To provide you with the advertising services you have ordered, we need information about you.

If you use Yell Direct, Yell Business or any of our other advertiser-focussed websites, you are in control of what information we collect about you, but if you choose not to share your information, you may not be able to access or use some areas of our websites.

Whenever you give us your personal information, legally we have to use it in accordance with the terms of various privacy laws, including the Data Protection Act 1998 (we refer to these laws in this privacy policy as the 'privacy laws').

We may contact you:

• about any product or service you have asked for or ordered, in order to provide you with that product or service;
• about any free line entry you have asked for, in order to process your request;
• about information you have asked for, in order to answer your request;
• if you have given us feedback, to discuss that feedback or ask your permission to publish it;
• if you have chosen to receive further information from us;
• to invite you to take part in surveys about our products and services (it is always up to you whether you want to take part); and
• for marketing purposes, unless you tell us to stop (for more information, please read section 4 – Direct marketing and how you can change your marketing preferences).

We offer you the chance to receive important news from the Yell group and information about our products and services, such as changes to the way you can use Yell Direct, Yell Business or any of our other advertiser-focussed websites and new services and special offers you might be interested in. We may use your order history to send you information we think you may be interested in.

Unless you tell us otherwise, when you sign up for a free line entry or register or attend one of our events, we will contact you every now and again to see if you are interested in buying any advertising from us. If you order any of our products and services, we will contact you every now and again with news from the Yell group, with information about our products and services and to see if you would like to renew or buy more advertising from us. We will ask you if you want to receive direct marketing if you:

• register for Yell Direct, Yell Business or any of our other advertiser-focussed websites;
• register or attend a Yell Live event or any other seminar, conference, workshop, training course or networking event we advertise and/ or provide; or
• enter a competition, prize draw or register for a promotion with any company in the Yell group.

Unless you tell us otherwise, we may contact you by phone, post, email, text message or any other way (electronic or otherwise). We will normally send you direct marketing by email if we have your email address.

If you would like us to stop sending direct marketing to you, we offer simple ways for you to tell us to stop. Whenever you receive direct marketing from us, we will tell you how to unsubscribe. Also, if you are registered on Yell Direct, you can change your marketing preferences at any time by logging on and changing the marketing preferences in "Your Profile". If you prefer, you can also change your marketing preference by phoning or writing to our customer services team using the address or phone number below.

If you tell us that you do not want to receive direct marketing, we will still contact you in order to confirm and carry out any requests or orders you make with us and for administration purposes.

If you previously chose not to receive direct marketing, but you have changed your mind and would now like to receive news, information and special offers from us, you can sign up again at any time through Yell Direct or Yell Business. Simply log on to your Yell Direct account and change the marketing preferences in "Your Profile". If you prefer, you can also change your marketing preference by contacting our customer services team using the details above.

We may need to share your information with other organisations to provide you with the products, services or information you ask for. We may pass your information to one or more of the following organisations:

• other companies in the Yell group;
• credit checking or screening service providers;
• payment processing organisations (such as PayPal);
• debt collection agencies;
• data processing companies;
• mailing houses working on our behalf;
• research students, universities and other research and development organisations;
• government and enforcement agencies, such as Trading Standards, and the police.

Occasionally, this may involve sending your information outside the European Economic Area. For more information, please read section 6 - Where we process your personal information.

Unless you ask us not to at the time we collect your personal details, we will pass them to Experian Limited, who may use them for marketing or sell them to other organisations for marketing purposes. If you do not want to receive direct marketing from Experian or these other organisations, you should contact them directly.

If you advertise with us, we may share any business address you give us with your customers on a case by case basis if there is a genuine consumer dispute, whether or not your address is published in your advertising and whether or not you agree for us to share it.

Every now and again, we receive requests for information from government departments, the police and other enforcement agencies. If this happens, and there is a proper legal basis for providing your personal information, we will provide it to the organisation asking for it.

When we use your information as described in section 2 - How we will use information we collect about you, this may occasionally involve sending your information outside the European Economic Area (EEA). Where we do this, we make sure that appropriate steps are taken to protect your personal information and your rights. By providing us with your personal information, you agree that we may transfer, store and process your information outside the EEA.

