Sensitive personal data
Certain types of personal data, such as health data, is a special category of personal data which by law requires additional protection. We do limit the circumstances in which we collect sensitive data, but we do collect and process it when:
- You notify us that you or a passenger has reduced mobility
- You notify us that your vehicle is specifically modified or adapted to accommodate your needs
- You notify us that you will be accompanied by a recognised assistance dog
- You are required by the authorities to provide certain data to us in advance in order to access the Border
- You have been involved in an accident on board a shuttle or at one of our terminals
By providing any sensitive personal data, you explicitly agree that we may collect it and use it to provide services to you.
3. How we use your data to personalise the products, services, communications and web pages we offer you including via cookies and similar technologies
We use the data we collect about you from different sources and touch points to try to understand more about you and your preferences, so that we can personalise the service we offer to you. We use information collected from the bookings you have made, from your participation in the My Eurotunnel membership programme, from your preferences and interests and from cookies.
4. What are cookies?
Cookies are text files containing small pieces of information which are stored by your web browser on your device. Cookies enable you to navigate our website or app efficiently, remember your preferences and provide you with relevant content. We use cookies in our website, mobile app and in our emails. You can update your cookie preferences through our Privacy Preference Centre and delete cookies if you wish, however certain cookies are necessary for viewing and navigating our website or app.
In order to understand how our customers interact with the emails and content we send, we use pixels that allow us to know an email we sent has been opened. Sometimes we can use the personal data you provide to us to identify when you visit our website using different devices. In most cases we will not be able to identify you personally from the information we collect using cookies. We use the information from these different sources in the following ways:
- To help us communicate with you. We use information about where you are, for example, to provide the right offers based on where you live
- To identify you when you access our websites from different devices
- To identify your preferences and interests. We look at which of our website pages you visit most to understand what you are most interested in
- To improve our products and services. Trends in the personal data we collect show what our customers like and dislike and we use this to inform our business plans, and to develop the design and layout of our website and app to enhance the customer experience
- To understand more about your preferences and your purchasing habits - our data analytics tools and segmentation tools allow us to match data we collect from cookies with data we have about bookings you have made for travel with Eurotunnel.
- Sometimes we use data and/or systems provided by third parties as part of this process.
- We know that similar customers are interested in similar products and services, so we group similar customers together in ‘segments’ (see the section ’Profiling’ below).
- We use segment information to improve our communications with you and recommend to you those services we think will be most interesting to you, including new products and services offered by our partners.
- We also use segment information to make sure that we show you adverts which we think will be of most interest to you when you visit through our online advertising space
- To help you complete a booking.
For more information about cookies and how you can manage cookies and remove them, please refer to our Cookies Policy or update your preferences through our Preference Centre.
5. Profiling
We carry out customer profiling to help us build a better picture of your needs and interests so that we can tailor your experience with Eurotunnel and provide you with tailored prices and offers that we hope will be as relevant to you as possible. We call this segmentation. This involves using booking data and data around how a customer interacts with our website and marketing communications. We also use customer preferences data provided by customers.
For information on how to opt out, please see ‘Your rights’ below.
6. Contacting you
We may send you marketing communications by email if you have given your consent for us to do so. Our marketing communications include information about our new and existing services, our loyalty programme ‘My Eurotunnel’, special offers we think you might like and other travel services, interesting articles and products which we think might be useful to you when planning your travel.
If you have previously opted in to receiving emails from us, you can opt out of receiving marketing emails from us by visiting the Preference Centre, by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email or emailing unsubscribe@eurotunnel.com. You can update your preferences and interests when logging into My Eurotunnel at any time.
If you ask us to stop sending marketing communications, we will keep a record of the fact that you have asked us not to send you marketing communications indefinitely so that we can respect your request in future.
Please note that if you tell us that you do not wish to receive marketing emails or SMS, you will still receive service emails or SMS which may be necessary to confirm your booking, to update you on the status of our service or the facilities available at our terminals.
We will use the contact details you give us when you check in (either your mobile telephone number, your email address, or both) to trace whether your train was cancelled or delayed. We do this so that we can monitor the performance of the contract we have with you.
From time to time, we may also contact you by phone when it is necessary to fulfil our contract with you or it is in our legitimate interests to do so. For example, we may contact you by phone when your journey has been disrupted, either to notify you in advance or to request feedback after the event.
7. Keeping your data
We keep your data only for as long as we need it. How long we need data depends on what we are using it for, whether that is to provide services to you, for our own legitimate interests (described above) or so that we can comply with the law. We will actively review the data we hold and when there is no longer a customer, legal or business need for us to hold it, we will either delete it securely or in some cases anonymise it.
Provision of our services
Where we process your personal data in connection with the provision of our services, we keep the data for 6 years after you travel with us (except for your IP address which we keep for 2 years).
