Privacy policy

1. Who we are and how to contact us

We are Gocompare.com Limited, the owner and operator of www.gocompare.com. At Gocompare.com Limited we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We work very hard to keep your information safe and we want our use of your data to be secure. We follow strict procedures on how personal information is stored and used, and we also limit who sees it to help stop any unauthorised person getting hold of it.

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation 2021 (GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 and related laws, we have a legal duty to protect the personal information we collect from you. GDPR says that ‘personal data’ is any information relating to a living individual who can be identified, either directly or indirectly, from that information. This could include your name, email address, postal address or telephone number, or information collected online and used to identify you.

For the purposes of GDPR, Gocompare.com Limited (referred to as “we”, “us” and “our” in this privacy policy) is the controller responsible for personal information processed by it. 

We have appointed a data protection officer (DPO) to oversee our data protection and privacy practices. If you have any questions about this privacy policy please contact our DPO using the details below.

Group companies

Gocompare.com Limited is part of Future Plc (“Future”). Any reference to the Group within this Policy includes all or any of GoCompare.com Limited’s direct or indirect parent or subsidiary undertakings, joint venture partners, and their related companies wherever located in the world as may exist from time to time.

Contact details

Our contact details are:

Gocompare.com Limited
Imperial House
Imperial Way
Newport
NP10 8UH

If you have any questions or concerns about our use of data, please contact us online or email us at: customerservices@gocompare.com

Our DPO’s contact details are: dpo@gocompare.com

2. Changes to this privacy policy

We review this privacy policy annually and may also amend it from time to time, so we encourage you to check it periodically. If we make material changes we will endeavour to provide you with appropriate notice before such changes take effect.

3. What types of personal information we collect

Depending upon the way in which you use our website and the individual products and services you are looking to buy, we may obtain the following:

a. personal information so that we can identify who you are. For example, this information may include your name and date and place of birth;

b. personal information so that we can contact you. For example, this information may include your home address, your email address and your contact telephone numbers;

c. personal information so that we can help you find a product or service. For example, this information may include details about you and your financial situation, your work or profession or the risk you are looking to insure;

d. other more sensitive personal information so that we can help you find a product or service. For example, this information may include details about your health or criminal convictions and offences. This data is known as “special category data” and we will only collect this data if the law allows us to do so;

e. technical and/or behavioural personal information from ‘cookie’ and other tracking technologies. For example, this information may include details about how you browse our website and the devices and technology you use to browse our website. This may also include unique online identifiers such as device ID, device type and approximate location at the time of browsing and may link to your activity on other sites. We may use this to build a more detailed profile of you and your interests. For information on the cookies we use, please click here;

f. information for analysis and reporting purposes. We also collect statistical and analysis  data about your visits and activity on our sites, such as the pages you view, how long for and which links are followed. This helps us to improve the way we deliver content and the products and services offered to you. We also use this anonymised data to report on our performance. For information on the analytics cookies we use, please click here;

g. information from emails. The web beacons in our emails track the success of our marketing campaigns so if you open an email from us, we can see, for example, the pages of our website you visited and the devices used. Our web beacons don’t store any information on your computer but by communicating with our cookies on your computer we receive this information. We may keep track of the emails that we send you and may use the information we collect to personalise the emails we send to you. We also keep a record of the communications  you have selected to receive or not to receive, for example whether you would like to only receive brand marketing from a particular brand, or that you have agreed to receive emails deemed of interest to you from other brands within the Group. We may also use your email in a hashed, unidentifiable form to help us understand your online behaviour. This may in turn be used for analytics and targeting. If you would like to opt out of receiving such emails you can unsubscribe here or via the unsubscribe hyperlink in the emails you receive. For information on the web beacons we use, please click here; and

h. information from other sources, including Group companies. We may receive information about you from other sources such as business partners, Group companies and social media platforms, for example when you visit our Facebook page. Other information, such as inferred data and demographics data, may also be collected and used to combine and enrich profile information we hold on you.

4. How we use personal information, the lawful grounds upon which we rely and why

5. How we collect personal information

We collect personal information from you when you interact or engage with our website including when you register an account with us or compare products or services via our website. We may also collect personal information from you when you talk to us on the phone, by post or online including via email, social media and mobile device apps. We may also engage with you and hence collect personal information from you if you choose to provide feedback or take part in any of our other market research initiatives, customer surveys or competitions, prize draws or promotions. Occasionally, we may also collect personal information about you from third parties or publicly available sources, as set out above.

