Privacy

About us

This website is operated by Oberg Associates Ltd, T/A Max Benjamin, a company incorporated under the laws of Ireland under company number 220168 with registered office at Glenstock, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, Ireland A98 R674 (‘Max Benjamin’, ‘we’, ‘our’ or ‘us’).

Who does this notice apply to?

This notice applies to individuals who access, browse and use our website. Its aim is to give you information on how we collect and process your personal data through your use of the website. We collect personal data when you access our website, register with us, contact us, send us feedback and product reviews, purchase products via our website, request marketing updates and take part in promotions, surveys and loyalty programs via our website.

This website isn’t intended for children and we don’t knowingly collect personal data relating to children.

Third party links

The website may include links to third party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We don’t control these third party websites and are not responsible for their privacy notices. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notices of every website you visit. Please see our Cookies Policy for details of the cookies and similar technologies served by us and third parties and how to control these.

Types of personal data we process

“Personal data” means information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where an individual’s identity has been removed (anonymous data). Throughout this privacy notice we use the term “processing” to refer to all activities involving your personal data, including collecting, handling, storing, sharing, accessing, using, transferring, erasing and disposing of it.

The personal data we collect about you depends on how you use our website. For example, we collect different types of personal data depending on whether you create a user account, purchase products or only browse the website. Typically we collect and process the following kinds of personal data:

Identity and Contact Data includes your name, postal address, email address, telephone number, any personal data provided when contacting us and, if you are a member of our loyalty programme, your date of birth;

Profile Data includes your username, password, login and user account details, loyalty credits awarded and used by you, gift card balances held by you, previous purchases, wishlist products of interest, preferences, feedback, product reviews and survey responses;
Transaction Data includes details about payments to and from you and other details of products and services you have purchased from us;
Technical Data may include internet protocol (IP) address, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access our website;
Usage Data includes information about how you use the website such as the services you view or search for, page response times, download errors, length of visits and page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks and mouse-overs); and
Marketing and Communications Data includes your preferences in receiving marketing communications from us and your communication preferences.

We also collect, use and share aggregated data such as statistical or demographic data for various purposes. Aggregated data may be derived from your personal data but is not considered personal data in law as this data does not directly or indirectly reveal your identity. For example, we may aggregate your Usage Data to calculate the percentage of users accessing a specific website feature. However, if we combine or connect aggregated data with your personal data so that it can directly or indirectly identify you, we treat the combined data as personal data which will be used in accordance with this privacy notice.

We do not collect any special categories of personal data about you (this is personal data that reveals racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs or trade union membership; genetic data; biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying an individual or data concerning health or sexual orientation).

Where we need to collect personal data by law, or under our Terms & Conditions, and you do not provide that personal data when requested, you may not be able to purchase products from us through our website. We will let you know at the time of collecting personal data from you whether you must provide the personal data to use the website or any of our services, and whether the provision of personal data requested by us is optional.

How your personal data is received

We may receive your personal data through various means including:

Direct interactions: You may give us your Identity and Contact Data, Profile Data and Transaction Data by creating and managing your user account, purchasing our products, using loyalty credits and gift cards, selecting preferences, providing product reviews or other comments, filling in website forms, sharing product details or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email, SMS, social media or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you enter a competition, promotion or survey, give us feedback or contact us.
Automated technologies or interactions: As you interact with our website, we collect Technical Data and Usage Data. We collect this personal data by using cookies and other similar technologies. Please see our Cookies Policy for further details.
How we use your personal data

We have set out below a description of the ways we typically process your personal data and the legal grounds we rely on to do so.

