Last updated November 2023
We respect the privacy of every person who visits or registers with picturehouses.com, spotlight.picturehouses.com/ or uses the Picturehouse mobile applications for iPhone and Android (the "Sites") and who uses the services that we make available from the Sites, in our cinemas, on our telephone booking line or through our customer services facilities (our "Services") and we are committed to ensuring a safe online experience.
This privacy policy ("Privacy Policy") explains our approach to any personal information that we might collect from you or which we have obtained about you from a third party, including someone who has purchased a gift for you, and the purposes for and basis upon which we process your personal information. This Privacy Policy also sets out your rights in respect of our processing of your personal information.
This Privacy Policy will inform you of the nature of the personal information about you that is processed by us and how you can request that we delete, update, transfer it and/or provide you with access to it.
This Privacy Policy is intended to assist you in making informed decisions when using the Sites and our Services. Please take a moment to read and understand it. Please note that it should be read in conjunction with our Terms & Conditions and our Terms of Admission
Please also note that this Privacy Notice only applies to the use of your personal information obtained by us, it does not apply to your personal information collected during your communications with third parties.
This Privacy Notice may vary from time to time so please check it regularly. Please see Changes to this Privacy Notice below for further details.
Back to topThe Sites and our Services are operated by Picturehouse Cinemas Limited ("we", "us" or "our").
We are a controller of your personal information obtained in connection with the provision of our Sites and Services and your personal information will be used in accordance with this Privacy Notice.
Picturehouse Cinemas Limited is an English company with registered company number: 2310403 and whose registered office is at 8th Floor, Vantage London, Great West Road, Brentford, TW8 9AG, United Kingdom
Back to topIf you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or want to exercise your rights set out in this Privacy Policy, please contact us by:
We obtain your personal information from the following sources:
Our primary goal in collecting personal information about you is to: (i) provide our Services to you and carry out requests made by you on the Sites or in our cinemas; (ii) verify your identity and age; (iii) help us improve our products and services and develop and market new products and services; (iv) investigate or settle inquiries or disputes; (v) comply with any applicable law, court order, other judicial process, or the requirements of a regulator; (vi) enforce our agreements with you; (vii) protect the rights, property or safety of us or third parties, including our other customers and users of the Sites and at our cinemas; (viii) provide support for the provision of our Services; and (ix) use as otherwise required or permitted by law.
In particular, we use your personal information for the following purposes:
We collect and maintain personal information that is voluntarily submitted to us during the use of the Sites and/or our Services. We use the contact and payment details which are provided to us so that we can fulfil the supply of products and services which have been ordered from our Sites or in our cinemas. We will use contact information to send you service-related communications relating to these orders. This includes your purchase of products and services, your registration for an account with us, your attendance at events hosted by us or our third-party partners, your hire of our cinemas for your own events and the processing of returns and refunds. For example:
We welcome children and young people to our cinemas. However, some of our Services and features available on our Sites (including online ticket booking, Picturehouse membership and subscription to our newsletter and marketing emails) have age restrictions attached to their use. These age restrictions are explained in the terms and conditions relating to Picturehouse Membership Terms and Conditions and our Terms of Admission (Online Purchases section).
This means that we may need to ask you to provide your date of birth.
We may also use your date of birth to understand more about our customers (see the Customer Insight and Analysis section for more details about our use of your personal information for this purpose).
If you register for an account (such as a MyPicturehouse account) on our Sites, we may ask you to provide your name, gender, e-mail address, home address and your favourite or local cinema. We will also ask you to provide a password for your account. You can also voluntarily provide us with additional information when using your account, for example your phone numbers. You can update and amend the contact details and some other personal information we hold about you at any time through your account.
We will use this personal information to provide you with the online functions available within the account, including facilitating your purchase of our products and services via your account. This personal information is also used to identify you when you visit and interact with other areas of our Sites (see the Customer Insight and Analysis section for more details about our use of your personal information for this purpose).
If you purchase Picturehouse membership for yourself, we will collect and use personal information about you in accordance with the purposes described in Sections 4.1 to 4.3 of this Privacy Policy. If you choose to set up automatic renewal by paying the membership subscription fee by recurring card payment or (where available) annual direct debit, we will need your payment card details to set up your continuous payment authority or your bank details to set up your direct debit and take payment from you.
