Privacy policy

This privacy policy covers ADVFN's use of personal information that ADVFN collects when you use ADVFN.com. The policy also gives you information about how we collect and process your personal data, your rights under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and cookies, ADVFN and third parties' use of cookies, and how you may reject such cookies.

Who we are

"ADVFN" means ADVFN PLC, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 2374988 of 28 Ongar Business Centre, The Gables, Fyfield Road, Ongar, Essex, CM5 0GA, its subsidiary companies and associated companies and its agents and employees.

If you have any questions or queries you can contact our data protection officer by:

• Writing to: Data protection officer, 28 Ongar Business Centre, The Gables, Fyfield Road, Ongar, Essex, CM5 0GA
• Emailing: dpo@advfn.com

Information we collect

Traffic Data

ADVFN collects a series of traffic data and information when you use the website. We collect the following types of traffic data:

• Web browser type and version
• Operating system
• Specific web page on ADVFN
• Referrer URL. (The URL from which you reach our website)
• IP address
• Date and time of access
• Geo location based on IP address

Such data only enables ADVFN to:

• Provide non-identifiably analytics data
• Improve the content of our website
• Monitor any gaps in service delivery
• Monitor and prohibit malicious activity on our website

Such data is stored on secure servers in a web server file format.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analysis service provided by Google Inc. ("Google"). Google utilizes the Data collected to track and examine the use of this Application, to prepare reports on its activities and share them with other Google services.

Google may use the Data collected to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network.

Personal Data collected: Cookies and Usage Data.

To opt out of Google analytics click here.

Facebook

The Facebook Like button and social widgets are services allowing interaction with the Facebook social network provided by Meta Platforms, Inc.

This type of service allows interaction with the Facebook platforms directly from ADVFN.

The interaction and information obtained through ADVFN are always subject to the User's privacy settings for Facebook.

Facebook might collect traffic data for the pages where the service is installed, even when Users do not use it.

Twitter

The Twitter Tweet button and social widgets are services allowing interaction with the Twitter social network provided by Twitter, Inc.

Twitter may collect cookie and usage data even when the service is not used.

Personal Information

Data collected upon registration

When creating a user account on ADVFN, the following personal information is collected, including but not limited to:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Username
• Password
• Email Address
• Tracking Cookie (Optional if you registered via an ADVFN marketing campaign)
• Date and Time
• Your consent to process this information
• Your consent to receive our email services
• IP address

If you have consented for us to process your information, ADVFN will process, use and store this data for the following purposes:

• Our authentication service to log you into the website;
• Our marketing service to evaluate which campaigns work best;
• To allow the use of all personalised functionality on the website;
• For fraud protection and quality control;
• Shared to relevant stock exchanges.

If we do not receive your consent to store and process the above information we will be unable to provide any of our personalised (i.e login required) services.

Data collected upon activation

After registering with ADVFN, you will be sent an email with a links to activate your account. By clicking on service activation link, we will collect the following information:

• Username
• Email Address
• Activation code within the email
• Date and time
• Your Country based on your IP Address
• Reference to the email content we sent to you
• (Optional) Your consent to receive our email service

The activation email verifies that you have access to the email address you supplied which will be used to communicate the purchase of our service subscription or major site affecting issues.

You may also give consent to receive our email services.

Data collected when purchasing an ADVFN subscription:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Residential Address
• Payment card details
• Date & Time
• IP Address

JP Morgan Chase & Co and Mastercard are used by ADVFN to process your card payments. ADVFN may introduce other payment processors in the future. Your personal information collected for buying our service subscription is stored in a secure database for re-occurring billing. Your personal information is shared with with payment processors for billing purposes only.

We may also use information about your purchases for marketing our products or third-party products and services to you.

You can manage the types of communications you receive under the "Email Services" as provided in this policy.

Data collected when signing an end-user contract for a data provider

When you purchase a subscription which includes an exchange license to gain stock market information, the following information is collected and shared with the relevant exchange, including but not limited to:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Residential Address
• Date & Time
• IP Address
• Confirmation that you are a private investor
• Acceptance of our terms and conditions

Each exchange contract requires different set of information from you and varies from the other exchanges. These exchanges help us providing the service you subscribe for and process and store your data for such purposes. We will continue to store your data and periodically send your data to the relevant exchanges to verify your subscriptions for licensing purposes. ADVFN holds no responsibility on how these exchanges will process your data for the purposes other than provided in our service subscription contract.

