Privacy Policy

At Meerkat Solutions we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy and the security of your data.

This policy explains when and why we collect personal information about people who visit our website and/or use our services, how we use it, the conditions under which we may disclose it to others and how we keep it
secure.

We may change this Policy from time to time so please check this page occasionally to ensure that you’re happy with any changes.
Any questions regarding this Policy and our Privacy practices should be sent by email to info@meerkat.ie or via our contact form.

Who are we?

Meerkat Solutions are a website design and development company based in Ireland. We have clients in Ireland and the UK and have been building websites and providing consultancy and related digital, IT and online services to businesses and charities since 2004.

How do we collect information from you?

We obtain information about you when you use Meerkat Solutions services for example when you access our website, contact us about products and services, use our services or receive our newsletter.

What type of information is collected from you?

The personal information we collect might include your name, address, email address, phone number, address, IP address, your existing website or facebook or other social media address. If you make an on-line purchase, your card information is not seen or stored by us, it is processed by our third-party payment processors (either PayPal or Stripe), who specialise in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions.

How is your information used?

Your information may be used in any of the following ways, e.g. to:

provide you with a quote for website design or development or other services you’ve expressed an interest in, e.g. by completing an enquiry form on our website
process orders that you have submitted;
to carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into by you and us;
seek your views or comments on the services we provide;
notify you of changes to our services;
send you communications which you have requested and that may be of interest to you. These may include information about our services or they may be informational, e.g. about website design or development or related technological areas;
process a job application.

We review our retention periods for personal information on a regular basis. We will hold your personal information on our secure systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity, or as long as is set
out in any relevant contract you hold with us.

Who has access to your information?

We do not and will not share your information with third parties except for the specific purposes you have agreed to and which are necessary to deliver the service you have requested (i.e., to process a payment from you, or to send you a marketing or informational email you have consented to).

We do not and will not sell or share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.

So to be clear – if you make a payment on our site, for example through PayPal or Stripe then your payment information is stored on on our account, on their servers (not ours).

Also, if you agree to receive email updates from us, we use a 3rd party email provider called Mailchimp, and then your email address, name, address is held on their servers (for our account).

If you fill in an enquiry form on our website, that data is encrypted, but it lives in the web database on the webserver for our site. We use Blacknight.com, in Carlow, Ireland to securely host our site.

Third Party Payment Providers we work in association with:

If you are purchasing our products on-line this will be processed securely by a third-party payment processor, currently either Stripe or PayPal, who specialise in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions.

Your choices

We will not contact you for marketing purposes by email, phone or text message unless you have given your prior consent.

You can change your marketing preferences at any time by contacting us by email: info@meerkat.ie

How you can access and update your information

The accuracy of your information is of vital importance to us. If you change email address, or any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, please contact us.

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information Meerkat Solutions hold about you which we will respond to within 30 days of receiving the request.

Security precautions in place to protect the loss, misuse or alteration of your information

When exchanging personal information, we take extra steps to ensure that it’s treated securely.

Our website(s) use SSL Encryption technology, to securely encrypt any data you submit in forms and help protect against any attempts to access your personal information.

Additionally, we have installed robust security software on our webservers, including web application firewalls, DDOS prevention, malware and phishing attack detection, to make every effort to ensure that our website(s) are as safe as possible.

We very regularly keep our CMS server software up to date, and monitor for available updates, along with applying all software updates in a timely fashion, as well as updating all the associated technologies on our webservers which are within our remit to update (some elements are the responsibility of our hosting companies to update).

We only use leading hosting companies in Ireland, the UK and the US, who have strong reputations in protecting company data. Those companies have their own security and privacy policies in place, which you should also refer to.

The ones which are pertinent to your use of this site in addition to our own are:

Blacknight.com
Mailchimp.com
Stripe.com
PayPal.com

We send email over VPN and with SSL technologies to provide as robust and secure a service as possible.

All computers used by Meerkat Solutions are kept up to date with the latest versions of operating systems, antivirus and anti-malware technologies.
All computers and mobile phones etc are robustly password protected and protected against viruses and malware.
We use VPN technologies to further protect any data in transmission as we use our PC’s.

NB: While we strive to protect your personal information, and make every reasonable effort to do so, like all businesses operating on the internet, we cannot guarantee the absolute 100% security of any information you transmit to us, as new threats emerge on the internet every day, therefore you share data with us at your own risk.

Use of ‘cookies’

Like most other websites, our website uses cookies. ‘Cookies’ are small pieces of information sent by an organisation to your computer and stored on your hard drive to allow that website to recognise you when
you visit. They collect statistical data about your browsing actions and patterns and do not identify you as an individual.

For example, we use cookies to send data to Google for Google Analytics on the number of visits to our website, and which country those visits were from, and which pages are the most popular on our site. You can access Google’s privacy policy for analytics here – https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245 and you can opt-out of Google Analytics here

We use cookies to store your country preference. This helps us to improve our website and deliver a better more personalised service. You can read more about Google’s use of cookies at https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies

It is possible to switch off cookies by setting your browser preferences. Turning cookies of may result in a loss of some functionality when using our website.

Links to other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites run by other organisations. We are very cautious in the choice of any websites we link to. However, this privacy policy applies only to our website‚ so we encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other sites even if you access them using links from our website.

In addition, if you linked to our website from a third-party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners and operators of that third-party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third-party site.

Transferring your information outside of Europe

As part of the services offered to you through our website, the information which you provide to us may be transferred to countries outside the European Economic Area (“EEA”). By way of example, this may happen if any of our servers are from time to time located in a country outside of the EEA. These countries may not have similar data protection laws to the UK. By submitting your personal data, you’re agreeing to this transfer, storing or processing. If we transfer your information outside of the EEA in this way, we will take reasonable steps to ensure that appropriate security measures are taken with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected as outlined in this Policy and under GDPR legislation.

If you use our services while you are outside the EEA, your information may be transferred outside the EEA to provide you with those services.

Making a Complaint

If you are not satisfied with how Meerkat Solutions manages your personal data, you have the right to make a complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner.

Review of this Policy

We keep this Policy under regular review.

This Policy was last updated in September 2024.