This privacy notice for ABR Hosting LTD ('we', 'us', or 'our'), describes how and why we might collect, store, use, and/or share ('process') your information when you use our services ('Services'), such as when you visit our website at abrhosting.com, or engage with us in other related ways, including any sales, marketing, or events.
If you are a parent or guardian who has registered an account to allow a minor to use the Services (for example, a family Minecraft server) — see our Terms and Conditions for how account eligibility works for minors — this notice applies to the account holder's personal information. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from minors beyond what the account holder provides on their behalf.
Questions or concerns? Reading this privacy notice will help you understand your privacy rights and choices. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, please do not use our Services. If you still have any questions or concerns, please contact us at legal@abrhosting.com.
1. What Information Do We Collect?
Personal information you disclose to us
We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide to us when you register on the Services, express an interest in obtaining information about us or our products and Services, when you participate in activities on the Services, or otherwise when you contact us.
Personal Information Provided by You. The personal information that we collect depends on the context of your interactions with us and the Services, the choices you make, and the products and features you use. The personal information we collect may include the following: names; phone numbers; email addresses; usernames; passwords; contact preferences; billing addresses; debit/credit card numbers; and contact or authentication data.
Sensitive Information. We do not process sensitive information.
Payment Data. We may collect data necessary to process your payment if you make purchases, such as your payment instrument number, and the security code associated with your payment instrument. All payment data is stored by Stripe and PayPal. You may find their privacy notice links here: stripe.com/privacy and paypal.com/uk/legalhub/privacy-full.
Social Media Login Data. We may provide you with the option to register with us using your existing social media account details. If you choose to register in this way, we will collect the information described in the section called 'Social Logins' below.
Information automatically collected
We automatically collect certain information when you visit, use, or navigate the Services. This information does not reveal your specific identity (like your name or contact information) but may include device and usage information, such as your IP address, browser and device characteristics, operating system, language preferences, referring URLs, device name, country, location, information about how and when you use our Services, and other technical information. This information is primarily needed to maintain the security and operation of our Services, and for our internal analytics and reporting purposes.
Like many businesses, we also collect information through cookies and similar technologies. The information we collect includes log and usage data, device data, and location data.
Google API
Our use of information received from Google APIs will adhere to Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
2. How Do We Process Your Information, and What Is Our Legal Basis?
We process your personal information for the reasons listed below. For each, we identify the lawful basis we rely on under UK GDPR: performance of a contract with you ('Contract'), our or a third party's legitimate interests ('Legitimate Interests'), your consent ('Consent'), or a legal obligation we must comply with ('Legal Obligation').
- To facilitate account creation and authentication and otherwise manage user accounts. (Contract)
- To deliver and facilitate delivery of the Services to you. (Contract)
- To respond to your inquiries and offer support. (Contract; Legitimate Interests in providing good support)
- To send administrative information relating to your account, orders, or the Services (for example, maintenance notices or a price-change notice). (Contract; Legal Obligation)
- To fulfil and manage your orders, payments, returns, and exchanges made through the Services. (Contract; Legal Obligation, for tax and accounting records)
- To request feedback and contact you about your use of our Services, where you have not opted out. (Legitimate Interests)
- To identify usage trends and evaluate and improve our Services, products, marketing, and your experience. (Legitimate Interests; Consent for optional analytics cookies — see our Cookie Policy)
- To determine the effectiveness of our marketing and promotional campaigns. (Consent, where this relies on analytics cookies)
- To comply with our legal obligations and exercise our legal rights, including responding to fraud, abuse, or security incidents. (Legal Obligation; Legitimate Interests)
3. When and with Whom Do We Share Your Personal Information?
We may need to share your personal information in the following situations:
- Business Transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.
- Google Cloud AI. We use Google Cloud AI to power our customer-support chat feature. Where you interact with this feature, your messages and account context necessary to respond to you are shared with Google Cloud AI under a data processing agreement, which prohibits Google Cloud AI from using your data to train its own models or for any purpose other than providing the feature to us.
