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Supplying Volkswagen Group Approved Genuine Parts and Quantum Consumables to the trade since 2006
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Cookie and Privacy Statement

 

Cookies

What are cookies?

"Cookies" are small text files that are stored on your computer or mobile device when you visit a website.

They allow the website to recognise your device and remember if you've been to the website before.

Cookies are very common web technology - most websites use cookies and have done for years. Cookies are widely used in order to make websites work more efficiently, as well as providing information to the owners of websites.

Cookies are used to measure which parts of the website people visit and to customise your experience. Cookies also provide information that helps us monitor and improve the website's performance.

You can read more about the different types of cookies that we use on this website on this page.

To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set on your computer and how to manage and delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

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Our cookies

We use cookies to enhance the performance of our website and personalise your online experience.

Cookies help us to collect information on how people use our website and which pages they visit. It enables us to monitor the number of visitors and to analyse website usage patterns and trends.

We collect this information anonymously, so it doesn't identify anyone as an individual and no personal information is stored in our cookies. We always use cookie data in a responsible way.

Our aim is to continually improve the online experience. Cookies help to make our website work better and more efficiently. However if you want to find out more on how to disable cookies you can do so here www.allaboutcookies.org.

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Types

  • DSID - Used for Google Advertising, on non-Google sites is named ‘DSID‘ and is stored in browsers under the domain doubleclick.net
  • IDE - Used for Google Advertising, on non-Google sites is named ‘IDE‘ and is stored in browsers under the domain doubleclick.net
  • _ga - Used for Google Analytics. Used to distinguish users. These cookies help optimise the website by allowing us to track generic website usage statistics.
  • _gat - Used for Google Analytics. Used to throttle request rate. If Google Analytics is deployed via Google Tag Manager, this cookie will be named _dc_gtm_.
  • _ga - Used for Google Analytics. These cookies help optimise the website by allowing us to track generic website usage statistics.
  • frontend - A functional cookie required by our web servers to respond to your actions. This cookie is required for the website to work, it sets a unique ID for the user.
  • external_no_cache - A functional cookie required by our web servers to respond to your actions. Indicates if caching is disabled or enabled.

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Privacy Statement – The Volkswagen Group Trade Parts Specialists

 

Trade Parts Specialists (“TPS”), a trading division of Volkswagen Group United Kingdom Limited (“we”/“us”) is committed to protecting and respecting your personal information.

We, in partnership with our TPS centres, distribute genuine Volkswagen trade parts to trade customers, such as independent workshops. If you are an owner, employee, contractor or otherwise work for one of our customers, this privacy statement applies to you.

This statement describes what types of information we collect about you, how it is used by us, how we share it with others, how you can manage the information we hold on you and how you can contact us.

For the purposes of data protection laws, we are a ‘controller’ of your personal information which means we decide why and how it is processed.  It also means we are responsible for that processing, which extends to those of our subcontractors who process your information based on our instructions.  We work with other, more independent, organisations in connection with some of the processing activities described in this statement, such as social media platforms, dealers, repairers and our group companies.  Where that information is collected and sent to other organisations for processing that is in both our and their interests and we make decisions together in relation to that particular processing, we will be ‘joint controllers’ with the organisations involved.  As joint controllers, we and the other organisations involved in making these decisions will be jointly responsible to you under data protection laws for this processing.  In other circumstances, the organisation receiving your information will be separately responsible to you and use your personal information in the ways described in its privacy statement (and not ours).

We will always give you the option not to receive marketing communications from us. We will never send you unsolicited ‘junk’ email or communications, or share your data with anyone else who might. We do not sell your information to third parties, but we do work closely with selected partners who help us to provide you with the information, products, parts and services that you request from us or our TPS centres.

The contents of this statement may change from time to time so you may wish to check this page occasionally to ensure you are still happy to share your information with us. Where possible, we will also contact you directly to notify you of these changes.

This version of our Privacy Statement is effective from 01/02/2023.

 

What information do we collect?

We collect information about you when you engage with us, whether through any of our TPS centres, websites, social media channels, applications or customer services centres. We only collect information which is necessary, relevant and adequate for the purpose you are providing it for.

