Privacy Policy

This policy outlines what personal information we collect and how we use that information to provide a good service and user experience. This policy also covers sharing of information with other companies and services.

The Service

UnscrewMe is a content and service platform offered by Goetz Buerkle. The core of the service is the website https://www.unscrewme.co.uk. Our content and service platform also covers mobile apps, which deliver a similar service across mobile devices.

As an events platform for wine-related experiences, we require any user to be of minimum drinking age. Any accounts that do not meet this requirement will be deleted without warning or comment.

We are serious about protecting the personal data of our users. This means that we put best practices in place to keep your information protected. We continuously review our information security and privacy processes to make sure we your data is safe.
No service can ever be fully protected from any possible threats. To help us keep your information safe, please report anything unusual to us, so we can look into it and if necessary take appropriate steps to mitigate any risks.

Personal Information

To make our service as useful and relevant to you as possible, we ask you to provide some personal data for example when you sign up for our newsletter. Providing a personalised experience to you on your request is a "lawful basis for processing".

We store the personal information as long as you have an account for the service platform or have subsribed to the newsletter and for as long as we are legally required to keep records. By agreeing to this policy, you allow us to store your personal data to offer you a personalised experience of the content and service platform including the newsletter.
The following list shows the personal information you can provide to take advantage of personalised features.

Information we collect

  • Email address

Benefits of providing the information to us

Your name helps us to present you with a more personal experience across the entire platform.
Your email address allows us to reach out to you, for example to send you updates, reminders for upcoming events and relevant events that match your interests.
We might also use the information to send you push notifications about events and other relevant activities.

We might also need your personal information such as your email address to respond to inquiries or complaints.

We also collect data about usage of our service platform, this includes technical information about your device as well as which pages and features you access.
This helps us understand which offerings and features are most relevant you, so we can make sure that we can continuously improve the service.

Please never give anyone the password or log-in credentials. We do not know your password, and will never ask for it.

User-generated Content

With a personal account, you might be able express your interest in topics, events, event hosts, event locations and specific tags.

We store these interests to give you a tailored list of events that includes just what is most relevant to you.
We also process all the interests of all users to better understand patterns across interests and users. This allows us to make recommendations of new events to you, which we think you will be interested in - even if you have not yet actively expressed your interest.

Marketing

We will only send you marketing communication when you've previously agreed to this and allowed us to contact you.

This applies to all the standard marketing communication and notifications. However, please be aware that there might be valid reasons why we contact you, even if you have unsubscribed from our marketing communications. Examples of when we will contact you include changes to our terms of service, for instance.

Cookies and Tracking

Cookies are used for a range of different purposes. Cookies are simple data records that the service platform stores on your local device when you access the website or app.

In general, cookies can be classified into different categories. Some cookies are necessary for the service platform to work properly, these are sometimes called "strictly necessary cookies".
The second category are cookies we use to track the usage of the service platform. These cookies help us to provide a reliable service and support continuous optimisation of the service platform. This category is sometimes called "functional, performance and advertising cookies".
The third category are cookies that are managed by "third-party" services for example to enable social network integrations or control advertisements.

Strictly necessary cookies are required to log you in as a user and keep your user session active.
Functional, performance and advertising cookies we use are from Google Analytics to allow us to collect usage data of the service platform.

If you do not accept any cookies, you might not be able to use all features of the service platform. Some functionality might be disabled or some features might not fully work as expected.

Information Sharing

To provide a smooth user experience, we might access data from external partners and share data with external partners. If necessary, our partners process your personal information on our behalf.
The trustworthiness of our partners is an important aspect for us. We carefully select our partners and we only share the data that the partners need to provide the services we need to operate the service platform.

We also share usage information of the service platform with Google Analytics. Please see How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services for more information.
For geographic and location-based features, we might also share location data with Google Maps.
We run our content and service platform on GitLab Pages and all data is stored on servers managed by GitLab. Depending on the data, some servers are operated by Google on behalf of GitLab.
For more information about how GitLab handles shared data, please see:

For our newsletter services, we rely on MailChimp. Please see the Intuit Global Privacy Statement for more ifnromation.

We aim to keep data processing within the geographic borders of the UK and the European Economic Area. But please be aware that some partner companies we work with might process your personal data outside of the UK and the European Economic Area (EEA). This means that your personal data could be transferred, stored or processed in a location outside the UK and the European Economic Area (EEA).
Data security is important to use and we only allow for data processing on our behalf when partner companies meet high data security standards.

User Rights

From the time you register your account on the service platform, you can change your personal data and get the information we have stored about you from us.

You can also change your subscription settings as well as your notification preferences.

Account Termination

If you no longer want to user the service platform, you can always close your account. When you delete your account, we will delete your personal information in your account.

To manage the service platform and monitor performance and usage, we collect anonymised activity data.
This data is not connected to your account or personal data and we will keep it to maintain our service quality.

You might also upload files, like, vote or comment on content on the service platform. We will disconnect your user-generated data from your account and keep the anonymous usage data. At this point, the data can no longer be matched to your user account. We prefer to keep it, since we can still learn from the anonymised data to improve the quality of the service platform.

Contact Details

If you have any questions or comments about our Privacy Policy or our service platform, please get in touch.

You can reach us via email hello@unscrewme.co.uk.

Or you can send us a letter:
UnscrewMe / Goetz Buerkle, Flat 14, Pavilion Court, 2 Stafford Road, London NW6 5YX, United Kingdom.


This Privacy Policy is inspired by BBC - Your Information & Privacy & The BBC Privacy and Cookies Policy. The article "We Read 150 Privacy Policies. They Were an Incomprehensible Disaster." in the New York Times mentioned that "The BBC has an unusually readable privacy policy. It’s written in short, declarative sentences, using plain language.". This has prompted us to aim for a similar approach to provide a privacy policy that is easy to read and understand.