Privacy Policy
NBS Privacy Policy
NBS Enterprises Limited (trading as NBS) (“we” or “us” in this policy) respects your privacy and will do its best to safeguard your personal information.
We sometimes need to collect and hold personal information so that we can deliver our services and products to you and/or your employer. If we do not collect such personal information, then we may be unable to provide you with the services and products you have requested or need to use in the course of your work.
This privacy policy tells you about our use of any personal information you give to us including via phone, by email, in letters, in web form or by using our services, products or online content or by applying for a vacancy with NBS. This policy also tells you about personal information we may obtain from sources other than directly from you.
Any changes we may make to our privacy policy in the future will be posted on this page (and, where appropriate, notified to you by email). Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to our privacy policy.
How to contact us about this policy
We hope that we can resolve any query or concern you may raise about our use of your information.
If you have any questions about how we may use your personal information, or have any concerns or wish to make a complaint about our handling of your personal information, please contact us by post at:
NBS Enterprises Limited (trading as NBS)
The Old Post Office
St Nicholas Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 1RH
or by email to privacy@theNBS.com.
We will investigate any complaints you notify to us and we will aim to ensure that any complaint and any queries you submit to us are resolved in a timely and appropriate manner.
The Data Protection Act 2018 also gives you the right to lodge a complaint with the relevant supervisory authority at any time. The supervisory authority in the UK is the Information Commissioner who may be contacted at https://ico.org.uk/concerns or telephone: 0303 123 1113. You can contact the ICO at any time if you have any concerns about how we collect or process your personal information, but we hope that you will contact us first to discuss your concerns and give us an opportunity to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
1. Who we are
NBS is leading the built environment with powerfully connected knowledge, products and services around the world. Please see “How to contact us” above for our full company details and who to contact if you have any concerns about how we collect and process your personal information.
2. What personal information we collect
Personal information means any information that identifies or can be used to identify you directly or indirectly.
When you use any of our services, products or online content, whether on your own behalf or your employer’s behalf, we may receive personal information about you.
The kind of information we collect and hold includes, but is not limited to:
- Your name (first and last name)
- Email address
- Telephone number and
- Company name
- Your profession
- CV and your right to work in the UK (if applying for a vacancy with NBS or its subsidiary companies).
We may also keep information about your use and payment for our services, products and online interactions with us.
3. Information about other people
Should you provide information to us about any person other than yourself, such as your employees, your suppliers, or your counter parties you must ensure that such third parties have been informed and understand how their personal information will be used and that they have given their permission or you have other lawful grounds under the data protection legislation justifying you disclosing it to us and for you to allow us to use it lawfully and in the ways outlined in this privacy policy.
4. How we obtain personal information
Directly by you
Most personal information we hold will be collected by us directly from you. For example you may provide personal information to us when you:
- Set up an NBS ID account
- Provide personal information on a subscription order form
- Complete a web form on our website
- Provide personal information to us via telephone, email, letter or your CV.
Not directly by you
There are certain circumstances where we may obtain your personal information without you providing that information to us directly. For example, if a recruiter provides your CV to us for consideration as part of a job application, or from an identity service provider (IDSP) providing documentation relating to your right to work in the UK. Or where your employer provides your email address to us in order to obtain user access for you to one of our subscription products, services or content.
We may also receive your contact information from one of the following third party lead providers:
| Provider | Information Provided | Privacy Policy |
| Cognism | • Name • Employer Company and Company Details • Office Location (Country and City) • Business Telephone Number • Business Email Address • Job Title
| https://www.cognism.com/privacy-policy |
Experian Information Solutions, Inc | • Corporate structure • Parent Company • Subsidiaries and Brands • Business Contact Information including address, telephone and email address
| https://www.experian.co.uk/privacy/privacy-policies |
| Solid Caddgroup Inc. t/a SolidCAD |
| https://www.solidcad.ca/privacy-policy |
| Diane Butterworth Ltd |
| https://www.dianebutterworth.com/terms-conditions |
| Advance TM Group Ltd |
| https://www.advancetmgroup.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/privacy-policy.pdf |
| Smart Marketing Works Ltd |
| https://www.smartmarketingworks.com/privacy-policy-2 |
We may also receive your contact information from the following partner organisation with whom we collaborate in order to provide a service to you:
| S&P Global, Inc. |
| https://www.spglobal.com/en/privacy/privacy-policy-english |
| RIBA |
| https://www.architecture.com/about/privacy-policy |
5. How we protect your personal information
We take appropriate and reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal information from loss, misuse, unauthorised access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction and to comply with our obligations under the data protection legislation.
