Privacy Policy

GWI Privacy Policy

General

This Privacy Policy was last updated on 4th July 2024.

We have updated our Privacy Policy to inform you of our GWI Magazine offering upgrading to GWI Executive.

The way we handle information will be subject to the privacy policy at the time the information is gathered. We will review and if necessary, update the privacy policy at least once every 12 months or sooner where required to accommodate legislation changes.

Please check this page regularly for updates.

At Global Water Intelligence we respect your privacy and we want to be as transparent as possible about how we process your data including personal data.

This policy is intended to explain who we are; how we collect your information; what information we may collect about you; how we may use your information; how we store and keep your information secure, and who we may disclose your information to. This policy also explains your data rights including your rights to access, correct, or restrict our use of your personal data. It also explains how to contact us and supervisory authorities in the event you have a complaint.

Unless we link to a different policy or state otherwise, this Privacy Policy applies when you visit or use the services on GWI’s websites including but not limited to

• www.globalwaterintel.com

• www.desalination.com

• www.desaldata.com

• www.gwiwaterdata.com

• www.ultrapuremicro.com

• www.watermeetsmoney.com

• www.americanwatersummit.com

• www.thewaterreport.co.uk

By using the services, you agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy. You shouldn’t use the services if you don’t agree with this Privacy Policy or any other agreement that governs your use of the services.

If you have any questions about this privacy statement, please address them to: privacy@globalwaterintel.com

Who We Are

Global Water Intelligence (“GWI”, “we”, “us”) refers to the following group of companies:

Holding company and main office (UK)

Media Analytics Limited

Registered in England and Wales. Company Registration Number 4412085

Fully owned subsidiaries:

American Water Intelligence Inc (USA)

Registered in the state of Texas, US Federal Tax ID Number: 27-3460611

Global Water Intelligence (Shanghai) Limited: 上海寰水商务咨询有限公司

Company Registration Number: 91310000MA1FP6D75R

How We Collect Your Information

We may obtain information about you when:

• You visit our website

• You engage with us on social media

• You contact us (via web form, email, phone call, conversation) about products or services

• You sign up to receive our blog updates

• You sign up to receive our newsletter(s)

• You use our products or services or your company sign you up for our products or services

• You contact us requesting assistance with a product or service we provide

• You request or use free trials of our products

• You are a paying customer

• You are a business partner, or a prospective business partner

• You intentionally give us your business contact information or make your business contact information available, for example at a networking event, an industry event, or a meeting.

• You are a job applicant, or a current or former employee.

What Information We May Collect About You

• Contact information: Full name, Email Addresses, Phone numbers, Associated Company, Company Address

• Job Role

• Previous Company / Job Role

• Contact history (including emails)

• Purchase History (including Quotes, orders, invoices)

• Support requests

• Marketing preferences (including op outs, unsubscribes, revoked consent)

• Activity on our website (such as pages visited, session length)

• IP address used to access our website

• Contracts

• CVs

• Response to marketing campaigns (such as email opens, clicks within emails)

• Product use details (including performance data)

• Except for interviews for GWI Executive or our market reports we do not record the audio of telephone calls, but we may have a log of when we called you, the call length, who you spoke to, and what the subject of that call was.

How We Use Your Information

Provision of Products and Services

We will use information (including personal information) provided by you or your company on your behalf to provide products and services requested by you including: free newsletters, blog posts, free trials, memberships, market reports, conferences & events; and to provide support for those products and services. As a result of providing support, such as in the form of training, your personal information, such as your email address, may be shared with other users within your company.

When you sign up for a free trial or purchase a membership from us we will use your email address to inform you about the latest updates to your membership, to let you know of any changes to the product, and to respond to any queries you may have or provide you with support for your product.

Where your membership product includes printed material or where you have purchased a hard copy market report from us we will use your full name, job title, company name and company address to send you your product by mail.

When you register to attend a conference or event we will use your email address to send you updates on speakers, agenda and other relevant information about the event.

