Privacy notice

About this Notice

M K Soni Notaries is committed to protecting your personal information when you use our services.  This notice explains how we collect, retain and process your personal information in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Your personal information

Here we set out how the personal information that we collect about you will be used.

We are committed to observing relevant legal and regulatory requirements and employing appropriate security measures in order to protect your personal information.

Contacting Us

For the purposes of data protection legislation, MKSN Limited is a “controller” meaning that we determine the purpose and means of processing the information we collect from you.

If you ever have any questions, comments or complaints about this notice, or any of its contents, please contact us via any of the following means and we will be pleased to assist you: privacy@mksn.co.uk 

Information that we collect

This section details the types of information we collect from you and use the following information about you:

• information that you provide to us from time to time including through our website, where you request or use any of our services, or when you submit queries to us;
• if you contact us by any means, we will keep a record of that correspondence and information that you provide to us in that correspondence;
• details of transactions you carry out using our products or services;
• details of your visits to any of our websites.

How we use your information

General uses of information

We use information supplied by you:

• to confirm your identity and allow us to carry out checks in the interest of security and to prevent fraud;
• to provide you with notarial, legalisation and / or translation services;
• to improve the products and services that we offer;
• to respond to your queries;
• to carry out our obligations under any contracts entered into between you and us;
• to notify you about any changes to our services and/or our websites;
• to comply with legal and regulatory requirements that apply to us;
• for general statistical analysis

Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site.  See our Internet Cookies page for more details. 

Information used for marketing purposes

M K Soni Notaries and CyberStreet are trading styles of MKSN Limited. We may from time to time contact you by post and/or telephone (unless you are on the corporate TPS list or have explicitly requested us not to do so) to provide you with details of our other services and/or events that we think may be of interest to you.  We will not contact you by email and/or SMS about those products and services and/or events unless it is in our legitimate interests to do so or you have specifically consented.  

You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes at any time.  You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by:

• checking certain boxes on the forms we use to collect your data
• by replying directly to the marketing message
• or updating your direct marketing preferences.
• in case you wish to withdraw from all marketing communications, you can also unsubscribe from all marketing by clicking the appropriate link in any email you receive. 
• at any time by contacting us.

Lawful Basis of Processing

In terms of the legal bases we rely on to process your information, these are where the processing is necessary:

• for the performance of a contract with you for provision of our services or to take steps at your request prior to entering into such a contract;
• to comply with our legal obligations;
• for our legitimate interests in:
  • ensuring the quality of the services we provide to you;
  • communicating with you; and
  • statistical analysis; or
• where you have consented to such use.

We process your sensitive and special categories of information (this includes data concerning your health, personal data revealing your racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or data concerning sexual orientation) where we have asked for your explicit consent or otherwise where this is necessary:

• for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims;
• in the case that you have obviously made information public (e.g. on social media) we will process sensitive/special categories of information for the purposes of carrying out our legal obligations.

If provision of your personal information is a legal or contractual requirement or a requirement necessary to enter into a contract with us, and you choose not to provide it, we may not be able to perform some of the tasks we need to in order to provide certain products or services to you. If you do choose to provide your consent you can withdraw it at any time by contacting us.

Sharing your information

We will not pass your information onto third parties except:

• we will provide your information to our service providers to allow them to assist us with delivering the products or services that you have requested, under the following categories:
  • accountants
  • credit reference agencies
  • law enforcement agencies
  • lawyers
  • Information technology services suppliers
• law enforcement agencies and regulators where we are under a duty to disclose or share your information in order to comply with any legal or regulatory obligation, or if we reasonably consider that this is necessary to help prevent or detect fraud or other crime or to protect the rights, property, or safety of MKSN Limited, our customers or others;
• if we are under a duty to disclose or share your information with HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC);
• if our business, or any part of it, were to be acquired by a third party, in which case personal data about you as one of our clients would be one of the transferred assets;
• if you have consented to any disclosure to a third party.

Where we store and use your information

We do not transfer, use and/or store your personal information outside of the European Economic Area (“EEA”) and the UK.  We may update this situation from time to time and any changes will be communicated to you via an update to this privacy notice.

Transfers to our third party service providers are to enable them use and store your personal information on our behalf.  We will, however, put in place appropriate security procedures in order to protect your personal information.

Keeping your information

We will keep your information only for as long as necessary depending on the purpose for which it was provided. Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal information are available by contacting us.

When determining the relevant retention periods, we will take into account factors including: 

•          legal obligations (such as Notarial Practice Rules) under applicable law to retain data for a certain period of time

•          statute of limitations under applicable law(s)

•          (potential) disputes, and

•          guidelines issued by relevant supervisory authorities.

Otherwise, we securely erase your information once this is no longer needed. We delete data following a specific retention period based upon the type and risk of use. We review these retention periods from time to time.

Security

We take information security seriously and have deployed technological and organisational measures to keep personal data safe.  These measures are intended to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed.  For example:

• We limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know.  They will only process your personal information on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

• We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.

• where we are sending you attachments or  confidential email, we will utilise encrypted email as our part of our normal processing unless you expressly wish for us not to do so; and     

• We have automated (for example, for mailboxes) and manual deletion in place to delete data where it is not legally required to be retained  under our regulator's rules.  

Your rights

You have the right to be provided with clear, transparent and easily understandable information about how we use your information and your rights. This is why we’re providing you with the information in this notice.

Your rights in connection with personal information

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

• Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or that of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
• Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a "data subject access request"). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
• Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
• Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see above).
• Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
• Request the transfer of your personal information to another party in a machine-readable, commonly used and structured format.

If you want to review, verify, correct or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact the Data Protection Officer in writing.

The various rights are not absolute and each is subject to certain exceptions or qualifications.  

Your duty to inform us of changes

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes during your working relationship with us.

Fees

Normally you will not have to pay a fee to access your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights).  In some cases, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is clearly unfounded or excessive, or if you request multiple copies of the information. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with the request in such circumstances.

What we may need from you

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is another appropriate security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it.

Right to complain

If you wish to request further information about any of the above rights, or if you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, contact us (see above).

If you are not satisfied with our response to your complaint or believe our processing of your information does not comply with data protection law, you can make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”): https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/  or 0303 123 1113.

Changes to our privacy notice

We keep our privacy notice under regular review and any updates in the future will be posted on our website and the most recent version of this “Privacy Notice”.  Where appropriate, changes may be notified to you by post or email.