We provide services to you from data centres with 24/7 physical security. Our data centres have international security accreditation including ISO 27001:2013 and ISO 9001:2015. All our data centres are based within the UK and EEA. We secure your connections to our services with TLS encryption.
Your personal information is logically separated from others' to ensure data segregation.
NBS ID accounts need a username and password to log in. You must keep your username and password secure, and never disclose it to a third party. NBS ID passwords are hashed, which means we cannot see your password. We cannot resend forgotten passwords; we will only provide instructions on how to reset them.
We restrict our access to your personal information by job role and limit staff access to your personal information to those individuals who have a genuine business need to access it. All employees receive regular security training and sign our information security policy annually. We have an ongoing programme to raise security awareness.
Although we make all reasonable efforts to prevent the loss or misuse of your personal information, we cannot guarantee your personal information will not be intercepted while being transmitted over the internet. Therefore, you acknowledge and agree that we assume no liability regarding the theft, loss, alteration, or misuse of your personal information during transmission.
6. How long your personal information will be kept
We will keep your personal information while you have an account with us or we are providing products and services to you.
Thereafter, we will keep your personal information for as long as is reasonable in the circumstances to ensure we can:
- respond to any questions, complaints or claims made by you or on your behalf;
- show that we treated you fairly; and
- keep records required by applicable laws or regulations.
We will not retain your personal information for longer than necessary for the purposes set out in this policy. Different retention periods apply for different types of personal information and we can make available more detailed information on our retention and deletion policies upon request.
When it is no longer necessary to retain your personal information, we will securely delete or anonymise it.
Personal information from a CV or employment application
We will process such information on the basis of preparation to perform a contract with the candidate and/or legitimate interests in recruiting and vetting potential employees of the business.
We will hold such data for a maximum of 6 months for unsuccessful candidates but for successful candidates we will hold such data for at least the duration of employment and usually for a period of 7 years thereafter (the length of time being determined by our regulatory and legal obligations, and any potential for legal claims).
7. How we use your personal information
Under data protection law, we can only use your personal information if we have a lawful reason for doing so. We may process your personal information in connection with any of the purposes set out in this policy or more on the following legal grounds:
- for the performance of our contract with you or to take steps at your request before entering into a contract, where we are providing you with services and/or products or you have expressed an interest in obtaining our services and/or products;
- to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations. For example, in relation to record keeping for tax purposes;
- because our legitimate interests, or those of a third party recipient of your personal information, make the processing necessary, provided that those interests are not overridden by your interests or fundamental rights and freedoms; or
- where you have given consent.
Please note a legitimate interest is when we have a business or commercial reason to use your information, so long as this is not overridden by your own rights and interests. We set out in the table below further information on the lawful grounds we typically rely on when processing your personal information.
We use your personal information in the following ways and with the following legal grounds
| The ways we use personal information: | Lawful grounds for processing this information |
| To provide you with our services and products and online content |
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| To deal with your requests and enquiries |
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| To provide you with information about our services, activities or online content. |
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| To provide essential updates to you e.g. terms and conditions change |
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| To personalise the way our content is presented to you. |
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| To assess your use of our services and products and content (Analytics Data). |
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| To block malicious users and prevent software piracy and fraud |
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| Conducting market research, including by sending questionnaires and surveys to gather customer feedback. We may use third party software providers to send these out, for more information please see section 8 of this privacy policy. |
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| For insurance and accounting purposes. We may need to share some of your information with professional advisers, accountants, auditors and insurers who provide consultancy, banking, insurance and accounting services |
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| To exercise or defend our legal rights. We may need to share this information with third party professional advisers including lawyers who provide legal services. |
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| Gathering and providing information required by or relating to audits, enquiries or investigations by regulatory bodies including external audits. We may also need to share this information with professional advisers including lawyers, bankers, auditors and insurers who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance and accounting services. |
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| A potential buyer (and its agents and advisors) in the case of a sale, merger, consolidation, liquidation, reorganization, or acquisition. In this type of event, any acquirer will be subject to this privacy policy. Usually information will be anonymized so you can no longer be personally identified from the data being shared but this may not always be possible. The recipient of the information will be bound by confidentiality obligations. |
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8. How we share information
In certain circumstances, we may share your data with the following third parties:- Members of our corporate group – group members and their employees may process your information and make use of it as described in section 7 and will abide by this Privacy Policy when they do so.
