You can ask us to stop contacting you for direct marketing purposes. If you would like to do this, please:

• email, call or write to us (see ‘How can you contact us?’ below). You can also click on the ‘unsubscribe’ button at the bottom of any email newsletter we may send you. It may take up to a month for this to take place.

• let us have proof of your identity and address (a copy of your driving licence or passport and a recent utility or credit card bill), and

• let us know what method of contact you are not happy with if you are unhappy with certain ways of contacting you only (for example, you may be happy for us to contact you by email but not by telephone)

Right to be forgotten

You can ask us to delete the data we hold about you in certain circumstance. You can do this if it is no longer necessary for us to hold the data for the purpose it was collected (for example if you are no longer a customer), or if we are using it without your consent or you have to ask us to delete it to comply with any of your legal obligations.  You can also do this if you originally gave your consent to us using your information and you want to change your mind, If you would like to do this, please:

• email, call or write to us (see ‘How can you contact us?’ below).

• let us have proof of your identity and address (a copy of your driving licence or passport and a recent utility or credit card bill), and

• let us know why you would like us to delete your data from our systems.

We will take steps to make sure the information is deleted from our systems and by any people who are processing your information for us unless we have to carry on using the information for legal reasons.

Please contact us if you have any questions about this privacy policy or the information we hold about you.

If you wish to contact us, please send an email to customerservices@accessstorage.com or write to us at 93 Park Lane, London, W1K 7TB or call us on 020 7297 4100

Changes to the privacy policy

We may change this privacy policy from time to time. You should check this policy occasionally to ensure you are aware of the most recent version that will apply each time you access our website.