When you register for Picturehouse membership we will set up an online My Picturehouse account for you. You can use your My Picturehouse account to access your Picturehouse membership, for example when booking online, and also manage your membership details such as updating your personal details, changing your saved payment card and subscribing/unsubscribing to our newsletter, special announcements and other email communications. Please see the 'Providing and administering accounts' section for further details.
As a part of your membership service, we will use your contact details to send you service communications, including information about your membership such as renewal reminders, account information, changes to Membership benefits and sometimes details of new cinema openings or changes or additions to our selection of Local and National Partners. In addition, where we have a lawful right to send you marketing communications or where you have asked us to we will also send you our newsletter, special announcement emails and other news and offers emails from Picturehouse which may include details of offers from our sister company Cineworld Cinemas Limited and other Picturehouse partners. Please see the Marketing Communications section for further information.
Our Sites and our cinemas use various user interfaces to allow you to request information about our products and services: these may include printed and electronic enquiry forms, dedicated email addresses, our social media pages and a telephone enquiry service. Contact information may be requested in each case, together with details of other personal information that is relevant to your customer service enquiry. This information is used in order to enable us to respond to your requests.
From time to time, we may run prize draws, prize competitions and other promotions on our Sites, on our social media accounts and/or in our cinemas. We may also run events at other locations. For the purposes of administering such promotions and events, we may process your name, contact details (including email address, postal address and/or telephone number), social media handle (if relevant) and any other personal information volunteered by you in your promotion entry. For certain competitions and events, we may process and publicise images, videos or sound recordings that you volunteer to us.
What is our legal basis? It is necessary for us to use your personal information to perform our obligations in accordance with any contract that we may have with you (e.g. the terms and conditions applicable to the promotion) or it is in our legitimate interest to use your personal information to enable you to participate in any prize draws, prize competitions and other promotions. We will only use photographs we take of you at events where we have your consent to do so.
Back to topFrom time to time we will contact you to invite you to provide feedback about our products and services in the form of online or in-cinema surveys. We use this information to help us improve the quality of service provided by our staff and in our cinemas. We also use your feedback to monitor the quality of our products and services, to develop our business and to assist with the selection of future product and service lines.
We analyse your contact details and other information provided by you during your use of the Sites and our Services, including your date of birth, with other personal information that we collect or observe about you from your interactions with our Sites, our email communications to you and/or with our products and services in our cinemas, such as the products and services you have purchased or viewed, or from your use of our in-cinema wifi.
Where you have given your consent (where lawfully required), we use cookies, log files and other technologies to collect personal information from the computer hardware and software you use to access the Sites, or from your mobile. This includes the following:
Our web pages and e-mails contain "cookies" "web beacons" or "pixel tags." ("Tags"). Tags allow us to track receipt of an e-mail to you, to count users that have visited a web page or opened an e-mail and collect other types of aggregate information. Once you click on an e-mail that contains a Tag, your contact information may subsequently be cross-referenced to the source e-mail and the relevant Tag.
In some of our e-mail messages, we use a "click-through URL" linked to certain websites administered by us or on our behalf. We may track click-through data to assist in determining interest in particular topics and measure the effectiveness of these communications. Please see our Cookie policy (below) for further information.
This information is used to create profiles and insights about your cinema habits and the cinema habits of our other customers and helps us to get to know our customers better. Where we have your consent to do so, we will also use your location data for customer insight purposes.
By using this information, we are able to measure the effectiveness of our content and how visitors use our Sites and our Services. This allows us to learn which pages of our Sites are most attractive to our visitors, which parts of our Sites are the most interesting, how customers use our Services and what kind of offers our customers like to see.
We also use this information to help us with the selection of future product and service lines, cinema, websites and app design and development, to identify appropriate partners whose offers we might obtain for you as a Picturehouse customer and to remember your customer preferences.
We also use this information for marketing purposes (see the marketing section below for further details)
Where your personal information is not in an anonymous form, it is in our legitimate interest to use your personal information in such a way to ensure that we provide the very best products and services to you and our other customers.
We will only use your location data for customer insight purposes where we have your consent to do so.
Back to topWe carry out the following marketing activities using your personal information:
We use your contact details to send you the Picturehouse newsletter and other marketing communications by post, but usually only where you have asked us to do so.
