Privacy policy

You have the option of signing up for Sky-Watcher USA’s mailing list or submitting photographs to Sky-Watcher USA.  To sign up for the mailing list or submit a photograph, you must first submit information including a valid email address and certain other personal and contact information.  Your personal and contact information will not be disclosed to any other organization without your prior consent.  If you choose to sign up for the mailing list, you may receive regular emails from this Website as well as emails from third party sponsors.  If you do not wish to receive emails from third party advertisers, do not sign up for the mailing list.  Sky-Watcher USA and its successors and assigns is the sole owner of the information collected on the Website. 

Though we make every effort to preserve user privacy, Sky-Watcher USA may need to disclose personal information if required to do so by law, or in the good faith belief that such disclosure is reasonably necessary to respond to a court order or other legal process.

Sky-Watcher USA may also disclose information about its users to law enforcement officers or others in the good faith belief that such disclosure is reasonably necessary to enforce the terms, respond to claims that any Service or Content violates the rights of third parties, or to protect the rights, property, or personal safety of Sky-Watcher USA, Sky-Watcher USA’s Website users, or the general public.

EEA Privacy Notice – Website Users in the EEA

Although our Website does not offer ecommerce services to customers within the European Union, we may collect, use and be responsible for certain limited personal information about you when you use the Website. When we do so we are subject to the General Data Protection Regulation, which applies across the European Union (including in the UK) and we are responsible as ‘controller’ of that personal information for the purposes of those laws.

Personal Information We Collect about You

We may collect the following personal information about you via the Website: (i) your name; (ii) your email address; (iii) street address; and (iv) phone number.

We may also collect: (i) any personal data that you submit via the forms on our Website; and (ii) technical information such as traffic statistics, conversion data, audience demographic data, tracking codes and IP addresses.

How your Personal Information is Collected

We collect personal information directly from you via our Website. We may also collect information from cookies on our Website (more information is set out below) and from our IT systems and via the following channels:

Google Analytics

The Website uses the Google Universal Analytics tracking code. This provides traffic statistics, conversion data, and audience demographic data.

Facebook Pixel

The Website uses the Facebook tracking pixel. This allows us to track user interactions with our site and use that data to inform the targeting logic of our Facebook advertisements. These advertisements currently only target US users, but global user data is used to develop the audience targets.

Mailchimp (email platform) tracking code

The Website uses the tracking code provided by our email marketing platform Mailchimp. This is used to track ecommerce conversions generated by our email campaigns and allow us to build user targeting data for future marketing campaigns.

How and why we use your Personal Information

Under EU data protection law, we can only use your personal information if we have a proper reason for doing so, for example: (i) for the performance of a contract with you or to take steps at your request before entering into a contract; (ii) to comply with our legal and/or regulatory obligations; (iii) for our legitimate interests or those of a third party; or (iv) where you have provided consent.

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.

The technical information gathered from the use of our website (including through our use of cookies) which may include personal data, is used for our legitimate interest of ensuring that our website is functioning properly and to help us make business decisions about the information to be provided on our Website. 

We may also use the information we collect from you for our legitimate interests of sending marketing communications, communicating with you (for instance, to deal with your queries) and registering your product with us.

Marketing Communications

We may use your personal information to send you updates by E-mail about our services, events, news and promotions.

Where you are an individual recipient, we will not send electronic marketing communications to you unless you have consented to this. Where you have provided your contact details as part of a negotiation of a sale or provision of services with us, we may send you marketing communications to you as an existing customer about similar products we think you may be interested in, however we will always give you the chance to opt-out or unsubscribe from these communications if you wish.

You have the right to opt-out of receiving promotional communications at any time by contacting us at optout@skywatcherusa.com.

We may ask you to confirm or update your marketing preferences in future, or if there are changes in the law, regulation or the structure of our business.

Who we Share your Personal Information With

We may disclose your personal information to any member of our corporate group, including any subsidiaries, ultimate holding company, or subsidiaries of that holding company. 

