Privacy Policy
You have trusted us to take care of your eyes and/or your hearing needs. You can also trust us with your personal details. Specsavers Privacy Policy means that we respect any personal information that you provide us with, or that we ascertain from your eye or hearing tests, from any purchase of our products and services or any other interactions with us.
- Information about us
- What personal information do you collect?
- How and why do you use my information?
- How long do you keep my information for?
- Who do you share personal information with?
- How do you process my personal information?
- Our cookie policy
- How can I update or change the personal information you hold about me?
- What rights do I have?
- What choices do I have?
- How do you protect my personal information?
- Updating our Privacy Policy
- Contact us
In this privacy policy, references to ‘Specsavers’, ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’ mean the members of the Specsavers group of companies (Specsavers Group) that process your personal information.
These companies include the following.
For store customers (optician or audiology), corporate eye-care customers or users of our Specsavers website:
- Specsavers Optical Superstores Limited (a company registered in England and Wales with company number 01721624 and its registered office at Forum 6 Parkway, Solent Business Park, Whiteley, Hampshire;
- Specsavers Optical Group Limited (a company registered in Guernsey with company number 12294 and its registered office at La Villiaze, St Andrews, Guernsey, GY6 8YP); and
- Specsavers Hearcare Group Limited (a company registered in Guernsey with company number 35965 and its registered office at La Villiaze, St Andrews, Guernsey, GY6 8YP).
Each Specsavers store is a company within the Specsavers Group. Details of each store company are available in the relevant store.
For our home-visit customers:
- Specsavers Healthcall Limited (a company registered in England and Wales with company number 02604077 and its registered office at Forum 6, Solent Business Park, Whiteley, Hampshire, PO15 7PA).
You can ask your Specsavers home-visit representative for details of the companies that provide this service.
The Specsavers Group are data controllers of your personal information for the purposes of any data-protection legislation that applies. This means that they are responsible for how and why your personal information is collected, used and stored. If have any questions or concerns about how your information is being managed, you can write to our Data Protection Officer at Data Protection Office, Forum 6 Parkway, Solent Business Park, Whiteley, Hampshire, PO15 7PA.
In this privacy policy, when we refer to ‘you’, we mean the person whose personal information we collect, use and process. This includes anyone who contacts us in connection with our products and services or who interacts with us on our website at www.specsavers.co.uk or in-store.
We may collect and process information about you including:
- your name;
- your date of birth;
- your contact phone numbers (including mobile);
- your email and postal address;
- your relevant health details, such as:
- current and past eye or hearing health conditions, general health conditions and glasses, contact-lens or hearing prescriptions;
- medication details; and
- communication between your optometrist or audiologist and your GP or ophthalmologist;
- your examination and test results;
- your payment details;
- information about your employment and lifestyle and whether you drive;
- details of any prescription supplied to you by your healthcare professional or medical practitioner;
- information that you provide by filling in forms on our website;
- details of your visit to the website and any online transactions you carry out;
- any information or images you give us when you use our virtual try-on technology;
- Your image through CCTV cameras or other safety and security systems, or by body cameras worn by our mystery shoppers when they interact with our staff;
- any other information you have chosen to give us.
We mainly collect this information from you when you have chosen to give it to us. But we may also collect it from other sources if it is necessary and legal to do so, including from:
- the NHS or other healthcare providers or institutions;
- people who have your permission to provide information on your behalf (for example, your parents or guardians);
- third-party service providers; and
- government, tax or law-enforcement agencies.
We can also combine this information with information we get from public sources.
We may also collect personal information about you from your use of other Specsavers Group websites or services.
We process your personal information for the following reasons, to help us provide you with the best possible eye and hearing health care and customer experience. We will only process your personal information if we have a lawful basis (reason) to do so. We rely on the following lawful bases to collect and process your personal information;
Legitimate interests – It is in our genuine interests to process your information for the following purposes to make sure we provide you with a professional eye and hearing service in the most secure and appropriate way:
- To perform eye and hearing tests so we can understand your eye and hearing health and any medical conditions.
- To work out and dispense your prescription for glasses, contact lenses or hearing aids.
- To book your eye and hearing tests.
- To confirm your appointment. We will send you confirmation by email and text message if you book online. We will also send you a reminder a short period before the appointment is due.
- To contact you about changes to our service that could affect or inconvenience you.
- To send you eye test reminders. Changes in your eyesight are usually very gradual, so regular eye tests are important.
- To send you communications about looking after your eye and hearing health, and information about correcting your vision.
- To send you direct marketing communications about our products, offers and discounts. You can opt out of these communications at any time.
- To send you surveys and to ask for feedback to help us improve our service and make our service and products more relevant to you. We use information collected through customer surveys, cookies, research, and analysis to help us improve our service.