We also obtain information about you from credit reference agencies, such as Experian, and other sources mentioned below. Some of this information does not identify you personally, but provides us with information about how you use our services and engage with us (we use this information to improve our services and make them more useful to you). The personal information we collect include some or all of the following:

  • Name (title, first and last name);
  • Business legal name;
  • Business address (or personal address where you operate your business from your personal address);
  • Time at address (if personal address is used as your business address);
  • Up to 3 years historic address history (if personal address is used as your business address);
  • Time and date of TPS deliveries or visits;
  • Photographic ID;
  • Job title;
  • Account Number (customer ID);
  • Vehicle Registration Number (VRN) relating to trade parts;
  • Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) relating to trade parts;
  • Business email address (or personal email address where this is used for business purposes);
  • Telephone number and/or mobile number;
  • The website address from which you accessed our websites;
  • Place of work;
  • The pages you visited on our website and how long you visited us for;
  • Your IP address;
  • Cookie, pixels or beacon information (for more information please see our Cookies Policy https://tps.trade/cookies-and-privacy#cookies;
  • Any personal information within correspondence you send to us;
  • Voice recordings of telephone conversations made to our contact centres;
  • Feedback collected via surveys;
  • Debtor information;
  • Payment history;
  • Payment information and type (cash, cheque, card or credit account);
  • Purchase information;
  • Details of warranty or goodwill claims;
  • Proof of delivery photographs taken upon delivery;
  • Digital or manual signatures upon receipt of delivery or payment.

 

How do we use this information?

We will only process personal information that is necessary for the purpose for which it has been collected. You will always have the option not to receive marketing communications from us (and you can withdraw your consent or object at any time). We will never send you unsolicited ‘junk’ email or communications, or share your personal information with anyone else who might.

There are various ways in which we use or process your personal information. We list these below:

Consent

Where you have provided your consent, we may use and process your information to:

  1. Contact you from time to time about promotions, events, products, services or information which we think may be of interest to you.

You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us at TPS-unsubscribe@vwg.co.uk or, in relation to any marketing messages you receive, by using the unsubscribe option included in those messages.

 

Contractual performance

We may use and process your personal information where this is necessary to perform a contract with you and to fulfil and complete your account registration, your orders, purchases and other transactions entered into with us. If you are a sole trader or other unincorporated business, this will include:

  1. To review your application and, if successful, make a decision as to how we will trade with you (e.g. cash sales, credit account, credit limit, discount applicable);
  2. If successful, to create and register your account, so that you are able to purchase through us;
  3. To manage your rebates and rewards;
  4. To process your purchases and returns.

 

Legitimate Interests

We may use and process your personal information as set out below where it is necessary for us to carry out activities for which it is in our legitimate interests as a business to do so.

 

Processing necessary for us to support customers with sales and sales enquiries

  1. For the purposes listed above under the section ‘contractual performance’ if you work for a corporate business and we process your personal information on the basis that you work for that business;
  2. To respond to correspondence you send to us and fulfil the requests you make to us (for example: parts delivery, promotions requests or information about specific products);
  3. To provide product support and services;
  4. To correspond with you in relation to any service messages, such as changes to opening hours/delivery services and ETA status updates on deliveries;
  5. To notify you of the opening of new TPS centres or delivery services (which we send, in the case of emails or SMS messages, if you work for a corporate business);
  6. To deal with any parts/warranty claims;
  7. To undertake credit reference checks (for example through Experian);
  8. To recover any debt owed by you to us (we will instruct our debt recovery agent to recover the debt on our behalf). If payment is not made, your details (name, address, contact information, vehicle registration, VIN Number, information supplied on sales orders of reference for VIN and security parts) will be passed on to our debt recovery agent (see “How do we share this information” below); and
  9. To deal with any complaints, feedback or issues you may raise.

 

Processing necessary for us to respond to changing market conditions

  1. To analyse, evaluate and improve our products and services so that your visit and use of the TPS centre or website or any related services, is more useful and enjoyable (we will generally use personal information amalgamated from many people so that the resulting information doesn’t identify you personally);
  2. To undertake market analysis and research (including contacting you with surveys) so that we can better understand your needs and provide tailored offers, products and services that we think you will be interested in.
  3. For product development purposes (for example to improve our products and performance);
  4. In some cases we may use automated methods to analyse, combine and evaluate information that you have provided to us (including the sharing of your personal information within our group of companies (see details about our group companies for a full list). We collect and analyse this information in this way so that we can deliver the most appropriate and customer experience to you by tailoring and making relevant all our service and communications.

 

Processing necessary for us to promote our business, brands and products and measure the reach and effectiveness of our campaigns

  1. To contact you from time to time with marketing information (unless you object) if you have expressly indicated to us that you are acting on behalf of a business. In relation to any such information we send by email or SMS, we will include an option allowing you to object to receiving future messages by unsubscribing;
  2. To contact you with targeted advertising delivered online through social media and other platforms operated by other companies, unless you object. You may receive advertising based on information about you that we have provided to the platform or because, at our request, the platform has identified you as having similar attributes to the individuals whose details it has received from us. To find out more, please refer to the information provided in the help pages of the platforms on which you receive advertising from us;
  3. To identify and record when you have received, opened or engaged with our website or electronic communications (please see our Cookie Policy for more information);
  4. To administer competitions and promotions that you enter with us from time to time and to distribute prizes;
  5. To administer ,’buy now pay later’ applications and agreements.

