Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

AKOU's Privacy Policy

This policy sets out how AKOU collects, stores and manages your data.

Company Name: AKOU (SHYFT LTD)
Address: 20-22 Wenlock Road, London, England, N1 7GU
E-mail: hello@akou.co.uk

We currently collect and process the following information:

  • Personal identifiers, contacts and characteristics (for example, name and contact details)

Most of the personal information we process is provided to us directly by you for one of the following reasons:

  • For marketing communication purposes – such as updates and information relating to your use of one of AKOU’s products or services
  • Marketing purposes – such as our Newsletter or marketing emails and messages promoting AKOU’s products and services

We use the information that you have given us in order to:

  • Send you emails and digital communications promoting AKOU’s products and services
  • Inform you of updates and information relating to AKOU’s products and services
  • Send you emails and digital communications notifying you of activity

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the lawful bases we rely on for processing this information are:

    • Your consent. You are able to remove your consent at any time. You can do this by contacting data@akou.co.uk

Personal data shall be subject to additional safeguards to ensure this data is processed securely. For example, we work hard to ensure data is encrypted when in transit and storage, and access to this data will be strictly limited to a minimum number of individuals and subject to confidentiality commitments.

We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Policy. Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to any of our websites; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access. When possible, encryption is used, both in transit and storage. Access controls within the organisation limit who may access information.

AKOU’s app is hosted by Heroku, a subsidiary of Salesforce so we rely in part on these third parties to protect the data you provide through it. Any data we collect through our app is stored in accordance with their data and policy. 

On some projects we may utilise additional data collection processes to collect personal data. For this we will use Typeform (based in Spain, EU). Their data and privacy policy is available to explore in full here.

We sometimes use external visualisation software to create network visualisations. For this we use Kumu (based in the US). We only transfer a very limited and necessary amount of data to their database. Their privacy policy is available here.

For our mailing lists and audience communications we use Mailchimp – their data and privacy policy is available here.  

You are also able to opt out of our communications any time by clicking the unsubscribe option in the footer of any email.

Under data protection law, you have rights including:

      • Your right of access – You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information. 
      • Your right to rectification – You have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete. 
      • Your right to erasure – You have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances. 
      • Your right to restriction of processing – You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances. 
      • Your right to object to processing – You have the the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.
      • Your right to data portability – You have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances.
      • You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.

Please contact us at data@akou.co.uk if you wish to make a request.

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us at hello@akou.co.uk

You can also complain to the ICO if you are unhappy with how we have used your data.

The ICO’s address:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Helpline number: 0303 123 1113
ICO website: https://www.ico.org.uk