Control Your Data

Merkle is a global marketing agency that helps advertisers and brands reach people and strengthen customer loyalty and engagement. As part of our services, Merkle may combine customer data that our clients already have with information from other sources.

This helps support marketing programs and allows our clients to communicate with the people most interested in their products and services.

Merkle collects certain personal information from you if you visit our websites or our online content and through online tracking technologies, as described in our Website Privacy Policy and Product Privacy Policies.

Merkle also obtains data from other companies who have direct contact with you, and we may also get information from other third-parties who collect your data. The collection of this data allows Merkle to help our clients promote relevant products and services to existing and potential customers.

In other words, we help businesses promote products and services among people interested in their offerings and we indirectly help consumers by limiting the marketing that would not be relevant to them.

Depending on where you live and what you are asking us to do, we may or may not be required to comply with your request in part or in full, and the time required to complete your request may vary.  

You have rights (with some exceptions and restrictions) to:

• object to our processing of your personal information;
• object to receiving marketing;
• access your personal information, i.e. find out exactly what information we hold about you;
• request erasure of your personal information;
• request correction or updating of any of your personal information that is inaccurate;
• request restriction of processing of your personal information, in some situations (so that we will keep it, but can't do anything with it while waiting for the issue to be resolved);
• request the "porting" (sending) of certain of your personal information, to yourself or to another organisation; and/or
• complain to your local data protection authority about our collection or use of your personal information - for more information, contact the UK Information Commissioner's Office.  

We have provided this form to give you a simple means to contact us about exercising your rights.

If you opt-out of marketing or profiling, we will stop including include your personal data in future data products we give to our clients. We will keep enough information about you so that if we receive new data about you in the future we will be able to recognise that you have already asked us to opt out and we will be able to suppress your personal data.  

We will continue to check data we receive against the list of people who have opted out of the sale of their personal data, but if you change your residential address or change your name we may not be able to recognise you again. You should let us know so that we can update our information.  

In contrast, if you request that we delete your personal data, we will delete the personal data we have (subject to certain exceptions allowed by law) at that point in time. A deletion request only applies to personal data we have about you when we are fulfilling your request, but it does not apply to personal data we may collect or receive after we process your request.  We receive personal data from various sources regularly in the course of our business. So if we receive new personal data about you after we have already honoured a deletion request, that new personal data will not be deleted unless you submit a new deletion request.  Note that if we delete your personal data, our ability to continue to screen data we receive in the future in order to exclude data about you is limited.

If you opt-out or request erasure, we will not include your personal data in the data products we give to our clients. If you request an erasure of your personal data, subject to certain exceptions allowed by law, we will delete your personal data from our records. However, if we lawfully receive your personal data after fulfilling your erasure request, that new information may be included in future data products unless/until you submit a new erasure request. However, if one of our clients has your information and they provide it to us, along with specific instructions on how to use it on their behalf, you may still receive their advertising. We do not add this information to our own data products unless allowed to by our clients.  

Your choices do NOT affect product marketing that is not based on your personal data. For example, you may still receive advertising based on the content and predicted audience of the website you are browsing.  This is known as “contextual advertising” and will not stop in response to your requests.  

You can also choose to register with an industry wide scheme such as the DMA’s UK preference services.

We will act on your request promptly but please be aware that it may take some time to be fully effective as some campaigns may have been built prior to receiving your instruction.

If you were known by another name or lived at another address, we may not be able to locate all information which relates to you if you do not include it in the form below. Please provide as much information as possible so that we can try to identify all records which relate to you. We may keep certain personal information in accordance with our legal obligations and rights, such as keeping sufficient information about you to recognise that you have made a data subject rights request and to keep a record of that request.

You can also review the UK product privacy notice which explains how we process data in our data products. This will help you understand how we process your data and the impact of your decision.