Purpose / activity	Type of Data	Grounds for processing
To allow you to create and manage a user account on our website, including managing your profile, wish list products of interest, preferences, previous purchases, feedback, product reviews and survey responses, and so we can conduct profiling based on the preferences you choose in your user account to ensure you receive relevant content.	Identity and Contact Data Profile Data Transaction Data	Necessary for the performance of a contract with you or in order to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contract. Necessary for our legitimate interests of enabling users to create and develop personalised accounts, to facilitate purchases and recording of product and service preferences, for running our business and to develop new business.
To deliver your orders to you, to send you delivery updates by email or SMS, to contact you by email, telephone and/or SMS to arrange or rearrange delivery, to manage product returns in accordance with our Terms & Conditions and other policies and to provide customer service and support.	Identity and Contact Data Transaction Data	Necessary for the performance of a contract with you. Necessary for our legitimate interests of providing you a good purchase experience.
Depending on your selected method of payment, to acknowledge payments from you, provide refunds and to keep a record of payments and transactions with us.	Identity and Contact Data Transaction Data	Necessary for the performance of a contract with you. Necessary to comply with a legal obligation.
To respond to queries submitted through the website, telephone, social media or other means and to manage our relationship with you including: (i) notification of changes to our services, Terms & Conditions, User Agreement, Cookies Policy, Privacy Notice or other policies; (ii) customer feedback, product review and survey facilities; (iii) complaints and disputes; (iv) administering your marketing and communication preferences; (v) administering your data protection, privacy and other rights.	Identity and Contact Data Profile Data Transaction Data Technical Data Usage Data Marketing and Communications Data	Necessary for the performance of a contract with you or in order to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contract. Necessary to comply with a legal obligation. Necessary for our legitimate interests for responding to queries, attracting new users and customers, running our business and to develop new business, keeping our records updated and to gauge consumer satisfaction with our services and/or the products they purchase.
To administer and protect our business, products, services, networks, systems, the website and data and property hosted on or made available through the website including implementing and monitoring security measures, troubleshooting, data and usage analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data. To anonymise personal data for statistical purposes.	Identity and Contact Data Profile Data Transaction Data Technical Data Usage Data Marketing and Communications Data	Necessary for the performance of a contract with you. Necessary to comply with a legal obligation. Necessary for our legitimate interests for running our business, network security, to identify and/or prevent fraud, to collate statistical information to enhance our services and business, and in the context of a business reorganisation or group restructuring exercise.
To use data analytics and similar technologies to monitor usage of the website, to measure the performance of the website and to optimise the website, to improve our services, marketing strategy and output, user interactions, relationships and experiences. We may also process information collected when you browse and use our website to set default options for you (such as language and currency).	Technical Data Usage Data	Necessary for our legitimate interests to define types of customers for our products and services, to keep our website updated and relevant, to develop our business and to inform our marketing strategy.
To make suggestions and recommendations to you about products that may be of interest to you, to deliver relevant content and ads to you on our website and third party websites and apps and to measure and understand the effectiveness of this. We may also observe the readership of our newsletters, blog postings and other publications.	Identity and Contact Data Technical Data Usage Data Marketing and Communications Data	Necessary for our legitimate interests to develop and improve our products and services, to grow our business, to inform our marketing and advertising strategy and output and to conduct marketing and advertising.
If you post comments about Max Benjamin, tag us or post photos to our social media pages we may process this information to highlight our products and branding or to respond to you.	Identity and Contact Data Profile Data	Necessary for our legitimate interests to develop our products and services and to gauge and react to consumer sentiment which helps us improve our products and services.

Generally, we do not rely on consent as a legal grounds for processing your personal data although we will request your consent before (i) sending direct marketing communications to you by electronic means (e.g. via email); and (ii) before setting non-essential cookies or similar technologies on your device.

Marketing: We would like to send you information about our products, insights and offers, which may be of interest to you. Where we have your consent or it is in our legitimate interests to do so, we may do this by email and/or SMS. We will only ask whether you would like us to send you marketing messages when you subscribe to our mailing list on our website. You can unsubscribe at any time by using the ‘unsubscribe’ link in our marketing emails or the ‘STOP’ number in SMS. If you tell us you do not want to receive marketing messages it might take a few days for all our systems to be updated to reflect this. Please note that opting out of marketing messages will not stop service communications, such as order updates.

If you agree as part of our cookies framework, we will use certain technologies that allow us to see whether news updates and other communications we send to you have been viewed and read. As explained in section 6 above, we use this information for our legitimate interests to develop our products and services, direct market and grow our business.