6. Who we may share personal information with

We may share personal information with or receive personal information from:

a. other members of our corporate Group. Future Group companies may use and share the information you provide, and other information held about you, for the purposes set out in this Policy. For more information about the Future Group please see the Future website and Privacy Policy. For more information see Section 8 How we work with Group companies.

b. approved partners and third party product providers; for example, we may pass relevant information to our third parties, in order for them to provide you with a quote tailored to your needs.

c. our approved third party data providers, including the DVLA if you give us your driving licence number;

d. our regulators and other regulatory bodies, including the Financial Conduct Authority and the Information Commissioner’s Office. Also industry associations with whom the Group has agreements for the sharing of such data;

e. law enforcement and fraud prevention agencies;

f. third parties to whom we may sell, transfer or merge parts of our business or assets or third parties whose business or assets we may acquire;

g. our third party suppliers (for example, IT software and service providers, marketing agencies and social media platforms).

h. third parties we use to collect feedback and reviews on our behalf;

i. with partner providers, when GoCompare provides you with an insurance product as part of the service; and

j. other third party service providers and partners who process personal data for content customisation, personalisation, ad selection, ad delivery, reporting and measurement purposes.

7. How our third parties may use personal information

We impose strict restrictions on the things that third parties may do with personal information that we give to them. For example, such third parties may process personal information that we give to them in order to:

a. assess your eligibility for the products or services which you have expressed an interest in;

b. determine your identity and the amount of your premium and hence carry out checks:

i. with fraud prevention agencies in order to detect and prevent financial crime, including fraud;

ii. with credit reference agencies, which will appear as soft searches on your credit report and hence should not adversely affect your credit profile;

iii. with public and private higher education sources in order to verify your student or graduate status; and

iv. against information they already hold about you (for example, if you are an existing member of their loyalty schemes or otherwise already known to their corporate group); and

c. share personal information with their insurance underwriters, approved third parties (such as the DVLA if you give us your driving licence number) and relevant industry databases (such as the Claims and Underwriting Exchange which holds information about incidents reported to insurers that may or may not have resulted in a claim);

d. conduct internal research (such as by analysing market trends and customer demographics) in order to develop the products and services which they offer; and

e. share personal information with fraud prevention agencies who will use it to prevent fraud and money-laundering and to verify your identity. If fraud is detected, you could be refused certain services, finance, or employment. Further details of how your information will be used by us and these fraud prevention agencies, and your data protection rights, can be found at https://www.cifas.org.uk/fpn.

If you intend to purchase products or services from any of our approved partners or third party product providers, you are strongly encouraged to read the terms of that partner’s or third party product provider’s own privacy policy in order to satisfy yourself as to the purposes for which your chosen supplier will use your personal information.

When you leave our website, you are also strongly encouraged to read the privacy policy of every website that you visit in order to satisfy yourself as to the purposes for which those third party website owners and operators will use any personal information you give to them.

8. How we work with group companies

As part of the Future Group, GoCompare receives information from, and shares information with, other companies within the Future Group. We may use the information we receive from them, and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customise, support, and market our services and their offerings. This includes:

• helping improve infrastructure and delivery systems;
• understanding how our services or theirs are used;
• promoting safety, security and integrity across the Future Group  e.g., securing systems and fighting spam, threats, abuse, or infringement activities;

In addition, a key way we share data across systems and Group companies is for advertising and targeting purposes. This can be based on your online behaviour on our sites, for example:

• When you go onto one of our brand sites we can track your behaviour on those sites, or any of our other sites across our Group companies, and use this to target advertising or email content to you. For example, if you use the GoCompare site, we can see if you later visited one of our other sites and you may see advertising based on this. If you would prefer to opt out, you can do so via the consent management pop-up.
• This also applies if you open an email from us and this takes you online as we can use the information from your online behaviour to later target marketing to you. So for example if you subscribe to Gocompare marketing emails and we see you have looked at iPhone content on our other sites we may promote phone insurance to you in GoCompare marketing emails. You can unsubscribe from emails at any time.
• We may also upload emails (in hashed, pseudonymous form) straight to the advertising data system and this enables us to identify the same non-identifiable user across devices. So we know, for example, that the person who looks at GoCompare house insurance on their phone and then another Future brand such as Ideal Home on their desktop is in fact the same non-identified person. You can unsubscribe from emails at any time.
• We can also use other data you have provided us with to enhance the non-identifiable online information we hold on you across our Group brands. For example if you gave details on your pet when searching for pet insurance on GoCompare then we can use this to enhance our non-identifiable profile of you. As a result you may receive advertising on pet products based on this information on other brand sites you visit across the Future Group. If you would like to opt out of this processing, please email DPO@gocompare.com using the subject line ‘Opt out of profiling quote data’.
• We may also use the other data you have provided to us, combined with your online behaviour, to personalise your email campaigns. For example, if you signed up to Gocompare marketing emails when searching for pet insurance, we may classify you as a ‘pet intender’ for marketing purposes. Later when you go online we may see you are also interested in content on houses and classify you as a ‘pet and house intender’. As a result you may see content on both pet and home insurance in the emails we send to you. You can unsubscribe from emails at any time.
  
