Privacy & Cookies

London Business Hub Privacy Policy (including Cookies)

The Greater London Authority (GLA) is committed to protecting your privacy and processing your personal data in accordance with the Data Protection Action (DPA) 1998. Please take the time to review this Privacy Policy carefully, as it tells you how your personal information will be treated by us.

UK Data Protection law will change on 25 May 2018. This notice sets out most of your rights under the new laws. We’ll update it again between now and 25 May 2018 when changes come into effect.

London Business Hub wants to offer you the best possible online experience. Consequently, additional functions, features, products or services are incorporated into the London Business Hub website from time to time. This, and our commitment to protecting your personal information, may result in periodic changes to this Privacy Policy. As a result, we would recommend that you refer back to this Privacy Policy regularly to review any amendments.

Any questions regarding our Privacy Policy should be directed to:

London Business Hub
City Hall
The Queen’s Walk
London SE1 2AA

Or BusinessHub@london.gov.uk

What information do we collect?

Information Supplied by you:

London Business Hub community members are asked to provide their full name and e-mail address in order to create an account, to allow us to allocate a unique access password, and send out e-mail invitations to take part. This information is stored privately in your London Business Hub profile and won’t be displayed on the site itself.

Users will also need to set a username to take part. We strongly recommend that users do not use their full names as their usernames, as usernames will appear along with comments posted. We recommend that users choose a username that does not identify them. Users are unable to register with an email address as their username.

Site members will also be required or prompted to provide additional information about themselves and their business. Some of this information is classed as ‘sensitive personal data’ under the Data Protection Act 1998. You may be asked about:

  • your gender;
  • your ethnicity;
  • your physical or mental health;
  • Other information about you

We will ask you for this information as part of the registration process, although all this information is not essential for the user to access and participate in the London Growth Hub community so some questions are therefore optional.

We ask for this personal information in order to analyse London’s Small and Medium sized Enterprise (SME) landscape, identify sample groups and issues within the business support landscape, and use as evidence and to inform the service we provide.

By using the service available through the Site, community members will have the opportunity to share personal information with other community members by, for example:

  • participating in forums;
  • posting comments;
  • uploading content for comment

Members can also choose to post pictures of themselves / their business alongside their profile.

Any additional information, content and material you choose to voluntarily post will be visible to all other community members of the Site, staff at the London Local Enterprise Partnership (and organisations acting on behalf of the London LEP on a confidential basis), and anyone who views the site. It will be identifiable by your username, but is not linked to your email address or private profile information on the site. As any information you post in these areas can be seen by others, you should always be careful when deciding to disclose your own personal information on to a public site.

Automated information collection:

The following types of information are automatically collected when you use our Site.

Cookie (including YouTube cookies):

A cookie is a small amount of data, which often includes a unique identifier that is sent to your computer, tablet or mobile phone (all referred to here as a “device”) web browser from a website’s computer and is stored on your device’s hard drive. Each website can send its own cookie to your web browser if your browser’s preferences allow it. Many websites do this whenever a user visits their website in order to track online traffic flows.

We may store some information as a cookie on your computer when you visit our Site. This information facilitates your use of our Site, and helps us to provide you with the best level of service. We use cookies to ensure that you do not need to re-enter your details every time you visit our Site, and to help us remember your preferred settings, such as screen width.

You can erase or block cookies from your computer if you want to (your help screen or manual should tell you how to do this), but certain Site services may not work correctly, or at all, if you set your browser not to accept cookies.

Third party cookies in embedded content

We embed videos from our YouTube channel, therefore, due to YouTube’s privacy enhanced policy you may find that cookies are set on your computer once you have clicked to play the videos. However, YouTube does not store personally-identifiable cookie information relating to playbacks of embedded videos when using their privacy-enhanced mode.

Other information collected from web browsers

We may also automatically collect non-personal information about you, such as the type of internet browsers you use, or the site from which you linked to our Site. You cannot be identified from this information, and it is only used to assist us in providing an effective service on our Site. We may, from time to time, supply the owners or operators of third party sites, from which it is possible to link to our Site, with information relating to the number of users linking to our Site from their sites. You cannot be identified from this information.

We use Google Analytics to collect information about how you use our Site. We do this to help make sure the site is meeting the needs of its users and to help us make improvements, for example improving site search.