The personal information we collect from you may be transferred, stored and processed by the exchanges based outside the EU. The laws of those jurisdictions may be differing from the laws applicable in the UK and the EU. For example, information collected in the European Economic Area (EEA) may be transferred to, stored and processed at a destination outside the EEA. Any processing of such information will be undertaken by our systems maintained to provide our services to you, or the systems of those third parties. By submitting your personal information at our website, you agree to the transfer, storing or processing of data outside the EEA.

Email Services

If you give consent to receive our email services, ADVFN will distribute the following types of emails to you:

• News and periodical reports - We send snapshots on the recent market activity.
• Service Announcements - Updates for improvement to our website and special offer to our subscriptions.
• Third party communications - Content provided by third parties.
• Newswire - Press releases, investment opinion reports or marketing pieces provided by third parties.

You can manage the email services and the types of communications you receive by:

• Clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our email;
• Visiting https://www.advfn.com/p.php?pid=unsubscribe and entering your email address in the space provided;
• Contacting customer services at help@advfn.com or telephone 1-888-992-3836

Third party marketing webpages

With your explicit consent your personal information will be stored and shared with the respective third parties. They may use your personal information for further marketing of their products and services. ADVFN will store your personal information and your consent only for our records. ADVFN is not responsible to obtain consent for further marketing from the respective third party.

Advertising

ADVFN may show you personalised adverts from one or more of our advertising partners. We do not share personal information like your name, address, email address or phone number with our advertising partners.

Our advertising partners will store information about your interactions with their adverts. They will use this information to show you more relevant adverts or limit the adverts you see. Generally, advertiser would track your interactions by using cookies. (To understand what cookies are and how ADVFN uses them please see "ADVFN cookies" in this policy.) Information processed and stored by our advertising partners will be held and governed in accordance with their privacy policy.

It may seem like ADVFN have passed or received information about you by the clever way adverts work.

For example, you may have browsed Amazon's website before checking ADVFN. Amazon will have access to your information and all the products you nearly purchased. Amazon will also have placed a cookie to identify you. When ADVFN shows to a generic Amazon advert, Amazon would be able to identify you by their cookie and be able to personalise the advert for you. At no point is the information in the advert passed to ADVFN or information from ADVFN passed to Amazon.

This Site is affiliated with Publisher First, Inc. dba Freestar ("Freestar") for the purposes of placing advertising on the Site, and Freestar will collect and use certain data for advertising purposes. To learn more about Freestar's data usage, Click here.

You can manage our advertiser's cookies by using our consent management tool. Click here to open the consent management tool.

Additionally, you can find out more and opt out of third party advertisers here:

• youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices
• optout.networkadvertising.org/

When you use our website and enter your email address on our website (either to log in, or to sign up for a newsletter, or similar), we may share with LiveRamp and its group companies information that we collect from you, such as your email (in hashed, pseudonymous form), IP address, or information about your browser or operating system, with any of the following, acting as “joint controllers” (as applicable and defined in the GDPR).

LiveRamp uses this information to create an online identification code that we may store in our first-party cookie for our use in online, in-app, and cross-channel advertising. This may be shared with advertising companies to enable interest-based and targeted advertising. LiveRamp uses this information to create an online identification code for the purpose of recognising you on your devices. This code does not contain any of your directly identifiable personal data and will not be used by LiveRamp to re-identify you.

Detailed information on LiveRamp’s data processing activities is available in LiveRamp’s privacy policy https://liveramp.com/privacy/. You have the right to withdraw your consent or opt-out to the processing of your personal data at any time https://liveramp.com/opt_out/.

How your data is stored

We will retain your personal information in accordance with our terms and conditions and this privacy policy for the duration of your business relationship with us and afterwards where it is required by any laws applicable to us.

The data is stored in databases with limited access to employees. The databases are located in secure networks which are monitored and maintained on a continuous basis.

Your right to access and update your personal information

You have the right to access the personal information held about you. To obtain a copy of the personal information we hold about you, please send an email to help@advfn.com or write to us at ADVFN Data Department, Suite 28, Ongar Business Centre, The Gables, Fyfield Road, Ongar, Essex, CM5 0GA.

If there are any changes to your personal data or if you believe that the personal data we have about you is inaccurate, incomplete, misleading or not up-to-date, please contact help@advfn.com so that we may take steps to update your personal data.

You have a right to ask for your data to be ported to another data controller. Where we receive such a request from you we will transfer your personal information in a generic machine-readable format to the other data controller. ADVFN is not responsible for the other data controller's system's ability to store and process the ported data.

You have the right to withdraw your consent for us to process your data. Doing so would result in termination of our client agreement with you and limited access to our services. Please contact help@advfn.com if you would like to withdraw consent.