You can view and update your personal details quickly and easily by logging onto Yell Direct.

If you prefer, you can also update the personal details we hold by phoning or writing to our customer services team using the address or phone number below.

If you write to us, we may phone you to check the details that you have given us.

We take the security of your personal information very seriously. We have put in place technology and security policies which are designed to protect the personal information that we hold about you. We also follow the strict security procedures that privacy laws require. These cover storing, using and releasing any information you have provided, and preventing unauthorised access or use. For more information on how Yell Direct protects the security of your information, please read the Yell Direct Security Policy. For more information on how Yell Business protects the security of your information, please read the Yell Business Security Policy which is available on Yell Business. For more information on how the Yell Live Microsite protects the security of your information, please read our Yell Live Security Policy.

Our websites contain hyperlinks to websites that are owned and operated by other organisations. These websites have their own privacy and cookie policies, and we urge you to read them. They control how your personal information is used when you give it to these other organisations or they collect it with cookies. We do not approve any other websites and we are not responsible for any information, material, products or services that are on or accessible through those websites or for the privacy practices of websites run by other organisations. If you use these other websites you do it at your own risk.

A cookie is a piece of information that a website transfers to the cookie file of the browser on your computer's hard disk so that the website can remember who you are. Cookies can help to display the information on a website in a way that matches your interests. Most major websites use cookies. Cookies cannot be used by themselves to identify you. We use two types of cookie on our websites.

The first type is a 'session-based' cookie. This means that it is only saved on your hard disk for the time you are using our website. On our websites, this cookie helps the website to 'remember' that you are logged into the site. If you log in and then don't do anything for 20 minutes you will get a message telling you that your session has timed out and that you need to log in again. This is a security measure to help us protect your information.

We only use the second type of cookie on Yell Direct, not on Yell Business or any of our other advertiser-focussed websites. It stays on your hard disk for up to five years. This 'persistent' cookie helps us understand the number of different people coming to Yell Direct, rather than the total number of times the site is used. Without the persistent cookie, if you visited Yell Direct once each week for three weeks we would count you as three separate users. We also use them for research surveys, to make sure you are not invited to fill in a questionnaire too often, or after you have already done so.

We do not store any of your personal information in either type of cookie. We do not link cookies to information you have given us during registration. We only use cookies to help us make the services we offer on our websites better for all our advertisers.

If you do not want a website to create a cookie on your computer, most web browsers provide the option to disable them. However, our websites may not work properly if you reject our cookies.

If you want to know more about how cookies work and how to manage or delete them, visit the World Wide Web Consortium's website or visit the Interactive Advertising Bureau's website.

Web beacons

A web beacon - sometimes called a clear GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) or pixel tag - is a line of code that we have installed on some of our pages to help us learn more about how our visitors make use of the content and services that we offer, and to count how often people visit different areas of our websites. A web beacon is invisible to you and doesn't affect the content you see.

Web beacons help us provide a better service to you by allowing us to understand which areas of our websites are more popular with visitors than others. We do not use web beacons to collect any personal information about you, but they allow us to build up general information about how people use our sites. Certain pages on our websites may also contain web beacons put in place by our advertising agencies so that we can measure how useful our advertising on other websites is. Web beacon files let our agency recognise a unique cookie on your web browser, which in turn means we can learn which adverts bring users to our websites. The web beacon only records a limited amount of information that includes the cookie number, the page ID and the time and date you accessed the page. It does not contain your name, address, telephone number or email address.

Find out more about web beacons.

You have the right to ask us not to use your personal information for marketing purposes. We will usually tell you when we collect your personal details if we are planning to use them for marketing purposes or if we plan to pass them to any other organisation for marketing purposes. For more information, please read section 4 - Direct Marketing and how you can manage your marketing preferences.

You have the right to see information we hold about you (with some exceptions, which are described in the privacy laws). If you would like a copy of your personal information, you should contact our data protection officer. You will need to pay a processing fee of £10.

If you prefer, you can also change the personal details we hold by contacting our customer services team using the address or phone number below.

We may update this privacy policy from time to time so you may want to check it each time you give us personal information or look at or change your personal details on our websites.

We are a corporate member of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).

We welcome your questions, comments and requests about this privacy policy. Please contact our data protection officer.