Border requirements
Advance Passenger Information (API) - All UK ports and airports are required by the UK Home Office to collect passport details from every person entering or leaving the country. Information supplied to us using our API system is passed to the UK Home Office. Once collected, your information is stored on our secure systems for a short period of time and sent in an encrypted format to UK Home Office when you travel.
Your API data will only be kept on our systems if you give your explicit consent by opting to store your API details for ease of future use in your My Eurotunnel Account. You can update and/or delete this information at any time by accessing your My Eurotunnel Account.
Marketing
Where we process your personal data for marketing purposes with your consent, we process the data for 6 years after you travel with us or until you ask us to stop and for a short period after this (to allow us to implement your requests). We also keep a record of the fact that you have asked us not to send you direct marketing so that we can respect your request in future.
We maintain administrative and financial records and make backup archive tapes of our IT systems on a monthly basis for disaster recovery management, information security and business management purposes. We retain this data for 15 years.
Recordings of your telephone calls to our contact centre are kept for 7 years in accordance with the requirements of the Financial Conduct Authority.
The Channel Tunnel Group Limited is an Appointed Representative of Eurotunnel Financial Services Limited (authorisation number 490713) which is directly authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. You can check the FCA register by visiting their web site at http://www.fsa.gov.uk/register/home.do or telephone 0845 606 1234 during normal working hours.
Images provided by you (for example Instagram images and videos) for use on our social media feed are kept until you ask us to delete them.
CCTV images and recordings are retained for 30 days except where government authorities or law enforcement officials require footage to be preserved, in which case it is retained as long as is legally necessary.
Your IP address is retained in accordance with your cookie preferences.
8. Protecting your personal data
How we protect your data
We protect your personal data against unauthorised access, unlawful use, accidental loss, corruption or destruction. We use technical measures such as encryption, pseudonymisation and password protection to protect your data and the systems they are held in. We also use operational measures to protect the data, for example by limiting the number of people who have access to the databases in which our booking information is held. We keep these security measures under review and refer to industry security standards to keep up to date with current best practice.
Where we provide links to third party websites through our website or app, these are subject to separate Privacy Policies and are not controlled by Eurotunnel. Please be aware that this Privacy Notice does not apply to such websites and Eurotunnel is not responsible for your information that third parties may collect through these websites.
Also, in some instances we may be compelled by law to disclose our customers’ personal data to a third party, such as law enforcement and or border control agencies. We have no control over how data is protected by that party.
How you can protect your data
You can follow some simple steps to keep your information secure. When you create your My Eurotunnel account, choose a strong password that is unique to your account and do not share your password with other people. If you use the same password across your different accounts, you increase the risk of your data being compromised if your password is accidentally or unlawfully accessed by another person. If you suspect that someone else has got access to your password, make sure that you change it immediately.
If you receive an email that looks suspicious, for example if it refers to a Eurotunnel booking that you are not aware of, please report it to us. You can call us from the UK: +44 (0) 3457 35 35 35 or from France: +33 (0) 809 10 08 11 during opening hours, use our webchat service or complete the ‘contact us’ form on our website.
Please note that we will never ask for your payment card details via email. Also, if you receive communications about free Eurotunnel tickets or a discount code, you may reasonably suspect that these are fraudulent.
9. Sharing your data
Eurotunnel is part of the Getlink Group of companies. We share some of your personal data with other members of the Getlink Group to administer and manage group functions, including the provision of our services and products to you.
We share some of your personal data with, or obtain personal data from, the following categories of third parties:
- Government authorities such as border control authorities and law enforcement authorities We sometimes have to provide your personal data to government authorities to ensure that you can travel to your destination or to meet our legal and regulatory obligations. We retain some aggregated anonymised information based on the personal data you provide to the government authorities, such as statistics regarding the nationalities of our customers.
- Safety standards organisations We share personal data about accidents on our services and terminals with the The Office of Rail and Road (‘ORR’) in the UK and Autorité de Régulation des Activités Ferroviaires et Routières (“Arafer”) in France, who are the national bodies responsible for the regulation of the Channel Fixed Link.
- Tour operators or companies through which you book your Eurotunnel tickets for travel on our services are sold through many different channels. These companies must share your booking information with us so that we can ensure you are able to travel. We may also use the booking information they provide to personalise our services and your preferences, as described above under the heading ‘How we use your data to personalise the service we offer you’.
- Companies who provide services to us in order to help us run our business and improve our service and your customer experience. We may share your data with our trusted partner companies, to approach you for market research purposes and feedback on our services, those who provide IT support to us and our professional advisers. We use our reasonable endeavours to make sure that our trusted partner companies respect your personal data and comply with data protection laws.