  Please note in the above scenarios where marketing is involved, the emails you receive will only be from GoCompare, unless you have opted in to receive marketing from Group Companies.

9. What communications you may receive from us

The communications we send to our customers can be categorised broadly as “direct marketing communications” (which we send by email) and “service communications” (which we send by email and SMS).

a. Direct marketing communications

We understand that some of our customers like to receive only certain types of direct marketing communications. For us, this means drawing a distinction between our renewal reminders and our general marketing which includes our newsletters and information about our latest offers, products and promotions.

Because we draw a distinction between renewal reminders and our general marketing, you can choose to receive general marketing but not our renewal reminders and vice versa. Similarly, if you tell us that you do not want to receive renewal reminders or general marketing from us, we will not send any direct marketing communications to you.

You can notify us and stop receiving renewal reminders and direct marketing communications at any time by following the unsubscribe instruction on the correspondence you receive or by emailing customerservices@gocompare.com, giving your email address and details of the information you no longer wish to receive.

This also applies if you have elected to receive marketing from Group companies.

b. Service communications

Service communications may be sent by SMS and email. We do not rely on consent to send these messages since they broadly comprise of communications which:

i. we have a legal or regulatory obligation to send to you (such as communications which we are obliged by our regulator to send to you from time to time);

ii. we send in connection with the provision of our services to you (such as our “best price” email, which we send to you immediately following your use of our service in order to confirm the best price for a product or service which you have compared via our website); and

iii. we send so that we can provide services at your request (such as password reset emails, which you may ask us to send if you do not remember your login credentials but want to access our products and services).

10. International data transfer

Your personal data may be transferred to a country outside the UK or EEA if, for example, a provider is based outside the UK or EEA. If such a transfer requires us to apply additional safeguards to your personal information under European data protection laws, we will do so. These steps include implementing the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers of personal information to our service providers and business partners. To the extent applicable, we may rely on derogations as set forth in Article 49 of the GDPR for the transfer and onward transfer of personal information collected from individuals in the UK or EEA to the United States, and other countries that the EU views as not providing adequate data protection. Specifically, we may transfer such information to another party in accordance with our lawful basis for processing.

11. Protecting children's privacy

We do not knowingly collect personal information relating to children under the age of 16 and children under the age of 16 should not use this website.  If, in the future, we collect personally identifiable information from children in connection with our products and services, we will do so in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations including, without limitation, obtaining parental consent where necessary.

12. Social media accounts

We operate accounts on different social media platforms. If you visit one of our social media accounts we can usually only see information stored in your public profile on the social media platform, when you are logged in to your profile, while visiting our social media account; although we may process data that you provide to us when you contact us (for example: if you create a post, or send us a private message via Facebook).

If you visit one of our social media accounts, the operator of the social media platform also processes your data, regardless of whether you yourself have a profile on the platform. The social media platform also provides us with anonymous usage statistics, which we use to improve user experience. We do not have access to the usage data that the operator of the social media platform collects to create these statistics. For information on the social media platform operators and their privacy policies, click here;

In addition, some social media platforms, such as Facebook, use cookies that are stored on your terminal device when you visit our social media account, even if you do not have your own profile in the network or are not logged in. These cookies enable the social media platform to create user profiles based on your preferences and interests and to show you advertising tailored to these.  For information on the cookies we use, please click here;

13. Storage and retention of data

Your information is collected and stored on our secure systems, mainly based in the UK and European Economic Area (EEA). Where we use third party service providers to store data, we have appropriate agreements in place to ensure that your personal data is protected.

We hold personal data for a variety of different purposes and the length of time we keep your data will vary depending on the services or products we are providing and the purpose for which we are using your data.

