Privacy and cookies notice

When ACCA collects your information, we are required by law to be fair in notifying individuals on how their information will be managed and informing them of their rights. More than that, we want to be transparent, open and ethical in our practices. This notice provides privacy information for visitors to ACCA's websites. For more specific detail on how we use your information to provide services to you please see our customer Data protection notice.

We collect information about the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of all visitors to the site which helps us monitor the level of activity and the service we provide. An IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the Internet, allowing Internet servers to locate and identify your computer.

Computing devices require IP addresses in order for users to communicate on the Internet, browse and shop, and to make sure messages get from one device to another and that the messages are understood.

To provide you with services, such as qualifications or professional membership, or answering an online query, we need to obtain and use your data.  We provide specific information and Privacy Notices for each of our services at the time you submit your information, so you always know what’s going to happen to your information, also ensuring you are in control of how it is used.

In addition to specific Privacy Notices about a particular service, we also maintain a more general Data protection notice that covers a wider view of our activities for people that want further details.  We also have the ACCA Privacy Promise, which spells out our overall commitment to privacy.

If you get in touch with us using ACCA Connect or the Webchat facility on our website, or otherwise using the contact details or social media referred to on our website, we may collect and retain your contact details and the contents of your communication in order to handle your query and maintain records for training and development purposes.

Calls made to ACCA's customer call centre and other communications may also be recorded and retained for training and record-keeping purposes.

We may also retain records of interactions with you using social media sites including Facebook, ACCA on LinkedIn and ACCA on Twitter with tools that analyse your interactions with us.

While we take all reasonable precautions to make sure that other organisations who we deal with have good security practices, we are not responsible for the privacy practices of other organisations whose websites may be linked to our service, or whose contact details we may provide on our website (such as joint scheme partners).

We are also not responsible for the privacy practices of social media providers with whom ACCA has pages or accounts.

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site. Some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of the site to operate.

ACCA sets first party cookies to manage access to our websites and personalise content. We also set first party cookies to provide analytical data on website use which enables us to understand which areas of the website are of most relevance to you.

Cookie technology also enables us to ensure that, where you have registered for any of our online services, we maintain your confidentiality and security as you move through secure or password protected areas of the website.

We use a number of third party services to provide us with information on the use of our website, associated external resources and to provide you with relevant advertising. These services fall into 2 distinct groups: web analytics and advertising.

Web Analytics

These third party services collect aggregate data about how visitors arrive at and use our site and our content hosted on other sites.

Advertising

We also use third party advertising companies to serve advertisements when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.

You're not obliged to accept a cookie that we (or any other web server) send to you. Most browsers accept cookies automatically but you can modify the settings in your browser to turn off this feature.

However, cookies are integral to some areas of our website and to certain online services offered by ACCA, so if you choose not to accept cookies from us, you may not be able to use some areas of our website and we may not be able to provide certain online services to you.

Details on how to modify cookie settings for popular browsers are available from the following links:

Microsoft Windows - Internet Explorer, delete and manage cookies
Safari for iOS
Safari for Mac: Manage cookies and website data using Safari
Firefox
Google Chrome
Security and Privacy in Opera

For further information on cookies, please visit All About Cookies.org

The Data protection notice on our website and this Privacy Notice are a good starting point.  However, if you have a more detailed query or want to exercise your rights, please contact privacy@accaglobal.com

From time to time we will review this document, when we make substantial changes to our processes or procedures and systems, or if laws and regulations change. We will update the notice here, and make reasonable efforts to contact and update those affected if the changes are substantial in nature.

Date of last revision - July 2019.