You have the right to request personal data erasure. Doing so will automatically withdraw your consent for us to process and store your personal identifiable data.

Disclosure of personal information

ADVFN does not sell or share your personal information.

Your personal information is only shared with third parties when you access their adverts through our website and give explicit consent to those third parties to process and hold your personal information for that specific advert. If you consent to receive future adverts from those third parties, they will process and store your personal information for future communications. Information processed and stored by those third parties will be held and governed in accordance with their privacy policy.

We may share your information with any group of companies of ours as defined under the companies act 2006 so that they can provide products and services to you where you consented.

As a part of providing you with our services, and for the management and operations of these services, and to comply with legal and regulatory requirements, we may be required or need to disclose your personal information to the following third parties:

• Organisations that assist us in processing and providing our services to you (e.g. Stock exchanges)
• Law enforcement, governmental or administrative agencies or directed to do so by court or tribunal.

Data breach reporting

If a data security breach occurs, we will notify this to the relevant regulatory body (ICO) promptly and in any event no later than 72 hours of discovery. Where we are unable to make such notification within 72 hours we will provide the reason for such delay.

Any individual impacted will be informed where there exists a high risk to the rights and freedom of the client. We will do so without undue delay.

Revision of privacy policy

ADVFN may revise this privacy policy from time to time on this page. Please check back regularly for updates.

California Residents

This section supplements our privacy policy with additional information for California residents only.

The California Consumer Privacy Act ("CCPA") provides specific protections and rules concerning California's definition of "Personal Information".

We collect information that you provide when you register for or use our services. For more information regarding what information we collect and for what purpose can be found above from section the "Information we collect".

You also have the right to direct us not to sell your personal information at any time. To opt-out of the sale of your personal information, click the link below.

Do not sell my personal information.

You also have the right to request a copy or delete your Personal Information. To do so, please contact customer services at help@advfn.com.

ADVFN Cookies

What is a cookie

A cookie is a small text file that is store on your computer/device. They can be read by the site that created the cookie and yourself. A Website will use the cookie to read and write information to make the website work, or work in a better more efficient way.

Type of Cookie	Description & Example
Essential	These are cookies are required for the operation of the website. CookiePrompt - Used to check if you have seen the consent management tool ADVFNUID - A unique id used to validate your browsing session with the website SID - A secure unique id for logged in users AFNTZ - This stores which timezone you are accessing the site from __cfduid - The __cfduid cookie is used to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. More info username - This is used to store your username during and between visiting our site euconsent - used to store your cookie preferences responsive_mobile_view - Is used to show the website in a mobile friendly view dfid - Unique id used for security purposes
Personalised	These cookies are used to store choices you make on the website which enables us to personalise our content for you. recent_stocks - Stores a list of your last viewed stocks broker_listing_advert - Stores which broker listing type was displayed to you BBTfilter - Used to store your forum filter settings BBPfilter - Used to store a bookmark on each post to help you find your place monitor_columns - Stores your monitor column preferences
Analytics & Performance	They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily and speed up high volume pages. Google Analytics is Google’s analytics tool that helps website and app owners to understand how their visitors engage with their properties. It may use a set of cookies to collect information and report website usage statistics without personally identifying individual visitors to Google. To view more infomation about the cookies used by Google Anayltics click here
Advertising	These cookies record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. ADVFN operates an in-house advertising system which does not share any information with third parties. aas_vid, im - These cookies are used by ADVFN’s current advertising system To manage or find out more about third party advertising cookies please see our advertising section in our privacy policy.

How do you turn off cookies?

Your browser should let you control whether websites you visit can use cookies or not. If you are unsure how to do this, please consult the help files available via the Help menu in your browser or go to allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/index.html for online help.

Please note that turning cookies off will restrict your use of the website, stopping you from accessing many features that require you to be logged in.

Third party cookies

Third party partners of ADVFN use their own cookies and have their own privacy policies.

Third party cookies are used to gather statistics but cannot be used to identify individuals. We allow our partners to serve these third-party cookies, but we do not have access to them.

A large proportion of the advertisements you see on the website are generated by third parties.

Cookies are often used by these third-party partners to allow them to track the number of people who have clicked on or seen a particular advert or page and how many people have seen the advert or page more than once. Parts of this statistical data may be shared with us by third parties, allowing us to improve the targeting and placement of adverts on the website.

Your browser should let you disable third party cookies. If you are unsure how to do this, please see the advertising section in our privacy policy or How do you turn off cookies above.