- Service providers who we rely on in order to provide our service or to perform other functions associated with our business. We only allow our service providers to handle your personal information if we are satisfied they take appropriate measures to protect your personal information. We also ensure there are written contractual obligations with such parties to ensure they can only use your personal information to provide services to us and to you, and to comply with the requirements of the data protection legislation for written processing agreements.
- Partner organisations with whom we collaborate in order to provide a service to you. Our contracts with these organisations allow them make use of your data in line with their own privacy policies and the data protection legislation.
Third parties providing email sending services
We currently use third party software and/or service providers, such as Pardot, to provide email sending and email list management services. We do this to ensure data is up to date and to send you emails about our products, services, events, training, surveys and notifications from time to time.
| Third Party Processor | Activity undertaken by third party processor | How information is shared | Types of data processed |
| Pardot (Salesforce, Inc.) | Email sending services and data list management services; to send you emails about our products, services, events, training and notifications. | Within Pardot’s online systems to manage the sending of emails and managing an individual’s privacy preferences | Email address |
| Cognism Ltd | Email sending services and data list management services; to send you emails about our products, services, events, training and notifications. | From Cognism’s systems into our Salesforce instance and manually from us to Cognism. | Email address |
Third parties providing supplemental services
We currently use third parties to offer services to supplement NBS products and services that we offer to you, you will typically access these services via a link which will take you away from our website and to the third party providers website or portal. For example:
| Third Party Processor | Activity undertaken by third party processor | How information is shared | Types of data processed |
| Day One | Online training software (link to third party provided within NBS Chorus) | A link to third party is provided within NBS Chorus and users input their NBS ID to access the training portal which is hosted by the third party | Email address Name (first and surname) Company Name |
| Freshdesk (Freshworks) | Online support software portal (used with NBS Chorus) support.theNBS.com | Within NBS Chorus users will be able to access a support portal which is hosted by the third party. | Email address Name (first and surname) Company (all passed from NBS ID) Support tickets, chats, support emails and telephone calls.
|
| LogMeIn, Inc. | Online webinar conferencing software | We share information on who will be attending our webinars with LogMeIn for their GoToWebinar product. | Name (first and surname) Email address Job title Company name Industry |
| Zoom Video Communications, Inc. | Online webinar conferencing software | We share information on who will be attending our webinars with Zoom. | Email address Name (first and surname) Address Telephone Number Company Name |
| Eventbrite, Inc. | Self-service ticketing platform for live events | Eventbrite collects attendee information when they register to attend one of our events and shares it with us. | Name (first and surname), Email address Job title Company Work address Work phone number
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Partner organisations with whom we collaborate in order to provide a service to you include:
Recipient of data | Purpose of sharing | How information is shared | Types of data shared |
| The RIBA | Provision of the RIBA CPD service, including the review of provider materials. | Submission of contact details to RIBA upon completion of sale. | Email address Name (first and surname) Position Address Telephone Number Company Name |
| Premium Credit Limited (PCL) | Credit facility to assist customers spread the cost of NBS products and services | Within PCL’s online systems used to manage borrower’s data and enable borrowers and service providers (where permitted by PCL to do so) to submit requests for transactions to PCL and view management information. | Email address Name (first and surname) Address Telephone Number Company Name |
| S&P Global, Inc. | To support sales and marketing activity | Information is stored in an encrypted excel sheet and shared via e-mail. | Email address Name (first and surname) Position Telephone Number Company Name |
Manufacturers
We do not share your name, email address or any other direct identifiers with manufacturers. Instead, we provide to manufacturers that you interact with the following information relating to your NBS ID account:
- Your company name
- Your role
- Usage analytics concerning your interaction with manufacturers e.g. number of downloads of a manufacturer’s products
The exception to this is if you register for a webinar or event which has been sponsored by a manufacturer, in which case we will share the following information so they can contact you to provide you with information about their products and/or services:
- Your company name,
- Your name,
- Your company e-mail address,
- Your company telephone number.
Analytics
We may collect data about your use of our products and services to help improve the quality and performance of products and services (‘Analytics Data’).