- Partners who provide services to you When you purchase goods or services which will be provided, either in whole or in part, by one of our partners, we share your personal data with that partner so that they can provide the service to you. For example, we would share your personal data with Allianz insurance or the RAC when you buy one of their insurance products. Our partners have their own privacy policies and terms of use over which Eurotunnel has no control. Eurotunnel carefully selects the partners that it chooses to work with, however it has no responsibility or liability for their privacy policies, terms of use or the way they process your personal data. Please make sure that you review the relevant privacy policies and terms of use of these partners prior to purchasing their goods or services, using their websites, apps or services or providing any personal data to them.
- Data analytics companies and advertisers From time to time, we may share a limited and pseudonymised (or partially anonymised) version of your data with advertising platforms such as Meta and Google.
- Your credit and debit card information In order to process payments and prevent and detect fraud, we process encrypted payment card data through our payment card and fraud management services providers.
- We do not sell your personal data to anyone.
10. Updates to our Privacy Notice
Our Privacy Policy is a dynamic tool and we will modify it when there is a change to the way we process your data. We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time, to ensure that the information we provide to you is up to date and in accordance with the relevant data protection laws. Any new version of this Notice will be published on our website.
11. Your rights
Data Access
You are entitled to know whether we hold your personal data and if so, receive a copy of that data held by us. You can do this by emailing our data protection team at legal@eurotunnel.com
In order for us to be able to process your request, you will need to provide us with the information below:
- Your full name.
- All email addresses you have used to book Eurotunnel tickets or communicate with us, even if you no longer use them.
- All postal addresses you have used to book Eurotunnel tickets, even if you no longer live there.
- A description of the data you would like to access including a date range (for example, your booking history for the past 12 months). An accurate description of your request will save you time and effort and will allow us to focus our searches on what you need and quickly reply to you.
- Any other information that may help us locate your data (for example, your booking references and vehicle registration number/s).
For the protection of your data, we will also need to verify your identity, so please make sure you provide us with a copy of your current and valid photo ID (for example, driving licence or passport photo page). This will only be used to match you with the data requested and will then be destroyed.
If you submit a request on behalf of another person, we will need to contact that person to ensure that they have authorised you to make the request and receive their data.
Data Rectification
If you believe that we hold incorrect or incomplete information about you, please let us know and we will correct it. Most of the time you will be able to correct and update your information through your My Eurotunnel account. If this not possible, you can notify us by contacting our Customer Service Team directly by telephone, through webchat or via the Contact Us form on our website.
Please note that any requests for changes in your active bookings, for example changes of passenger names or of travel document details, will be processed by Customer Services, so contacting our Customer Service team directly will save you time.
Data deletion
We will retain your information for the period required to fulfil the purposes set out in this Notice and when there is a legal obligation to do so.
If you wish to make a request in relation to your personal data, please contact legal@eurotunnel.com.
Withdrawing consent and objection
Where we process your personal data based on your consent you can withdraw your consent at any time. Please see section 6 above for more details. Please note that even if you withdraw your consent, this does not affect the legality of any processing carried out before you withdrew your consent.
Objection
You have the right to object to the use of your data for direct marketing purposes at any time. Please see section 6 above for more details on how you can unsubscribe from marketing.
Also, you may consider that you have reasons to object to the use of your data when such use is based on our legitimate interests as explained in this Policy. These rights may be limited in some situations, for example where we can demonstrate that we have a legal requirement to process your data. Before using your data for our business interests, we have balanced these interests against your rights and freedoms; however, if you consider that you have grounds to object to the use of your data, you can explain to us your particular situation and we will individually review your request.
You can also limit, restrict or object to the processing of your data. You can use our Preference Centre and Cookie Preferences tool, as described above. You can also log in to your My Eurotunnel account to update the details held there. If you object to data processing or ask for your data to be deleted we will delete your data from our systems, but this means we will no longer be able to hold any information to assist with future bookings or personalise our products, services, communications or website for you.
12. Contact us
To raise any queries, objections or to exercise any of your rights, you can send an email to us at legal@eurotunnel.com or write to us at:
- UK: Eurotunnel Legal Department, UK Terminal, Ashford Road, Folkestone, Kent CT18 8XX
- In France: Eurotunnel Department Juridique Siege Exploitation B.P. 69 62904 Coquelles. Cedex. France
When you get in touch, we will reply to you as soon as possible but in any event within one month. Please note that if your request is more complicated, it may take a little longer to come back to you and the response deadline will, where necessary, be extended. There is no charge for most requests, but if for example you ask us to provide a significant amount of data, we may ask you to pay a reasonable administration fee. We will also ask you to verify your identity before we provide any information to you.
Please note that you have the right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority which is responsible for the protection of personal data in the country where you live or work, or in which you think a breach of data protection laws might have taken place.
Customers in the UK can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office by telephone on 0303 123 1113, or by using the live chat service which is available through the Information Commissioner’s website www.ico.org.uk.
Customers in France can contact the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés by telephone on +33 (0)1.53.73.22.22 or by writing to the Commission at 3 Place de Fontenoy, TSA 80715, 75334 PARIS CEDEX 07, France.