Advertising: If you agree, we may use cookies and similar technologies that allow us to include ads for our products on other websites and apps, such as social media. The ads you see are based on information we hold about you or your previous use of our website (e.g. your search history and the content you read on our website) or on Max Benjamin adverts you have previously clicked on. For more information on our use of advertising technologies and cookies, please see our Cookies Policy.

Disclosure of your personal data

Except as set out in this privacy notice, we do not disclose to any third party personal data that we collect from you or you provide to us. We may have to share personal data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in the table in section 6.

External third parties: Companies that provide us products and services. This includes companies that help us to deliver and fulfil your orders; marketing agencies and advertising partners; analytics companies; IT service providers (e.g. website hosting and support) and other professional service providers.
Public and Government Authorities: Entities that regulate or have jurisdiction over us. We will disclose personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, if we are ordered to do so by a court of competent jurisdiction, law enforcement, regulatory or administrative authorities or in order to enforce a contract with you or to protect our rights, property or safety and/or that of our staff, website users and others.
Corporate activity: Third parties to whom we may choose to sell, transfer or merge parts of our business or our assets. Alternatively, we may seek to acquire other businesses or merge with them.

We require all service providers who we disclose personal data which we collect under this privacy notice to respect the security of personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

International transfers

Max Benjamin has operations inside and outside of Ireland. We use suppliers and fulfilment providers located across the world. Some of these locations may not have data protection laws equivalent to those in Ireland or the EU. However, if we transfer your information to one of these locations we will take steps to ensure that your data and rights are protected through methods approved under relevant data protection laws. Please contact us if you would like further information about how we protect your transferred information.

Updating your personal data

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed, using your user account settings page, if any of your personal data changes during your relationship with us. You can also contact us using the information provided in section 13 below to update your personal data.

Data security

We have appropriate security measures in place to prevent personal data from being accidentally lost or used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We limit access to your personal data to those who have a genuine business need to know it. Those processing your personal data will do so only in an authorised manner and are subject to obligations of confidentiality. You recognise that no entity can keep data fully secure. If you have reason to believe that any of your personal data is no longer secure, please tell us immediately by contacting us using the information provided in section 13 below.

Data retention

We will hold on to your personal data for as long as you continue to be a Max Benjamin customer and for as long as we are required to keep it to ensure we meet our legal requirements. If you no longer wish to have a user account on our website you can contact us using the information in section 13 below and request that we close your account. However, we have a legal requirement to keep some of your personal data even after you have asked us to delete it. We will only keep what we absolutely need to, and only to make sure we can meet our legal or regulatory requirements, resolve disputes, prevent fraud and abuse, or enforce our User Agreement and/or our Terms & Conditions.

Your legal rights

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

Request access to your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
Request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate personal data we hold about you corrected.
Request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data 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 data where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we may have processed your personal data unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. We may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.
Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground as you feel it impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes. In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your personal data which override your rights and freedoms.
Request restriction of processing of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios: (a) if you want us to establish the data’s accuracy; (b) where our use of the personal data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it; (c) where you need us to hold the personal data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or (d) you have objected to our use of your personal data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.
Request the transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party. This enables you to ask us to provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the personal data to perform a contract with you.
Right to withdraw consent: If you provided your consent to the processing of your personal data for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. Once we have received notification that you wish to withdraw your consent, we will take steps to ensure we no longer process your personal data for the purpose(s) you originally agreed to, unless we have another legitimate basis for doing so in law. Withdrawal of consent will not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before withdrawal.

In order to exercise one or more of your rights in respect of your personal data, please contact us in writing using the information provided in section 13 below. We will need you to provide us with information to identify you on our records, we will also need proof of your identity and address, and the information to which your request relates.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Data Protection Commission, the Irish supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.dataprotection.ie). However, we would appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you contact the supervisory authority and therefore ask you please contact us in the first instance.

Contact us

If you have any questions about this privacy notice, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact us by email at [email protected] or write to Data Protection Manager, Max Benjamin, Glenstock, Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, Ireland.

Changes to this privacy notice

We will change this privacy notice from time to time and any changes will be contained in a revised privacy notice posted on the website. This version of the privacy notice was last updated on 01 August 2022.