We may keep your personal information for up to six (6) years following the date on which we last provided our products or services to you or only for as long as is reasonably necessary thereafter in order to:

a. respond fully to any questions or complaints;

b. evidence that we have treated customers fairly or satisfy some other legal, accounting, tax or reporting requirement; and

c. establish, exercise or defend legal claims in accordance with statutory limitation periods.

Once the purpose for using your data has been fulfilled, we will securely delete that data or anonymise your information (so that we, or anyone else, can no longer tell that data relates to you) unless we are required to retain the data longer for legal, tax or accounting reasons.

If one of our partners processes your data in order to provide you with a quote they will be acting as data controller but they should only hold that data for so long as is reasonable in relation to providing you with that quote. If you purchase a product then the service provider will keep your personal information in accordance with their own retention periods and so you should check their own privacy policy for further information.

14. Data security

The security of personal information is extremely important to us and hence we have put in place appropriate security measures to protect personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way.

In accordance with GDPR, we adopt appropriate technical and organisational measures to help prevent unauthorised access to your information and ensure data is held securely. We also require any third parties to whom we may transfer personal data to have appropriate security measures in place. We ask third parties to complete Data Security Questionnaires so we can be sure they are a safe place for your data.

15. Your legal rights

a. Right of access

You have a right to know whether we are processing your personal information. If we are processing your personal information, you also have a right to request copies of your personal information that we are processing and certain further information, including the purposes of our processing and the recipients or categories of recipients to whom we have disclosed (or will disclose) your personal information.

b. Right to rectification

You have the right to require us to rectify or complete any inaccurate or incomplete personal information that we are holding about you.

c. Right to erasure

You have a right to ask us to erase your personal information. This is also known as the “right to be forgotten”. We must erase your personal information following your request except in limited circumstances prescribed by law, such as where we need to retain your personal information in order to comply with a legal obligation or in order to establish, exercise or defend legal claims. In these circumstances, we will restrict our processing of your personal information by putting it “beyond use”. This means that your personal information is deleted from our website and retained only in a separate and restricted database, where it will not be processed for any purpose other than as detailed above.

d. Right to restriction of processing

You have a right to require us to restrict processing of your personal information where:-

i. you believe that the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate and we require reasonable time to verify the accuracy of that personal information;

ii. your personal information has been unlawfully processed by us but you do not want us to erase that personal information;

iii. it is no longer necessary for us to keep your personal information for the purposes for which they were collected by us but they are required by you for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims; or

iv. you exercise your right to object to processing and we require reasonable time to verify whether there are any overriding grounds upon which we may rely in order to continue that processing.

e. Right to data portability

If we process your personal information with your consent or because it is necessary for us to do so in order to provide our service to you, you may require us to move, copy or transfer that personal information to you or another third party in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format.

f. Right to object

You have a right to object to our processing of your personal information where we are processing that personal information on legitimate interest grounds. We will stop processing this personal information if you exercise your right to object unless there are overriding grounds upon which we may rely in order to continue that processing or unless that processing is necessary in order to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

You also have a right to object to our processing of your personal information for direct marketing purposes. You can object to our processing of your personal information for direct marketing purposes by unsubscribing here or via the unsubscribe hyperlink in any direct marketing messages which we may send to you. We will stop processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes if you request us to do so.

g. Right to withdraw consent

If we process your personal information with your consent, you have a right to withdraw your consent at any time. If you withdraw your consent, we may be unable to continue to provide certain services to you but we will inform you if that is the case.

Exercising your rights

If you wish to exercise any of your rights please contact: 

By email:  customerservices@gocompare.com

By post: Gocompare.com Limited, Imperial House, Imperial Way, Newport NP10 8UH

Our DPO’s contact details are: dpo@gocompare.com

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). If you have authorised a third party to submit a request on your behalf, we will ask them to prove they have your permission to act. This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request. We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. If this is the case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

No fee usually required

You will not usually have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the rights), however, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances. If we choose not to action your request we will explain to you the reasons for our refusal.

16. Further information

General information about data protection may be found at the Information Commissioner’s website: https://ico.org.uk/

For more information about cookies please visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org/ and for more information about how to manage cookies please refer to our Cookies Policy.

Information about direct marketing may be found at the Direct Marketing Association’s website: https://dma.org.uk/

To unsubscribe from all emails contact: customerservices@gocompare.com

If you feel you need to, you also have the right to make a complaint to us or the Information Commissioner’s Office at any time. We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO, so please do contact us in the first instance.

Last Updated: December 2021