Who is responsible for your data
Discern is a trading name of Discern Search Ltd, registered in England and Wales (company number 17377332), with its registered office at 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. Discern Search Ltd is the data controller for the information described here.
If you have a question about this notice or want to exercise any of your rights, email privacy@discernsearch.com.
What is collected
Almost all of the personal data held comes directly from you when you fill in the contact form, send an email or communicate during an enquiry or engagement.
- Contact details
- Your name, role, email address and any phone number you choose to provide.
- Organisation details
- Your company name and website and, where relevant, the website or business an enquiry concerns.
- Enquiry information
- What you write in the form or email, including the situation, timing, decision and services you may need.
- Correspondence
- Emails, notes of calls and any documents you send during an enquiry or engagement.
- Aggregate website usage
- Anonymous statistics about pages viewed and referring sites, as explained under Analytics and cookies.
Please do not send special category data, such as health, political or religious information, through the contact form. It is not needed and there is no reason for Discern to hold it.
Why it is collected and the lawful basis
| Purpose | Lawful basis | Retention |
|---|---|---|
| Responding to an enquiry and scoping possible work | Legitimate interests: responding to someone who has approached the business about its services. | 24 months from the last contact if no engagement follows. |
| Delivering an engagement and communicating during it | Performance of a contract or steps taken at your request before entering one. | The duration of the engagement, then six years. |
| Invoicing, accounting and tax records | Legal obligation. | Six years after the end of the relevant accounting period. |
| Understanding aggregate website usage | Legitimate interests: improving the website. No individual is identified. | Not personal data; retained in aggregate. |
Where legitimate interests are relied on, the assessment is that a business enquiry carries a low privacy impact, the data is limited to what you choose to send, and you can object at any time.
Analytics and cookies
This website does not use tracking cookies, advertising cookies or cross-site trackers. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.
Plausible Analytics is used to understand aggregate website usage. Plausible does not use cookies or persistent identifiers to track individual visitors, does not share data with advertisers, and reports aggregate statistics such as pages viewed, referring sites, country and broad device type.
Who the data is shared with
Personal data is not sold and is not shared for marketing. It is processed by a small number of suppliers that provide the tools needed to run the business:
- Email and file storage for correspondence and documents relating to enquiries and engagements.
- Website hosting and forms to run this site and deliver form submissions.
- Analytics through Plausible Analytics, which reports aggregate usage.
- Accounting and invoicing for financial records and tax compliance.
- Professional advisers, such as accountants or legal advisers, where genuinely necessary.
Each supplier acts under appropriate contractual terms and may only use the data to provide its service. Data may also be disclosed where required by law.
Where an engagement involves working alongside another specialist, this will be agreed with you in advance and their role disclosed.
International transfers
Some suppliers are based outside the UK, principally in the EEA and the United States. Where personal data is transferred outside the UK, it is protected through an applicable UK adequacy regulation, the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, or the UK extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, as appropriate to the supplier.
Confidentiality
Information you send about your business, website or a transaction is treated as confidential. Discern works under NDA as standard for due diligence engagements and is happy to sign one before you share confidential material.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law, you may have the following rights:
- Access
- Ask for a copy of the personal data held about you.
- Rectification
- Have inaccurate data corrected.
- Erasure
- Ask for data to be deleted where there is no continuing reason to hold it.
- Restriction
- Ask that processing is paused while a concern is resolved.
- Object
- Object to processing carried out on the basis of legitimate interests.
- Portability
- Receive certain data in a portable format.
To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@discernsearch.com. A response will normally follow within one month.
If you are unhappy with how a request has been handled, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. You are welcome to raise the issue directly first, but you are not required to do so.
Changes to this notice
This notice may be updated from time to time. The date at the top shows when it was last changed.