We may use third party tools to obtain Analytics Data with whom we may share your personal data in order to identify any issues with usability and engagement with the features of our products and services. For example:
We may share this Analytics Data with other third parties but where we do so the Analytics Data will be anonymized so that it is not possible to identify you or any other individual from the data. We may share anonymized Analytics Data about use of our products and services with third parties such as manufacturers.
9. Content we show to you from third parties
We may also provide you with access to third party content and websites (not controlled by us), via our products, services and content e.g. Links to The Construction Information Service (CIS) to provide access to Standards, and links to manufacturer websites to provide access to supplementary technical information.
We are not responsible for such third party content. The user is responsible for ensuring the contents are suitable for the intended purpose. Please refer to our Terms and Conditions for more information on third party content.
10. Transferring your personal information out of the European Economic Area (EEA)
We use data servers based in the UK and EEA to store and process your personal information. Where you are based in the EEA (including the UK), we may make transfers of personal information outside the EEA.
We will only transfer your personal information to countries outside the UK and EEA where one of the following conditions applies under the Data Protection Act 2018:
- the UK has issued a decision confirming that the country to which we transfer the personal information ensures an adequate level of protection for the data subjects' rights and freedoms;
- appropriate safeguards are in place such as:
- binding corporate rules (BCR),
- standard contractual clauses or an International Data Transfer Agreement (as appropriate) approved by the UK,
- an approved code of conduct or a certification mechanism (including the EU-US Privacy Shield or its replacement);
- you have provided explicit consent to the proposed transfer after being informed of any potential risks.
To deliver some of our products and services we use third party providers who may transfer your personal information out of the UK and EEA. For example:
| Third Party Processor | Activity undertaken by third party processor | Location of processing and appropriate safeguards for your personal information | Types of data processed |
| Freshdesk (Freshworks) | Online support software portal (used with NBS Chorus) support.theNBS.com | Frankfurt AWS Cloud Server Cluster | Email address support tickets, chats, support emails and telephone calls. |
| Premium Credit Limited | Credit facility to assist customers spread the cost of NBS products and services | May be transferred outside of the EEA. Please refer to your credit agreement or contact Premium Credit directly. | Email address Name (first and surname) Address Telephone Number Company Name |
11. Cookies
We use cookies on our websites and we collect IP addresses from visitors to our websites. Cookies are small amounts of information that we store on your computer. Our system issues these cookies to your computer when you log on to our websites and have provided your consent to those cookies where appropriate. Cookies make it easier for you to log on to and use our websites during future visits. If you complete a form on our websites with your contact details, cookies will pre-populate the other forms on our websites with that data. Cookies also allow us to monitor website traffic and to personalise the content of our websites for you. You may set up your computer to reject cookies although, in that case, you may not be able to use certain features on our websites.
To view the NBS Cookie Policy https://www.theNBS.com/cookies.
12. Your rights
You have the following rights, which (provided we are acting as the controller of your personal information) you can usually exercise free of charge by writing to us at the details given below:
| Access | The right to be provided with a copy of your personal information (the right of access) |
| Rectification | The right to require us to correct any mistakes in your personal information |
| To be forgotten | The right to require us to delete your personal information - in certain circumstances |
| Restriction of processing | The right to require us to restrict processing of your personal information - in certain circumstances |
| Data portability | The right to receive the personal information you provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and/or transmit that data to a third party - in certain circumstances |
| To object | The right to object:
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| Not to be subject to automated individual decision-making. | The right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing (including profiling) that produces legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affects you. |
If you would like to exercise any of those rights, please:
- email or write to us - see above: ‘How to contact us about this policy’;
- let us have enough information to identify you (e.g. your full name, address and subscriber or matter reference number);
- let us have proof of your identity and address (a copy of your driving licence or passport and a recent utility or credit card bill); and
- let us know what right you want to exercise and the information to which your request relates.
13. Right to withdraw consent
If we are processing your personal information on the basis of your consent, you have the right to withdraw your consent. If you wish to do so, please contact us at the postal address set out above: ‘How to contact us about this policy’ or email us at privacy@thenbs.com.
Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your information for the purpose(s) to which you originally consented unless there are compelling legitimate grounds for further processing which override your interests, rights and freedoms or for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.
If you are receiving marketing material you no longer wish to receive, you can click the “Manage email preferences” link included on any marketing e-mail we send to you or e-mail us at privacy@thenbs.com.
Withdrawal of consent to receive marketing communications will not affect the processing of personal information for the provision of our services.
Last updated July 2023