We may share also your personal information with:

• Facebook Pixel: to enable us to track user interactions with our Website and use that data to develop audience targets. We do not currently use this information to target advertisements at non-US users.
• Google Analytics: to collect information about web traffic statistics, conversion data and audience demographic data, to help us understand how you use the Website.

Occasionally, we may need to disclose your personal data to third parties where necessary for the legitimate interests of business or in order to comply with legal obligations:

• in the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets;
• if Sky-Watcher USA Acquisition, LLC or substantially all of its assets are acquired by a third party, in which case personal data held by it about its customers will be one of the transferred assets; or
• if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, enforce or apply our Website terms of use or other agreements, or to protect the rights, property or safety of our corporate group, our customers or others.

How long your Personal Information will be Kept

We will keep your personal information for as long as is necessary:

• to respond to any questions, complaints or claims made by you or on your behalf;
• to show that we treated you fairly; and
• as required by law.

We will not retain personal information for longer than is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Notice.  When it is no longer necessary to retain your personal information, we will delete or anonymize it.

Transfers of your Personal Information outside the EEA

When you provide your personal information to us in accordance with this EEA Privacy Notice, the information you provide may be transferred to countries outside the European Economic Area (EEA) (specifically, the USA) that do not have similar protections in place to the EEA regarding your data and restrictions on its use as set out in this policy. The EEA comprises the EU member states plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

By submitting your information you consent to this transfer for the purposes specified in this EEA Privacy Notice.

Cookies

A cookie is a small text file which is placed onto your computer (or other electronic device) when you access our website. We use cookies on our website to:

• recognize you whenever you visit our website (this speeds up your access to the website as you do not have to log in each time);
• obtain information about your preferences, online movements and use of the internet;
• carry out research and statistical analysis to help improve our content; and
• make your online experience more efficient and enjoyable.

In most cases we will need your consent in order to use cookies on this website. The exception is where the cookie is essential in order for us to provide you with a service you have requested.

If you visit our website when your browser is set to accept cookies, we will interpret this as an indication that you consent to our use of cookies and other similar technologies as described in this website cookie policy. If you change your mind in the future about letting us use cookies, you can modify the settings of your browser to reject cookies or disable cookies completely.

The table below provides some information on the cookies which we use on our website:

Cookie Name	What it does	Why is it used	How long it lasts
_ga	Distinguish users.	Used for website analytics.	2 years
_gid	Distinguish users.	Used for website analytics.	24 hours

Your Privacy Rights

EU data protection law gives you a number of rights set out below.  If you would like to exercise any of your rights, please contact us in writing via mydata@skywatcherusa.com.

• Access: you may request access to a copy of your personal information.
• Withdraw Consent: where our processing of your personal information is based on your consent, you can withdraw your consent at any time. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.
• Rectification: you may ask us to rectify any inaccurate information we hold about you.
• Erasure: you may ask us to delete the personal information we hold about you, where there is no reason for us to continue to hold your information.
• Portability: you may ask us to provide you with the personal information that we hold about you in a structured, commonly used, machine readable format, or you can ask us to send your information in this format to another controller.
• Object: you may object to our processing of your personal information.
• Restriction: you can ask us to restrict the personal information we use about you where you have asked for it to be erased or where you have objected to our use of it.

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

If you are not happy with the way in which we process your personal information, or the way in which we handle any request by you to exercise your privacy rights, you may make a complaint to your local data protection regulator. In the case of the UK, this is the UK Information Commissioner's Office ("ICO"). The ICO can be contacted by visiting their website at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/ or by telephone on (+44) 0303 123 1113.

Keeping your Personal Information Secure

We have appropriate security measures to prevent personal information from being accidentally lost, or used or accessed unlawfully. We limit access to your personal information to those who have a genuine business need to access it. Those processing your information will do so only in an authorized manner and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

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

Changes to this Privacy Notice

This EEA Privacy Notice was last updated on 5/25/2018

We may change this EEA Privacy Notice from time to time – when we do we will inform you via an announcement on our Website or via email to you.