Privacy Statement

This privacy statement is made by Oxford Instruments plc and its subsidiaries (“we” or “us”).

We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data.

This privacy statement tells you how we look after your personal data, confirms your privacy rights and summarises how the law protects you. It applies when we use, collect or process your personal data when you interact with us, whether that be by visiting our websites (regardless of where you visit from), social media platforms, systems and applications when you purchase goods or services from us, engage in our due diligence processes or you become a partner or supplier. 

Please take the time to read this privacy statement, including the country and activity specific sections below, carefully to understand how we will use your personal data.

Please use the Schedule to understand the meaning of some of the terms used below.

Our employees and workers have an additional privacy statement applicable to our interactions with them as an employer. This notice can be accessed by employees and workers on our internal SharePoint site or by obtaining it directly from our Human Resources department.

Global data privacy standards

We are committed to the following principles of good practice in all our activities that involve the use of your personal data:

  • We use personal data in compliance with applicable data protection legislation.
  • We have a lawful basis to acquire and use personal data.
  • We are open with individuals on what we will do with their personal data.
  • We treat personal data with respect.
  • We handle personal data in a way that ensures appropriate security.
  • We only keep personal data for as long as we need it.
  • We respect an individual’s rights in relation to their personal data.

Purpose of this privacy notice

This privacy statement aims to give you information on how we collect and process your personal data, including any data you may provide when you sign up to our newsletter, purchase a product or service, take part in an event or competition, complete a contact support form, complete a due diligence form, provide us with identification documentation, request pricing or a quote or download a document from our websites, sell a product or service or become one of our partners.

It is important that you read this privacy statement together with any other privacy notice, policy or fair processing notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal data about you so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data.

This privacy statement supplements the other notices and is not intended to override them.

Who controls and/or processes your data

Oxford Instruments plc is made up of different legal entities, details of which can be found here.  As a global group of companies, we have cross-border business process, procedures, applications, systems and management.

This privacy statement is issued on behalf of the Oxford Instruments Group so when we mention “Oxford Instruments”, "we", "us" or "our" in this privacy notice, we are referring to the relevant company in the Oxford Instruments Group responsible for processing your data.

Oxford Instruments plc is the data controller for our main website (oxinst.com). The Oxford Instruments legal entity that is the data controller and responsible for collection and use of your personal data, determines what data to collect, how to use it, for how long to store it, and with whom to share it, depends on your relationship with us.  For example, if you are or work for one of our customers, suppliers, agents or distributors, or business partners, the data controller is the Oxford Instruments legal entity you are doing business with. This information can be found on our quotations, order acknowledgements, invoices or purchase orders you receive or in the agreement you have entered into with us, or can be obtained from your contact person at Oxford Instruments.

We have appointed a data privacy manager who is responsible for overseeing questions in relation to this privacy statement. If you have any questions about this privacy statement, including any requests to exercise any legal rights you may have, please contact us using the details set out below.  Certain of our country-specific sections below also contain details of how to contact our local teams regarding data privacy matters in your country.

Personal data we may collect about you

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).

We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together as follows:

  • Identity Data includes first name, maiden name, last name, username or similar identifier, marital status, title, date of birth and gender.
  • Contact Data includes billing address, delivery address, email address and telephone numbers.
  • Financial Data includes credit reference agencies, bank account and payment card details received at the point of transaction.
  • Transaction Data includes details of products and services you have purchased from us and other details about payments to and from you.
  • Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, operating system and platform.
  • Profile Data includes your username and password, purchases or orders made by you, feedback and survey responses, your interests and preferences that you have provided.
  • Usage Data includes information about how you use our websites, application, systems, products and services.
  • Marketing and Communications Data includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences. 

We also collect, use and share Aggregated Data such as statistical or demographic data for any purpose. Aggregated Data may be derived from your personal data but 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 only in accordance with this privacy statement. 

We do not knowingly collect any Special Categories of Personal Data about you (this includes details about race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about health and genetic and biometric data). We also do not collect any information about criminal convictions and offences except as may be exceptionally required (and permitted in law) as part of our third party due diligence process.

How we collect your personal data

We use different methods to collect data from and about you including:

  • Direct interactions. You may give us your Identity, Contact and Financial Data by filling in forms or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you:
    • purchase or enquire about our products or services;
    • create an account on our website;
    • subscribe to our service or publications;
    • request marketing to be sent to you;
    • enter a competition, promotion or survey; or
    • give us some feedback.
  • Automated technologies or interactions. As you interact with our website, we may automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, server logs and other similar technologies. We may also receive Technical Data about you if you visit other websites employing our cookies. Please see our Cookie Policy for further details.
  • Third parties or publicly available sources. We may receive personal data from various third parties and public sources as set out below: 
    • Technical Data from the following parties:
      • analytics providers;
      • advertising networks;
      • industry lead generators;
      • scientific publishers and social networking providers;
      • customer relationship management providers;
      • academic societies;
      • webinar providers;
      • search information providers;
      • survey engines;
      • event ticketing and management providers;
      • web and email marketing providers;
      • product comparison websites;
      • sales and marketing automation platforms; and
      • compliance screening providers.
    • Contact, Financial and Transaction Data from providers of technical, payment and delivery services.
    • Identity and Contact Data from data brokers or aggregators.
    • Identity and Contact Data from publicly availably sources such as Companies House, third party websites, compliance screening providers and the Electoral Register based inside the EU.