When you sign up for a newsletter or blog post we will use your email address to send you the newsletter or blog posts you signed up for.

We may also use your telephone number to respond to any queries or provide support with products you have purchased, including informing you when your membership is due for renewal or has expired.

Marketing

As a publisher of business information, we operate in a business-to-business capacity and as such our marketing communications are sent to professional email addresses and consist of relevant, informative industry and product updates, including: blog articles and white papers; news about industry conferences and events; and about product releases and technical information.

They are sent to our customers, our partners, our prospective customers and our prospective partners who have not opted out. We send these emails on the basis of legitimate interest, and in all of them there is an obvious and simple way of opting out of such messages in the future. We have processes in place to ensure opt-out requests are processed in a timely manner to ensure that anyone who has opted out is not included in future marketing communications, and we monitor responses to marketing campaigns to ensure that our marketing is useful and relevant to you.

While we are a business service provider we understand that on occasion individuals may be interested in our products or information or may prefer to receive our products at their personal email address. Should you provide us with a personal email address when signing up for a newsletter, blog post, product or service we offer than we will use your personal email address as outlined above until you ask us not to.

Product use details

Product use details, including performance data and activity on our websites is used to improve our products and website experience. If we publish any statistical data, any personal information will be removed.

IP Address

Your IP address is a code which is assigned to your computer every time you connect to the Internet. We use aggregated IP address information to compile reports on the demographics of the usage of our websites for purposes of system administration, as information to potential advertisers and members, and to track potential abuse of our terms and conditions of use.

We do not use IP address information in a form that is personally identifiable except where that IP address has been responsible for violation of our terms and conditions of use.

Cookies

Cookies are short strings of code sent to your browser and stored on your computer’s hard drive. Most commercial websites use cookies.

We use the information gathered from cookies:

• To store information about the number of computers you use to log into our website, how often and the time and extent of your use of our websites for the purposes of system administration and to track potential abuse of our terms and conditions.

• To keep track of login credentials of members to any of our online products. If you choose to reject cookies you will still be able to use the GWI website, but members who use the extended member services who reject the cookies will have to enter their login ID and password on every page from the member area that they view.

• For purposes of marketing and as information to potential advertisers and members. We only use aggregated information from cookies for this purpose and do not use this information in any way that is personally identifying.

• For analytics purposes to help understand the traffic to our website and improve the performance of our websites and the services we provide to you.

We use Google Analytics and Google Signal when you opt-in for cookies on our websites and have enabled personalised advertising in your Google account. For full details about our use of cookies and how you can opt-in or out of non-essential cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

Advertisers may use tracking cookies when you click on their adverts to gather aggregated information about the effectiveness of their advertising, or to implement retargeting campaigns which will show their products and services to you in other platforms. We have no access to or control over these cookies and do not take any responsibility for the way in which they are implemented.

Most browsers have ‘preference’ settings which alert you when cookies are being sent and allow you to reject them before they are sent or delete them after they have been sent, however if you accept cookies, you will find the site much easier to use.

CV’s

If you send us your CV as part of a job application or as a speculative request, we may choose to retain it for consideration in future recruitment processes. Should this be the case, you will be informed and given the opportunity to oppose, in which case we will delete it.

Automated Decision Making

We do not use automated decision making when processing data.

How we store and keep your information secure

All data provided by you for the purposes outlined in this privacy policy is stored securely in our database on our UK server. Access is password protected and limited to staff who need access to perform their job.

In addition, data which is required to give access to our online memberships is stored in our online secure database which is hosted on Amazon Web Servers. Access is password protected and limited to staff who need access to perform their job.

All our websites use SSL (secure socket layer) encryption for all financial transactions and all other data we collect about users for access purposes is similarly protected.

We do not store any sensitive or financial information on any of our databases.

If you provide credit card details to become a member to or purchase any of our products online those details are only accessible to our credit card merchant partners, Stripe, and we have no access to them. We cannot accept any responsibility for information transferred to Stripe.

