You & Us

Your privacy is important, so we want to do our best to protect it.

As a listener you’re incredibly important to us, because without you there wouldn’t be much point in doing all of this stuff on the radio. You’re our reason for living. The wind beneath our wings. You’re the Lennon to our McCartney, the Hall to our Oates, and the Paul to our Simon.

Our website, Radioplayer, and apps are more than an extension to our radio stations; they’re right at the heart of what we do. In order to make them as good as they can be, and allow us to do interesting things like giving you fewer ads and more music when you listen online, we collect anonymous data automatically, and store personal information when you provide it to us.

Data & information

The anonymous data tells us how visitors are using our site. From this data we can find out which pages get the most views, which links gets the most clicks, how long visitors spend on the site, which are the most common web browsers, and more. This helps us to work out which parts of the site are working well, which parts need improving, and what’s popular. None of this data can be used to identify you personally.

We request personal information from you when you fill in a form on our site, or in one of our apps. We use these forms for entering competitions, registering for an Absolute Radio Account, and posting comments and suggestions. If you contact us, we may keep a record of the correspondence. Finally, from time to time we run surveys for research purposes, but responding to these surveys is always optional. If you have an Absolute Radio Account, you can see all of the personal information you have provided to us from the Account page.

Some of the uses for this personal information are obvious: if you win a competition we need to be able to get in touch! But we also use some of this information to make the adverts you see and hear more relevant to you, based on your age, gender, and approximate location.

Storing your information securely

Currently we store all of this personal information in the UK, on servers with security measures exceeding industry standards. Our systems have been audited by external specialists, and we review our security measures regularly.

Our site also uses cookies. These are very small pieces of information which are stored on your computer and help us quickly tell you apart from all the other visitors to our website. Cookies let us do things like keeping you logged in to our site so you don’t have to sign in every time you visit. Most importantly, only we can read the cookies that relate to our site, and we can’t read the cookies for anyone else’s site.

Some of the cookies that are stored and used when you visit our site are put there by companies other than Absolute Radio. For example, in order to use Facebook for commenting on videos or photos, Facebook needs to use one its own cookies, so it can work out who you are. In every case, these ‘3rd party’ cookies are used to add features to, and improve the experience of, our site.

A detailed explanation of the cookies we use, and what we use them for, can be found on our Cookies Policy page. All of these cookies are digital and therefore suitable for those on dairy and wheat-free diets.

Keeping your information between you & us

We do not give out your information to anyone, unless you have given us permission, or we have to legally. Many of the competitions we run on this site on behalf of other companies have a marketing check box at the end of the entry form. If you don't check this box, we will not pass your information to the company. If you do check this box, the only information we pass on is your name as displayed and your email address.

There are some extremely rare circumstances in which we have to disclose personal information for legal reasons. These circumstances are detailed in our Privacy Policy.

The newsletter

We have a weekly email newsletter which you may have signed up for when you registered your Absolute Radio Account, or if you entered a competition. You can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. Please don’t mark it as spam, or email service providers will ban us from sending emails! That would be a shame, because we’ve been sent a hilarious chain email which we want to send to all our grandchildren.

Our privacy policy

Like most companies we have a proper Privacy Policy. Ours says what you’ve read above, but with a few extra bits and a little more detail. It also talks about our legal requirement to comply with the Data Protection Act (spoiler: we do!).

If you have any questions that the Privacy Policy doesn’t answer, please email us and we’ll get back to you