How we use your personal data

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

  • Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you;
  • Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests; and
  • Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.

Generally, we do not rely on your consent as a legal basis for processing your personal data other than in relation to some direct marketing communications to you from ourselves and/or third parties – for more information on this please see the tab “Direct Marketing & Opting Out” below. You have the right to withdraw consent to that form of marketing at any time by contacting us.

We have set out below, in a table format, a description of all the ways we can to use your personal data, and which of the legal bases permit us to do so. We have also identified what our legitimate interests are where appropriate and where we are legally permitted to use this lawful basis.

Note that we may process your personal data for more than one lawful ground depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your personal data. Please contact us you need details about the specific legal ground we are relying on to process your personal data where more than one ground has been set out in the table below.

Purpose/Activity Type of data Lawful basis for processing including basis of legitimate interest
To register you as a new or continuing customer or to prepare for signing a contract with you. (a) Identity
(b) Contact
Performance of a contract with you
To process and deliver your order including:
(a) Manage payments, fees and charges
(b) Collect and recover money owed to us
(c) Provide customer service
(d) Carry out repairs


To process our order to you including:
(a) Make payments, pay fees and charges
(c) Request customer service
(d) Request repairs
(a) Identity
(b) Contact
(c) Financial
(d)Transaction
(e) Marketing and Communications
(a) Performance of a contract with you
(b) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to recover debts due to us)
To manage our relationship with you which will include:
(a) Notifying you about changes to our terms or privacy policy
(b) Asking you to leave a review or take a survey
(a) Identity
(b) Contact
(c) Profile
(d) Marketing and Communications
(a) Performance of a contract with you
(b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation
(c) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to keep our records updated and to study how customers use our products/services)
To enable you to partake in a prize draw, competition or complete a survey (a) Identity
(b) Contact
(c) Profile
(d) Usage
(e) Marketing and Communications
(a) Performance of a contract with you
(b) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them and grow our business)
To administer and protect our business and this website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data) (a) Identity
(b) Contact
(c) Technical
(a) Necessary for our legitimate interests (for running our business, provision of administration and IT services, network security, to prevent fraud and in the context of a business reorganisation or group restructuring exercise)
(b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation
To deliver relevant website content and advertisements to you and measure or understand the effectiveness of the advertising we serve to you (a) Identity
(b) Contact
(c) Profile
(d) Usage
(e) Marketing and Communications
(f) Technical
Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them, to grow our business and to inform our marketing strategy)
To use data analytics to improve our website, products/services, marketing, customer relationships and experiences, and to forecast stock management (a) Technical
(b) Usage
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 goods or services that may be of interest to you (a) Identity
(b) Contact
(c) Technical
(d) Usage
(e) Profile
Necessary for our legitimate interests (to develop our products/services and grow our business)
To authorise you to act for us or to prepare to sign a contract with us as a supplier, partner, distributor or agent. (a) Identity
(b) Contact
(c) Financial
(d)Transaction
(e) Profile Data
(f) Marketing and Communications
a) Performance of a contract with you
(b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation
(c) Necessary for our legitimate interests

We will only use your personal data for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If you wish to get an explanation as to how the processing for the new purpose is compatible with the original purpose, please contact us. 

If we need to use your personal data for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so. Please note that we may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.

Where we need to collect personal data by law, or under the terms of a contract we have with you and you fail to provide that data when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have or are trying to enter into with you (for example, to provide you with goods or services). In this case, we may have to cancel a product or service order you have with us but we will notify you if this is the case at the time.

Disclosure of your personal data

We may have to share your personal data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in the table above.

  • Internal Third Parties as set out in the Schedule;
  • External Third Parties as set out in the Schedule;
  • 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. If a change happens to our business, then the new owners may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this privacy statement; and
  • Law enforcement agencies in connection with any investigation to help prevent unlawful activity.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party 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.

We are a global group of companies, and we use cross-border Internal Third Parties and External Third Parties to help us run our businesses.   Some of our Internal Third Parties and External Third Parties are based outside the country within which your personal data was collected so your personal data may be processed overseas by Internal Third Parties and External Third Parties.   We comply with the applicable legal requirements to safeguard personal data when it is transferred overseas.

Keeping your data secure

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed.

In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

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

We will use technical and organisational measures to safeguard your personal data. 

In particular, we:

  • use firewalls;
  • encrypt payment details using SSL technology on certain of our websites that sell products and services online;
  • restrict access to personal information to those who need to know that information in order to process it for us and who are subject to contractual confidentiality obligations;
  • train our employees on good data handling practices;
  • require our employees to adhere to our data protection policy and our IT policies; and
  • store your personal data on secure servers.