- Facebook Login. If you choose to register or log in using Facebook Login, we share the minimum information necessary to authenticate you (as described in 'How Do We Handle Your Social Logins?' below) with Meta Platforms, Inc. See our Cookie Policy for any cookies this sets.
- Google Analytics. Where you have given analytics consent (see our Cookie Policy), we share anonymised usage data with Google Analytics, which reports on website traffic to help us improve our Services.
- Stripe. We share your payment data with Stripe, which provides payment processing services.
- PayPal. We share your payment data with PayPal, which provides payment processing services.
4. Do We Use Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies?
We may use cookies and similar tracking technologies (like web beacons and pixels) to access or store information. Specific information about how we use such technologies and how you can refuse certain cookies is set out in our Cookie Policy.
5. Do We Offer Artificial Intelligence-Based Products?
As part of our Services, we offer a customer-support chat feature powered by artificial intelligence ('AI Products'). This tool is designed to give you faster answers to common support questions.
Use of AI Technologies. We provide this feature through a third-party service provider ('AI Service Provider'), Google Cloud AI, under a data processing agreement. Google Cloud AI will not use your data to train or improve its own models, and will use your input, output, and personal information only as necessary to provide the feature to us.
Our AI Products. Our only current AI Product is customer-support chat. We do not use AI to make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you.
6. How Do We Handle Your Social Logins?
Our Services offer you the ability to register and log in using Facebook Login. Where you choose to do this, we will receive certain profile information about you from Facebook, typically your name, email address, and profile picture. We only request the minimum profile information needed to create and authenticate your account — we do not request access to your friends list or other information you have not chosen to make public.
We will use the information we receive only for the purposes that are described in this privacy notice or that are otherwise made clear to you on the relevant Services. Please note that we do not control, and are not responsible for, other uses of your personal information by Facebook. We recommend that you review Facebook's privacy policy to understand how it collects, uses, and shares your personal information.
7. Is Your Information Transferred Internationally?
Our servers and the servers of the infrastructure providers we use are located in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Finland, Canada, Singapore, and the United States. This is the same list of locations named in our Terms and Conditions — if either document is ever updated to add or remove a location, we will keep this list current here as the single source of truth.
Where we transfer personal information outside the UK or EEA — including to the United States, Singapore, and Canada — we do so only where the destination benefits from a UK adequacy regulation, or under Standard Contractual Clauses / the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, or another safeguard recognised under UK GDPR. You can ask us for more detail on the specific safeguard used for a given transfer by contacting our DPO.
8. How Long Do We Keep Your Information?
We keep different categories of personal information for different periods, depending on why we hold it:
- Billing, invoicing, and tax records: retained for 6 years after the end of the financial year they relate to, in line with UK tax and accounting record-keeping requirements.
- Account and profile information (name, contact details, login data): retained for as long as your account is active, and deleted or anonymised within 3 months of account closure, unless we need to keep specific items longer for one of the other reasons on this list.
- Security, abuse, and fraud-prevention logs: retained for up to 12 months from the date of the relevant event, to allow us to investigate and respond to fraud, network abuse, or security incidents that may not come to light immediately.
- Support tickets and correspondence: retained for 2 years after the ticket is closed, so we have context if you contact us again about the same issue.
When we have no ongoing need to process your personal information under any of the above, we will delete or anonymise it, or, if this is not possible (for example, because it is held in an encrypted backup archive with other customers' data), we will securely store it and isolate it from further processing until deletion is possible.
9. How Do We Keep Your Information Safe?
We have implemented appropriate and reasonable technical and organisational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process. However, despite our safeguards and efforts to secure your information, no electronic transmission over the Internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise or guarantee that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorised third parties will not be able to defeat our security and improperly collect, access, steal, or modify your information.
Although we will do our best to protect your personal information, transmission of personal information to and from our Services is at your own risk. You should only access the Services within a secure environment.
