Our Promise to consumers

We treat your data with the utmost care, ensuring that it is stored and processed securely and used only for specific and fair purposes.

• We will use your data to improve your experience with brands – for example in recommending that your favourite products are available in your local store, or improving the offers and communications you receive from brands.
• Data about you is stored to the highest standards of security and encryption.
• We cannot identify you from any data we receive or hold about you – we use many techniques including ‘pseudonymisation’ to irreversibly conceal your data*.
• Our standard approach is to aggregate similar data into ‘audiences’ based on similar behaviours. Data that we share with clients will generally be at this aggregated and anonymous level.
• We only process data for targeting or making decisions at an individual level at the specific request of our clients. We ensure that our clients have permission for this use of data before facilitating any such work. For example, we may help clients to offer you personalised discounts on products that you regularly buy.

Our Promise to brands

We win when you win. We will work with you as trusted and honest partners to help you get the most from your data and amaze your customers

• Customers – we are the experts in customer understanding. We use your data to discover the voice of your customers, clearly articulating their needs and helping you to meet them.
• Privacy – your consumers are your biggest asset and we protect them as if they were our own. We use best in class security and storage practices, and your data is always kept separate and isolated from any other client data.
• Quality – we constantly strive to utilise the best technology, people and science to ensure that the work we do for you is at the cutting edge and cannot be bettered.
• Transparency – we work with you in open and honest collaboration and treat our engagements as partnerships. We win when you win.
• Objectivity – we are unapologetically focused on doing the best for customers. We don’t rely on short term wins and quick fixes; we help you build long-term market leadership through great customer relationships.
• Scalability – our solutions are scalable and repeatable by design; you can always benefit from our work regardless of growth in data or demand.

Our data in a GDPR world

• Starcount keep up-to-date on all announcements and changes issued by the ICO in terms of Data Protection and Customer Transparence
• As such, our solutions have always been designed as ‘GDPR-compliant’ via our data practices:
  • Privacy, pseudonymisation and anonymisation by design.
  • Legitimate, balanced and proportionate processing of personal data.
  • Data is kept for a set purpose and for a set length of time, not ‘just in case’.
  • Outputs are always at an aggregated and anonymous level.
• In line with GDPR guidelines, we have a designated Data Privacy Officer (Michael Reed) – please contact privacy@starcount.com for queries.
• If you wish to know what data we have for you, or want us to remove your data, we will do so within 30 days of you contacting us. Please contact our DPO with your request.
• When you request this information, we will not know without your help as all our data is encrypted and pseudonymised for your protection.

*For example, if your email address were ‘example@example.com’, we might store the value like this:
’31C5543C1734D25C7206F5FD591525D0295BEC6FE84FF82F946A34FE970A1E66’

What we get from Twitter?

Publicly available information at scale

• We work with Twitter because it is an open and public platform that gives a great read of consumer passions, mindsets and motivations at an aggregate level.
• We don’t see anything you can’t see on the web interface.
• We are a contracted partner of Twitter and abide by their user policy.
• We create audiences and profile aggregate users based on their similar behaviours.
• We do this to help add colour to brands’ understanding of you as a consumer and why you engage with them so they can be more relevant.

What we get from Acxiom?

UK demographic information at scale

• We work with Acxiom to create a demographic ground truth of the UK population
• We are a contracted partner of Acxiom and abide by their policies.
• We create postcode summaries of demographics including lifestage, income and household composition
• We use these demographic summaries to map our proprietary mindset data using a probabilistic model
• We do this to help add colour to brands’ understanding of you as a consumer and why you engage with them so they can be more relevant.