While we will use commercially reasonable efforts to safeguard your personal data, you acknowledge that the use of the internet is not entirely secure and for this reason we cannot guarantee the security or integrity of any personal data transferred from you or to you via the internet.

Data retention

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

Local laws may require that we have to keep basic information about our you for a certain period of time.  For example, if you are or work for a customer of ours, we are required to keep your personal data (including Contact, Identity, Financial and Transaction Data) for a certain number of years after the date of your purchase.  For example, this is six years in the UK.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

In some circumstances:

  • you can ask us to delete your data: see below for further information; and
  • we may anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

Monitoring

We may monitor and record communications with you (such as emails) for the purpose of quality assurance, training, fraud prevention and compliance.

Information about other individuals

If you give us information on behalf of someone else, you confirm that the other person has appointed you to act on his/her behalf and has agreed that you can:

  • give consent on his/her behalf to the processing of his/her personal data;
  • receive on his/her behalf any data protection notices; and
  • give consent to the processing and transfer of his/her personal data abroad.

Your rights

Local laws provide you with certain other rights regarding your personal data.   More information about specific rights that you may have under local laws (such as in the EEA, Switzerland, the UK, Brazil, Japan, Australia, the US or in China), and how to exercise those rights, can be found under our country specific privacy statements below.

We will make reasonable efforts to respond promptly to your requests in accordance with applicable local laws.  When you contact us, we may require you to provide information to us to authenticate your identity to assist you with your request. If you are unable to provide this information to us, we may be unable to process your request and/or there may be a delay in our response.

Our contact details

We welcome your feedback and questions.

If you wish to contact us, please send an email to privacy@oxinst.com or you can write to us at Attention: Group Data Privacy Manager, Tubney Woods, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5QX, UK.

Certain of our country specific privacy statements also contain details of how to contact our local teams on privacy matters in your country. The following countries have the following specific privacy email addresses for you to use: 

China - PrivacyCN@oxinst.com.

Japan - PrivacyJP@oxinst.com.

USA - PrivacyUS@oxinst.com.

Australia - PrivacyAU@oxinst.com.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the relevant supervisory authority.  Please see our country specific privacy statements below for further details. 

We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach a supervisory authority so please contact us in the first instance.

Changes to this statement and your duty to keep us up to date

We may change this Privacy Statement from time to time. You should check this Privacy Statement occasionally to ensure you are aware of the most recent version that will apply each time you access our websites, social media platforms, systems and applications which belong to or are used by us. Historic versions can be obtained by contacting us.

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us.

Additional Privacy Statements: Activity Specific

Please expand each section to see the relevant privacy statements by activity. These activity specific privacy statements supplement our other notices and are not intended to override them.

Additional Privacy Statements: Country Specific

Please expand each section to see the relevant privacy statements by country. 

SCHEDULE

THIRD PARTIES

INTERNAL THIRD PARTIES

Companies in the Oxford Instruments Group (acting as joint controllers or processors) provide various services to each other, including sales and support services and IT and system administration services and business analytics reporting.

EXTERNAL THIRD PARTIES

  • Service providers acting as processors and/or controllers.
  • Professional advisers acting as processors or joint controllers including lawyers, bankers, auditors and insurers who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance and accounting services.
  • HM Revenue & Customs, regulators, courts or government agencies and other authorities acting as processors or joint controllers who require reporting of processing activities in certain circumstances.
  • Credit reference agencies, business partners, agents, distributors, representatives, resellers, partners, suppliers, service providers and marketing automation providers;

LAWFUL BASIS

Legitimate Interest means the interest of our business in conducting and managing our business to enable us to give you the best service/product and the best and most secure experience. We make sure we consider and balance any potential impact on you (both positive and negative) and your rights before we process your personal data for our legitimate interests. We do not use your personal data for activities where our interests are overridden by the impact on you (unless we have your consent or are otherwise required or permitted to by law). You can obtain further information about how we assess our legitimate interests against any potential impact on you in respect of specific activities by contacting us. 

Performance of Contract means processing your data where it is necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are a party or to take steps at your request before entering into such a contract.

Comply with a legal or regulatory obligation means processing your personal data where it is necessary for compliance with a legal or regulatory obligation that we are subject to.

Representatives

Oxford Instruments GmbH is the appointed EU representative for: Oxford Instruments plc, Oxford Instruments Industrial Products Limited, Oxford Instruments Nanotechnology Tools Limited, Andor Technology Limited, Oxford Instruments Overseas Marketing Limited, Oxford Instruments Asylum Research, Inc., Oxford Instruments X-Ray Technology, Inc., Bitplane AG

Oxford Instruments plc is the appointed UK representative for: Oxford Instruments Asylum Research, Inc., Oxford Instruments X-Ray Technology Inc., Bitplane AG, WITec Wissenschaftliche Instrumente und Technologie GmbH, First Light Imaging SAS

 

Last updated: 1 September 2023