 

Processing necessary for us to operate the administrative and technical aspects of our business efficiently and effectively

  1. To verify the accuracy of information that we hold about you and create a better understanding of you;
  2. For network and information security purposes i.e. in order for us to take steps to protect your information against loss, damage, theft or unauthorised access;
  3. For systems administration purposes, including systems testing and data migration;
  4. To comply with a request from you in connection with the exercise of your rights (for example where you have asked us not to contact you for marketing purposes, we will keep a record of this on our suppression lists in order to be able to comply with your request);
  5. To inform you of updates to our terms and conditions and policies.

 

Legal Obligation

We may process your personal information to comply with our legal requirements (for example for warranty claims).

 

Vital Interest

Sometimes we will need to process your personal information to contact you if there is an urgent safety or product recall notice and we need to tell you about it.

 

How do we share this information?

We do not sell your information to third parties, but we do work closely with third party suppliers who fulfil business activities for us (like credit reference agencies, debt recovery companies, management of customer rewards programme suppliers and market research firms.)

 

Suppliers. We may from time to time disclose your information to the following categories of companies or organisations to which we pass the responsibility to handle services on our behalf: customer contact centres, direct marketing communications agencies and consultants, market research and market analytics service providers, credit reference agencies, debt recovery agents, customer rewards programme suppliers, software providers, cloud storage providers, TPS centres our legal and other professional advisors

 

Retailers. We will also share your information with our dealer/retailer network in situations where we need to pass your information to them in order to manage any request or warranty claim you have made to us.

 

Group companies. There are circumstances where we share your information with our parent (or other companies within our Group) in order to provide course and training information, fulfil orders, transactions, handle complaints or provide you with a service or information that you have requested. For example we will share information with our group companies where you make a complaint to us and later make the same or similar complaint to them. For more information, please see their privacy statement.

 

Social Media Platforms.  We use a number of different social media platforms to communicate with you and to promote products and services. We process your personal information using these platforms in a variety of ways, as follows:

 

Pages.  We use your personal information when you post content or otherwise interact with us on our official pages on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok and other social media platforms.   We also use the Page Insights service for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to view statistical information and reports regarding your interactions with the pages we administer on those platforms and their content.  Where those interactions are recorded and form part of the information we access through these Page Insights services, we and the relevant platform are joint controllers of the processing necessary to provide that service to us.

 

Cookies.  We use cookies and similar technologies in our websites and applications to collect and send information to Meta (who owns and operates Facebook and Instagram) and LinkedIn about actions you take on our website and applications.  In particular:

  • Meta uses this information to provide services to us and also for further processing for its own business purposes.  We and Meta are joint controllers of the processing involved in collecting and sending your personal information to Facebook using cookies and similar technologies as each of us has a business interest in Meta receiving this information.   You can find out more about these technologies by visiting our Cookie Policy. The services we receive from Meta that use this information are delivered to us through Meta’s Business Tools, which include Facebook Pixel, App Events SDK and Website Custom Audiences.  These tools allow us to target advertising to you within Meta’s social media platforms by creating audiences based on your actions on our website and applications and allow Meta to improve and optimise the targeting and delivery of our advertising campaigns for us.  
  • We use LinkedIn Insight Tag, a small piece of code that we embed in our websites that allows us to perform in-depth campaign reporting and unlock insights about users that may visit our websites via our LinkedIn campaigns (e.g. by allowing us to discover business demographics by layering LinkedIn data on data about our website visitors).  LinkedIn Insight Tag enables the collection of metadata such as IP addresses, timestamps, and events such as page views.  You can find out more about these technologies by visiting our Cookie Policy.  

 

Our relationship with Meta and LinkedIn. As we are joint controllers with these platforms for certain processing, we and each platform have:

  • entered into agreements in which we have agreed each of our data protection responsibilities for the processing of your personal information described above;
  • agreed that we are responsible for providing to you the information in this privacy statement about our relationship with each platform; and
  • agreed that each platform is responsible for responding to you when you exercise your rights under data protection law in relation to that platform’s processing of your personal information as a joint controller.

Meta and LinkedIn also processes, as our processor, personal information that we submit for the purposes of matching, online targeting, measurement, reporting and analytics purposes.  These services include the processing these platforms carry out when they display our advertisements to you in your news feed at our request after matching contact details for you that we have uploaded to them.  These advertisements may include forms through which we collect contact information you give to us.

