Privacy notice

Our commitment

Hopkins Vehicle Solutions Ltd (“Hopkins VS”, “we”, “us”) is committed to respecting the privacy of everyone who visits this website, and of our customers, employees and contacts. This notice explains how we use and protect the personal data you give us or that we obtain about you through pilotcar.uk, and what your rights are in relation to it.

Pilot Car UK is a trading name of Hopkins Vehicle Solutions Ltd. This site is the dedicated UK home of the Pilot Car range; machine information shown here is drawn from our sister company, Hopkins Machinery.

Who we are

For the purposes of UK data protection law, the data controller is Hopkins Vehicle Solutions Ltd.

• General enquiries: 01764 680183 · info@hopkinsvs.co.uk · East Third, Easthill Rd, Auchterarder, PH3 1NJ
• Data protection enquiries: dp@hopkinsmachinery.co.uk · Data Privacy Dept., Little Ty-Coch, St Brides Wentloog, Newport, NP10 8SR

What is personal data?

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018, personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable living person — someone who can be identified directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier, or one or more factors specific to their physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity.

What we collect

Information you give us

This website has one form: the enquiry form. When you use it, we collect only what you type into it:

• Your name
• Your company or site name, if you provide one
• Your email address
• Your telephone number, if you provide one
• Which Pilot Car model you are interested in
• The message you write

That enquiry is sent to us by email. We do not store it in a database on this website.

Information collected automatically

• Web server logs. Our hosting provider records standard technical information for every page requested — your IP address, the date and time, the page requested, and your browser's user-agent string. This is ordinary server operation and is used for security and diagnosing faults.
• Spam protection. To stop automated abuse of the enquiry form, we count recent submissions per visitor over a fifteen-minute window. Your IP address is not stored for this — only an irreversible SHA‑256 hash of it, which is discarded after the window passes.
• Blocked-submission log. If a submission is caught by our spam filters, we record the reason together with the IP address and the email address given, so we can tell genuine enquiries from abuse and correct any false positives. If an enquiry cannot be emailed because of a technical fault, its contents are written to our server error log so the enquiry is not lost.

How we use it

We use the information you give us for the purpose you gave it to us for:

• To answer your enquiry and provide the information, quotation or demonstration you asked for
• To contact you about the products or services you enquired about
• To enter into and perform a contract with you
• To deal with your feedback, query or complaint
• To meet our statutory and regulatory obligations
• To keep this website secure and working correctly, and to prevent abuse of the enquiry form

Our lawful basis

We must have a lawful basis for processing your information. Which one applies depends on the circumstances, but typically:

• Legitimate interests — responding to an enquiry you have sent us, running and securing our website, and our internal administration as a business engaging with prospective and current customers
• Steps prior to entering a contract — where your enquiry relates to buying or hiring a vehicle
• Consent — where you have specifically agreed to something, such as receiving marketing
• Legal obligation — where we are required to process information by law

We do not ask for, and have no need of, special category data (such as information about health, ethnicity, religious beliefs, trade union membership or sexual orientation). Please do not include such information in an enquiry.

Marketing

If you are a business customer, we may use your details to tell you about products and services we think will interest you or your business. If you are an individual, you will be given the choice about whether to receive direct marketing from us at the point you give us your details.

You can ask us to stop at any time, either by using the unsubscribe option in any message we send, or by contacting us using the details above. We will act on that request without delay.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files placed on your device by websites you visit. They are widely used to make websites work, and to give site owners information about how their site is used.

This website sets no cookies for ordinary browsing. You can read every page here without a cookie being stored on your device. We use no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies at all.

One cookie is used, and only in a single situation. When you submit the enquiry form, a temporary session cookie is created so that the page you return to can tell you whether your enquiry was sent successfully. It contains no personal information beyond what is needed to show that message, it is deleted as soon as it has been read, and it expires when you close your browser. This is a strictly necessary cookie under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, so no consent banner is required.

Most browsers let you control or delete cookies through their settings. To find out more, visit aboutcookies.org or allaboutcookies.org.

Third parties and disclosure

The information you send us is held on systems in the UK and is seen by our staff and the staff of related Hopkins companies. We may also use third parties who process data for us and on our behalf.

The third parties involved in running this website are:

• IONOS — our web and email hosting provider. They host this website, its server logs, and the mailbox that receives your enquiries.
• Hopkins Machinery — a related company. Machine descriptions and photographs shown on this site are served from hopkinsmachinery.co.uk, so your browser requests those images from that domain. No enquiry information is sent there.
• Google Fonts — the typefaces used on this site are loaded from Google's font servers. When a page loads, your browser requests those font files from Google, which necessarily discloses your IP address to Google as part of that request. No other information is shared and this is not used to identify you to us.

We may also be obliged to disclose information under law, by order of a court or a competent regulatory body, or where permitted under data protection law. If Hopkins VS merges with another business, sells part of its business, or carries out an internal restructuring, your information may be disclosed to the new owners or corporate entities.

Where information is transferred outside the UK, we will comply with the legal rules governing such transfers and take all steps reasonably necessary to make sure your data is treated securely.

Automated decisions and profiling

We do not carry out any automated decision-making that produces legal effects concerning you, and we do not build profiles of visitors. The automated checks described above apply only to the enquiry form and exist solely to filter out spam. If a genuine enquiry is ever blocked in error, please phone us on 01764 680183 and we will put it right.

Protecting your information

We have administrative, technical and physical measures in place, both on this website and internally, designed to guard against loss, misuse, or unauthorised access, processing or disclosure of the personal information we hold. This website is served over an encrypted HTTPS connection, and enquiries are transmitted to our mail server over an encrypted connection.

Where we pass information to third parties to process on our behalf, we make sure they meet or exceed the relevant legal requirements for handling and securing it.

How long we keep it

We keep personal information no longer than is necessary for the purpose it was collected for.

• Enquiries are kept for as long as needed to deal with your enquiry and any resulting business relationship, and afterwards for as long as we must keep records for legal, accounting or warranty purposes.
• Spam-protection counts are discarded automatically after fifteen minutes.
• Server and error logs are retained for a short period for security and fault diagnosis, and are then overwritten by our hosting provider in the ordinary course.

Your rights

You have rights in relation to your personal information, though they do not apply in all cases or to everything we hold. We will tell you if that is the case when you contact us. You have the right to ask us to:

• Provide you with a copy of the personal information we hold about you
• Correct your personal information where it is out of date or wrong
• Delete personal information that we hold
• Restrict the way in which we process your information
• Consider any valid objection to our processing of your information
• Provide information you have given us to another service provider, where our basis for processing is consent and the processing is automated

We will respond within the statutory time period, normally one month. If we are not sure who you are, we may ask for further information so we can confirm your identity before acting.

Changes to this notice

We may change this notice from time to time as our business, our internal practices or the law change. We will not use your personal information in a way that is inconsistent with the purpose it was originally collected for — and if we intend to, we will tell you in advance wherever possible. The date and version at the top of this page show when it was last revised.

How to contact us

If you would like to discuss this notice, how we use your personal information, to exercise any of your rights, or to make a complaint about our use of your information, please contact:

• dp@hopkinsmachinery.co.uk
• Data Privacy Dept., Little Ty-Coch, St Brides Wentloog, Newport, NP10 8SR

You can also contact the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk for information, advice, or to make a complaint.