10. Do We Collect Information from Minors?
Our Terms and Conditions require the account holder who registers and pays for the Services to be at least 18. We recognise, however, that our game-server products (Minecraft in particular) are commonly used by minors under a parent or guardian's account. In that situation, we collect the parent or guardian's personal information as the account holder, and we do not knowingly collect personal information directly from the minor beyond what the account holder provides.
Because our services are likely to be accessed by minors in this way, we design our default settings with this in mind — for example, our Cookie Policy already ensures no analytics or tracking technology is active for any visitor, of any age, unless they affirmatively consent. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a minor has provided us with personal information outside of an account you control, please contact our DPO and we will investigate and delete it as appropriate.
11. What Are Your Privacy Rights?
In some regions (like the EEA, UK, Switzerland, and Canada), you have certain rights under applicable data protection laws. These may include the right to: (i) request access and obtain a copy of your personal information; (ii) request rectification or erasure; (iii) restrict the processing of your personal information; (iv) if applicable, to data portability; and (v) not be subject to automated decision-making.
If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, which may be express and/or implied consent depending on the applicable law, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of processing before its withdrawal nor, when applicable law allows, will it affect the processing of your personal information conducted in reliance of lawful processing grounds other than consent.
If you are located in the EEA or UK and you believe we are unlawfully processing your personal information, you also have the right to complain to your Member State data protection authority or your UK data protection authority.
If you are located in Switzerland, you may contact the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner.
Withdrawing your consent: If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us using the contact details provided in the 'Contact Us' section below.
Account information: If you would like to review or change the information in your account or terminate your account, you may contact us using the contact information provided. Upon your request to terminate your account, we will deactivate or delete your account and information from our active databases. However, we may retain some information in our files to prevent fraud, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigations, enforce our legal terms and/or comply with applicable legal requirements.
12. Controls for Do-Not-Track Features
Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems and mobile applications include a Do-Not-Track ('DNT') feature or setting you can activate to signal your privacy preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. At this stage no uniform technology standard for recognising and implementing DNT signals has been finalised. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online — though as noted above, no analytics tracking is active for any visitor unless they have already given affirmative consent through our cookie banner.
13. Do United States Residents Have Specific Privacy Rights?
If you are a resident of certain US states, you may have certain rights regarding your personal information. We collect the following categories of personal information: identifiers; customer records information; commercial information; and geolocation data (approximate, from IP address, for analytics only where you have consented). We do not collect biometric information, protected classification characteristics, internet or other electronic network activity beyond standard analytics, audio/visual/thermal/olfactory information, professional or employment-related information, education information, or inferences drawn from personal information, and we do not sell personal information.
Your rights may include the right to know about personal information collected or disclosed; the right to delete personal information; the right to non-discrimination for exercising your rights; and the right to limit use and disclosure of sensitive personal information.
To exercise these rights, you can contact us by email at legal@abrhosting.com, or by referring to the contact details at the bottom of this document.
14. Do Other Regions Have Specific Privacy Rights?
If you are a resident of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or another region not specifically mentioned above, you may also have certain rights regarding your personal information under applicable local laws. Please contact us using the details below to exercise any applicable rights or to request information about the specific laws that may apply to you.
15. Do We Make Updates to This Notice?
We may update this privacy notice from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated 'Last updated' date at the top of this privacy notice. If we make material changes to this privacy notice, we will notify you by email or by prominently posting a notice on the Services before the change takes effect. We encourage you to review this privacy notice periodically to stay informed of how we are protecting your information.
16. Contact Us
If you have questions or comments about this notice, you may contact our Data Protection Officer (DPO) at:
ABR Hosting LTD20 Onslow Close
Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 8BU
United Kingdom
Phone: (+44) 01707 929887
Email: legal@abrhosting.com
If you are a resident in the United Kingdom, we are the 'data controller' of your personal information. We have appointed a data protection officer who is responsible for overseeing questions in relation to this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact our DPO.
To request deletion of your data or to exercise any other right described in this notice, please email our DPO at legal@abrhosting.com.