- If you are browsing our website, we will not collect any information which will identify you by name. However, we will collect information using cookies or traffic data which uses IP addresses or other numeric identifiers to analyse how people use our website. See our Cookie Policy for more information about cookies and how we use them.
- To communicate with you about health care information, special offers and discounts that are relevant to you.
- To respond to complaints, queries and any claims made against us.
- To ensure the safety and security of our customers when in our stores.
- To understand the experience of our customers when in-store. This helps us to identify the strengths and weaknesses of our customer service, and can be used to inform a development strategy for improving customer experiences.
Please note, we will communicate with you using the communication preferences you give us. This may include by post, email, text message, phone or on social media.
Contractual obligations – we rely on the responsibilities set out in our contract with you when we process your information in order to keep to any arrangements we have made with you. This may include for the following reasons:
- To manage your online account.
- To process transactions when you buy any of our goods and services.
- To process your credit-card or debit-card information when you are paying for goods and services, or when we are dealing with refunds.
- To provide you with our products and services.
- To meet the obligations we have under our contract with you.
Legal obligations – there may be times when we have a legal reason for needing to share and process your personal information you have given us, including for the following reasons:
- We may need to make your personal information available to other optometrists, medical practitioners, health and social care providers, or the NHS.
- We may need to respond to any complaints or claims we receive from our regulators or other third parties. Our regulators might also ask for information when carrying out their work.
- We may need to share your information with other third parties who have a legal right to access it (for example, the police, our insurers, external auditors, and investigators).
- We may need to share your information with companies who provide us with your updated personal information, such as changes to your contact information or deceased indicators (notice of your death).
- We will need to process your information if you ask us for a copy of the personal information we are holding. This is known as a ‘subject access request’ and is one of the rights you have under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- We have to process your personal information to meet our responsibilities as registered and dispensing optometrists and audiologists.
- We may need to share your information to help prevent and detect fraud, and to protect the health and safety of members of the public, our staff and our customers.
- We may have to share your personal information to meet our corporate responsibilities, including during company mergers and when buying or selling assets.
In line with our rights under relevant data-protection law, there may be times when we will anonymise your personal information. That means any details which could be used to identify you, such as your name, will be removed so that you can no longer be identified. We may use this anonymised information: - for statistical research, and publication purposes; and
- to develop and improve future treatments, and the accuracy of core health-care technologies (health machines such as cameras which detect eye disease) and related products and medicines.
Consent – we rely on your consent (permission) to process your personal information within the Specsavers Group, and will ask you to provide this:
- when you enter one of our competitions;
- when we use facial scanning services to deliver personalised experiences in-store; and
- when you use our virtual try-on service online.
We and other members of the Specsavers Group will keep personal information for as long as is reasonably necessary (or as defined under healthcare laws and regulations which apply) to provide products and services, including aftercare services, and to maintain records as needed to satisfy tax and other legal or regulatory requirements, as well as to protect and defend against claims. Once it is determined that there is no longer a legal basis to retain your Personal Data, it may be deleted or anonymised where it can no longer be used to identify you directly or indirectly.
We de-identify (anonymise) your personal data so that it does not directly or indirectly identify you for the following purposes; concerning health for future scientific and historical research purposes, analytics, and statistical purposes to develop and improve new treatments and programs of healthcare, related services, and products.
We may share your personal information with other members of the Specsavers Group for any of the reasons we have given in this privacy policy.
Each of our stores is run by a company within the Specsavers Group. When you place an order for products or services in a store, the data controller of the personal information will be that store. Specsavers Optical Group will process that information, including any health information, on behalf of the store. Specsavers Optical Group also provides IT, marketing and other services for each store and processes any personal information relating to these services.
We may share your personal information with other people when it is necessary to do so, including for the following reasons:
- We use other organisations to help us process personal information, but they are not allowed to use it for any other purposes. We may use the information we are given from other organisations to add to and improve our databases of customer details.
- We may reveal personal information to health authorities, including the NHS or national equivalent organisations.
- We may pass personal information to external agencies and organisations, including the police and other law-enforcement agencies, to prevent and detect fraud (including fraudulent transactions) and criminal activity. These external agencies may check the information we give them against public and private databases and may keep a record of those checks to use in future security checks.
- If a claim is made, or could be made, against us or other members of the Specsavers Group, we may pass personal information to our insurers.
- If we sell or buy any business or assets, we may reveal personal information about you to the seller or buyer.
- If we (or our assets) are bought or taken over by another organisation (or there is a reorganisation within our corporate group), personal information we hold about customers will be one of the assets transferred.