Who we may disclose your information to

We will not disclose your personal information to third parties except in the following cases:

• With Service Providers, Contractors, and Agents: We share your data with third-party companies who perform services on our behalf, like payment processing, email and hosting services, and mailing houses.

  Where a third party is required to process your data on our behalf we will ensure a data processing agreement is in place, under which they will be required to use your data solely as we direct, to provide our requested service.

  E.g. we may share limited personal data with another vendor to complete a commercial transaction such as to email members to advise regarding updates to online content for their membership.

• Under circumstances required by law: when we believe in good faith that a law or legal process requires it or where we believe disclosure is necessary to protect or enforce our rights, the rights of our contributors whose copyright material is under our control, or the rights of other users of GWI’s websites whose personal information is under our control.

• Opportunity Exchange: when you submit interest to a posting on the GWI Opportunity Exchange, the completed form is sent to the GWI member who listed the opportunity. GWI does not control how they will use your data you submit.

• Public forums: In the future we may make chat rooms, forums, message boards, and/or news groups available to users of our websites. Please remember that any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information and you should exercise caution when deciding to disclose your personal information.

Members of our products

We operate in a business-to-business capacity, and where your company holds a membership for WaterData, GWI Executive, DesalData or a combination of all three, there are times when we share usage statistics with your company when you use our websites. This may include, for example, an annual report detailing your webpage visits, downloads, and interactions with our websites. Your paying member for your membership is able to opt-out of this by writing to us at sales@globalwaterintel.com. 

How long we keep your information for

We will retain your contact history, purchase history and support requests for accounting purposes, to deliver your product and to provide a consistent quality experience with us.

Where your purchase includes a contract, these will be retained for legal purposes.

Where no transactions have taken place and there is no contractual requirement to do so we may remove information from anyone who has not engaged with us within the last 12 months from our databases.

Your Data Rights

You have certain rights given to you by law, that means you have an amount of control over your personal data that we process.

• Access to Your Personal Data: This right allows you to confirm that your personal data is being processed and to allow you to check if the processing is lawful.

• Correcting Any Mistakes: The right of rectification allows you to instruct an organisation that is processing your personal data, to rectify any mistakes.

• Right to be Forgotten: You have the right to instruct an organisation to erase your personal data.

• Stop Processing: The right to stop the processing of your personal data

• Moving Data: The right to data portability means that under certain circumstances you will be able to ask for your personal data to be transferred from one organisation to another.

• Right to Object to Direct Marketing: You have the right to object to the processing of your personal data for the purposes of direct marketing.

• Object to Profiling: Under certain circumstances, you are able to object to profiling and/or automated decision making.

• Right to complain to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO)

Third Party Websites & Contextual Links

Our websites contain advertisements and promotional links to websites operated by third parties. While we would never knowingly link to a site which we believed to be trading in bad faith, GWI is not responsible for the content of these websites and we take no responsibility for the content, privacy practices, goods or services offered by these sites.

Articles on our websites sometimes contain links to third party websites. These links, provided by contributors to GWI, are provided on a contextual basis and are relevant to the content in which they appear. Global Water Intelligence is not responsible for the content, business practices or privacy practices of such websites.

Who you can contact for help or to complain

Please contact us at privacy@globalwaterintel.com if you wish to exercise any of your rights or if you have any questions about the processing of your personal data.

If, after contacting us, you are not happy with an aspect of how Media Analytics Ltd or our subsidiary companies are processing your data, you can lodge a complaint to the supervisory authority, which is the ICO (ico.org.uk).

Alternatively, if you reside in the EU, we have appointed IT Governance Europe Limited to act as our EU Representative. If you wish to exercise your rights under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or have any queries in relation to your rights or privacy matters generally, please email our Representative at eurep@itgovernance.eu or post your request or query to: EU Representative, IT Governance Europe, The Mill, Newtown Link Rd, Stagreenan, Drogheda, Co. Louth, A92 CD3D, Ireland. When contacting our Representative please ensure you include our company name, Media Analytics Ltd, in any correspondence.