Google Analytics stores information including but not limited to:

  • the pages you visit on the site
  • how long you spend on each page
  • how you got to the site
  • what you click on while you’re visiting the site

You can opt out of Google Analytics.

We do not use Google Analytics to collect or store information that could be used to identify who you are.

What do we use collected personal information for?

In order to:

  • create and administer your London Business Hub account;
  • moderate use of the Site;
  • customise and improve the service we provide to you;
  • verify your identity;
  • where you have consented for us to do so, we will contact you with information about exclusive community member updates and information such as events via our newsletter etc;
  • where applicable and where you have consented for us to do so, share with our programme delivery partners to register you on our support programmes and/ or events
  • identify suitable users for particular activities;
  • build up a profile of users to inform future marketing campaigns and projects; and
  • ensure our service is reaching a varied user audience representative of London’s diversity

Disclosing your information to others:

We will share your contact and business information gathered during registration with partner organisations who deliver our support programmes and/ or events on our behalf. This will only happen when you have either submitted a submission of interest of identifying that you are searching for specific types of support, applied for one of our support programmes or based on your business circumstances. We will be very clear when this is the case and who our delivery partners are in each circumstance.

This data is shared so that they can contact you in order to register you for that service or programme, contact you with programme information and conduct evaluations post receipt of support.

We share aggregated anonymised information relating to the use of the Site with our partners and funders such as Government departments. Individual community members cannot be identified from this information.

London Business Hub and the GLA use Pure360 (www.pure360.com) to act on our behalf to manage our email, newsletter and marketing campaigns. Where you have consented for us to send you updates and newsletters, we will share your email address, name and location, among other personal data, such as your business support interests with Pure360.

Pure360 are engaged as a data processor acting only on instructions from the GLA and in accordance with their Licence Agreement.

For feedback we use a third party provider of survey software; Survey Monkey. We don’t collect any of your identifiable data within Survey Monkey however, unless you voluntarily choose to share it or select options for us to do so, such as asking to be added to our mailing list.

The Site, or certain services such as surveys, product studies or research, from time to time are offered in conjunction with our client business partners. We will always inform you when any service will involve sharing your data with any additional party.

Other than disclosures referred to in this policy, we will not disclose any personal information without your permission, unless we are legally entitled or obliged to do so (for example, if required to do so by a Court order, or in order to prevent fraud or any other crime).

Keeping our records accurate and accessing your information:

We aim to keep our information about you as accurate as possible. If you would like to review or change your account settings, communication preferences, or details you have supplied us, you may do so at any time using the ‘Profile’ feature.

Under the Data Protection Act 1998, you are entitled to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you. To do so, please email us (BusinessHub@london.gov.uk).

Third-party sites:

We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other sites, even if you access them using links from our Site, and we therefore recommend that you check the privacy policy of each site that you visit.

If you linked to our Site from a third-party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners or operators of that third-party site, and we therefore recommend that you check the policy of that third party site, and contact its owner or operator if you have any concerns or questions.

Facebook Pixel

We use Facebook Pixel to capture anonymised data about those who use our site who also use Facebook. Facebook’s targeted advertising then delivers our relevant Facebook adverts based on the page viewed.

Facebook pixel stores information about:

  1. the page you visit at businesshub.london after viewing the Facebook advertising
  2. what you click on while you’re visiting the site
  3. whether you are a Facebook user and have opted in to relevant advertising from Facebook

The data is anonymised, so we cannot see who you are. After 180 days you are deleted from the list of page viewers, unless you view a page with the pixel on it again. Find out more, or opt out of Facebook advertising.

LinkedIn Insight Tag

We use The LinkedIn Insight Tag to allow us to report on our LinkedIn outreach and advertising activity. The Tag enables the collection of data regarding LinkedIn members’ visits to London Business Hub. This data comprises the URL, referrer, IP address, device and browser characteristics (User Agent(, and timestamp. The IP addresses and truncates or hashed (when used for reaching members across devices), and members’ direct identifiers are removed within seven days in order to make the data pseudonymous. This remaining pseudonymized data is then deleted within 180 days.

Contacting us:

If at any time you would like to contact us with your views about our privacy practices, or with any enquiry relating to your personal information, you can do so by sending an e-mail to us (BusinessHub@london.gov.uk). You are entitled to ask for a copy of the information we store about you.

Last updated: 01/11/2021.