- We may pass certain personal information to your employer if you have been referred to us as a corporate eye-care customer.
- We may pass your personal information to others:
- if we have to by law (including under a court order);
- to apply our Terms and Conditions of Use of Website (‘Terms of Use’) or the terms of other agreements we have with you; and
- to protect our rights, property and safety and those of our customers, employees or others.
- We may share an anonymised version of your email address to third-party social media sites, such as Facebook, to enable us to display marketing to you. When we do this, we use a process called ‘hashing’ to protect your details. This is where we scramble the plain text of your email address into a unique and irreversible collection of numbers and letters so that your email address cannot be recognised. When we do this, social media providers are only allowed to use your information to display our marketing to you through their site and not for any of their own purposes. You can update your social media privacy preferences on your own social media accounts.
- We may share an anonymised version of your personal information or clinical test results (or both) to third-party equipment and technology suppliers or research institutions:
- to provide you with clinical care (including your eye or hearing test);
- to help the suppliers continually improve their products and test equipment (which means we can then provide you with the best care); and
- for the purposes of clinical research.
Sometimes it may be necessary to share your personal information with our business partners (other organisations), or other members of the Specsavers Group who provide services for us. This may mean sharing your information outside of the UK, European Union (EU) and European Economic Area (EEA), including in the USA. Please note, when information is shared outside of the UK, EU and EEA, it may be handled according to local laws.
If we need to share your personal information outside of the UK, EU or EEA, we will make sure that the transfer is in line with data-protection law.
Our contracts with the overseas companies we share personal information with will include standard clauses which are approved by the European Commission for transferring information from the EU. Where necessary, we will put further measures in place to protect your information. These clauses, and any further measures, make sure that your information is protected in the same way as it would be in the UK, EU and EEA. If you would like a copy of our standard contractual clauses, please write to our Data Protection Officer at Data Protection Office, Forum 6 Parkway, Solent Business Park, Whiteley, Hampshire, PO15 7PA
Cookies are small pieces of information that are stored on your device when you visit a website or use an app. We use cookies to improve how our website runs. You can find more information in our Cookie Policy.
You can update or change your personal information at your local Specsavers store, by signing in to your account (if you are a registered online customer), or by contacting customerservice@specsavers.co.uk.
You have certain rights under UK data-protection law, including the right to:
- access your personal information (we may charge a fee if we are allowed to do so by law); and
- correct your personal information if it is inaccurate or incomplete.
You also have the right to ask us to delete your personal information and to stop processing it if we have no legal basis to keep storing or processing it. This includes if:
- we no longer need your personal information for the purpose originally collected or processed it for;
- you withdraw your permission;
- you object to us processing your personal information;
- you ask us to stop processing your personal information (although we are entitled to store your personal information, we cannot process it further if you ask us not to);
- we move or transfer your personal information to another organisation; or
- you object to us processing your personal information if we are processing it:
- based on our legitimate interests (our business purposes)
- for direct marketing; or
- for scientific or historical research and statistical purposes.
To exercise of the above rights, please contact your Specsavers store, or if you are a registered online customer, contact customerservice@specsavers.co.uk or fill in an online form.
You have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office. They can investigate whether organisations are keeping to data-protection law. For more information, visit ico.org.uk.
We may use your personal information to contact you about our products and services.
If you do not want to receive marketing material (including special offers and discounts), you can let us know in-store, by emailing customerservice@specsavers.co.uk or by phoning the customer service team on 0808 172 0072.
You can choose to stop receiving marketing emails from us by following the unsubscribe link and instructions in the marketing emails we send you.
We use the following security technology and methods to help protect your personal information from unauthorised access and use.
- Encryption, meaning that information is hidden so that it cannot be read without special knowledge (such as a password). This is done with a secret code (a cypher). The hidden information is said to be ‘encrypted’.
- Using a different name for you so we can hide parts of your personal information.
- Controlling access to systems and networks. This allows us to stop people who are not allowed to view your personal information from getting access to it.
- Training our staff so they know how to handle personal information and how and when to report when something goes wrong.
- Regular testing of our technology and ways of working, including keeping up to date on the latest security updates.
We have no control over the contents of other websites or resources which are linked to our website. We accept no responsibility for them or the privacy practices they use, or for any loss or damage that results from you using those websites or resources.
We may update our privacy policy from time to time. Any updates will take effect as soon as they are posted on our website.
If you have any questions about this privacy policy, or you would like to change any of the preferences you have chosen, visit us in-store or online or write to Data Protection Officer, Data Protection Office, Forum 6 Parkway, Solent Business Park, Whiteley, Hampshire, PO15 7PA.
Last updated May 2023
See our Intellectual property rights policy which applies to all trademarks and copyright material.