 

Further information. The Meta company that is a joint controller of your personal information is Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, 4 Grand Canal Square, Grand Canal Harbour, Dublin 2, Ireland. The LinkedIn company that is a joint controller of your personal information is LinkedIn Ireland Unlimited Company, Wilton Place, Dublin 2, Ireland.   For further information regarding these platforms and their use of your personal information, please see:

 

We take steps to ensure that any third party partners who handle your information comply with data protection legislation and protect your information just as we do. We only disclose personal information that is necessary for them to provide the service that they are undertaking on our behalf. We will aim to anonymise your information or use aggregated non-specific data sets where ever possible.

 

Transfers of your personal information outside of Europe

Due to the international nature of our business, there may be some instances where your information is processed or stored outside of the UK and European Economic Area.  In those instances, we will take steps to ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place for that transfer and storage as required by applicable law.

These steps include imposing contractual obligations on the recipient of your personal information using standard clauses issued by the ICO (or other relevant body) and relying on decisions issued by the UK Secretary of State (or other relevant person) declaring that a country is adequately protective of personal information to a degree that allows us to safely transfer your personal information to that country.  Please contact us using the details at the end of this statement for more information about the protections that we put in place and to obtain a copy or access to the relevant documents.

 

How long do we keep your information for?

We will not hold your personal information in an identifiable format for any longer than is necessary. If you are a customer or otherwise have a relationship with us we will hold personal information about you for a longer period than if we have obtained your details in connection with a prospective relationship.

We do not retain personal information in an identifiable format for longer than is necessary.

 

Customer

If we have a relationship with you (e.g. you are or work for a customer), we hold your personal information for 6 years from the date our relationship ends. We hold your personal information after our relationship ends to establish, bring or defend legal claims. For clarity, if you have provided your consent, we will continue to send marketing to you during those 6 years unless you opt-out. Our relationship may end for a number of reasons including where you deactivate your account or we have been made aware that you no longer work for our customer.

 

Prospective relationships

Where we have obtained your personal information following a request for information, , quotation or any other information on any of our products or services, we hold your personal information for 1 year and 6 months from the date we collect that information, unless during that period we form a relationship with you e.g. you purchase products from our TPS centres or consent for us to send you marketing information.

If we have added you to our marketing list, regardless of whether or not we have a prospective relationship with you based on an information request, we will retain information we need to market to you for 3 years and 6 months from the date consent was given. Each time you provide your consent, the time period will refresh.

We hold your personal information for the above periods to give us an opportunity to form a relationship with you.

 

Exceptions

The only exceptions to the periods mentioned above are where:

  • The law requires us to hold your personal information for a longer period, or delete it sooner;
  • Where you have raised a complaint or concern regarding a product or service offered by us, in which case we will retain your information for a period of 6 years following the date of that complaint or query;
  • You exercise your right to have the information erased (where it applies) and we do not need to hold it in connection with any of the reasons permitted or required under the law (see further “How can you manage the information we hold about you); or
  • In limited cases, the law permits us to keep your personal information indefinitely provided we put certain protections in place.

 

How can you manage the information we hold about you

You have the right as an individual to access your personal information we hold about you and make corrections if necessary. You also have the right to withdraw any consent you have previously given us and ask us to erase information we hold about you. You can also object to us using your personal information (where we rely on our business interests to process and use your personal information).

You have a number of rights in relation to your personal information under data protection law. In relation to most rights, we will ask you for information to confirm your identity and, where applicable, to help us search for your personal information. Except in rare cases, we will respond to you within 1 month after we have received any request.

You have the right to:

  1. Ask for a copy of the information that we hold about you;
  2. Correct and update your information;
  3. Withdraw your consent (where we rely on it). Please see further How do we use this information;
  4. Object to our use of your information (where we rely on our legitimate interests to use your personal information) provided we do not have any continuing lawful reason to continue to use and process the information. When we do rely on our legitimate interests to use your personal information for direct marketing, we will always comply with your right to object;
  5. Erase your information (or restrict the use of it), provided we do not have any continuing lawful reason to continue to use and process that information;
  6. Transfer your information in a structured data file (in a commonly used and machine readable format), where we rely on your consent to use and process your personal information or need to process it in connection with your contract.

You also have the right not to be subject to purely automated decisions (including profiling) where this has a significant effect on you.  We do not envisage that any decisions will be taken about you in this way, however we will update this statement if this changes.

You can exercise the above rights and/or manage your information by contacting us using the details below:

The Data Protection Management Team
Legal Department
Volkswagen Group United Kingdom Limited
Yeomans Drive
Blakelands
Milton Keynes
MK14 5AN

Email: dataprotection@vwg.co.uk

 

If you have any specific data protection concerns or a complaint, you can address it to our Data Protection Team at dataprotection@vwg.co.uk.

If you are unhappy, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office, the data protection regulator in the UK. The contact details for the Information Commissioner’s Office are below:

Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Call: 0303 123 1113
Email: casework@ico.org.uk