Where your personal information is not in an anonymous form, such as your postal address, it is in our legitimate interest to use your personal information for postal marketing if you have requested this. You can unsubscribe from receiving such marketing by amending your preferences online in your My Picturehouse account or by contacting our customer services department using the contact details in the How to Contact Us? section above.
We will only send you marketing communications via email where you have consented to receive such marketing communications, or where we have a lawful right to do so. If you are an existing current member of Picturehouse Cinemas prior to 25th May 2018 then you may have been asked to consent to receive marketing communications from us when registering with us. As you are an existing member we will not be relying on this consent instead we will be relying on our legitimate interest to continue to send you marketing communications as an existing member. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe button on the marketing communication or visiting the "preferences' section of your My Picturehouse account on our Site here.
We use information that we observe about you from your interactions with our Sites, our email communications to you and/or with our products and services in our cinemas (see the Customer Insight and Analysis section above for more details of the information collected and how it is collected) to provide you with personalised online advertising.
Where your personal information is not in an anonymous form, it is in our legitimate interest to use your personal information for marketing purposes.
Social media marketing. We use information that we observe about you from your interactions with our Sites, our email communications to you and/or with our products and services in our cinemas (see the Customer Insight and Analysis section above for more details of the information collected and how it is collected) to provide you with personalised advertising on social media channels operated by Meta and/or Google where you are a registered user of such services.
We do this using Facebook Customer Audiences and/or Google Customer Match respectively. Please note that such activity requires that we share your encrypted email address with Meta and/or Google and is also subject to the privacy choices you have elected to make on such services.
We use your personal information for the following business administration and legal compliance purposes:
Where we participate in government contact tracing schemes operated by public health authorities, we may need to collect additional information from you when you book a ticket online or visit one of our cinemas. This may include us asking you to provide certain contact details which we may then share, together with details about the time and date of your visit to our cinema, with public health authorities. We'll let you know when we're participating in these contact tracing schemes by notices on our Sites and in our cinemas. We'll provide information about the measures we are taking and how your personal information may be collected and used for this purpose by providing information about the scheme(s) on our Sites, in this Privacy Policy and, where appropriate, when you book a ticket. If you have a MyPicturehouse account or Picturehouse membership, we may also send you service updates about these schemes.
We will only retain the data that we collect for this purpose in line with government guidance. Please see the How long do we keep your personal information for? section for further information.
It is in our and our customers' legitimate interests to contribute to the public health efforts to tackle threats to public health posed by epidemics, pandemics and other public health emergencies. In some cases, we may also be under a legal obligation to collect your contact details.
You can object to our use of your personal information for this purpose by contacting us by email at [email protected] or telephone (020 7326 2649), but we may not give effect to your request if we have decided that the use of your personal information for this purpose is mandatory as a result of measures and/or guidance applicable to your area or country. You can also exercise your rights (including your right of objection) in respect of this activity as set out in the How to access your information and your other rights section.We may use your personal information which is gathered for health and safety purposes, including any accident report or claim log in respect of an accident or incident which occurs in one of our cinemas. As this may be data relating to your health it could fall within special categories of data which is defined under relevant data protection legislation as including personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, religious beliefs and data concerning health (as well as various others). We may also use this information to establish, exercise or defend any legal claim in relation to the accident or incident, including sharing this information with our insurance providers.
Where we use your personal information in connection with an accident or incident as described above it is in our legitimate interest to do so and to comply with our legal obligations. Where this includes use of special categories of data it is necessary for the purposes of carrying out our obligations and exercising specific rights relating to relevant social protection law which may include health and safety and/or occupier's liability legislation. In addition, where we also process special categories of data to establish, exercise or defend any legal claim we do so because it is necessary to process it for these purposes.
Any other purposes for which we wish to use your personal information that are not listed above, or any other significant changes we propose to make to the existing purposes will be notified to you using your contact details. Alternatively, we may provide details to you of the new or amended purpose and our legal basis for processing it at the time of collecting your personal information for that particular purpose.
Back to topWhere our use of your personal information requires your consent, you can provide such consent:
The legal basis of consent is only used by us in relation to processing that is entirely voluntary – it is not used for processing that is necessary or obligatory in any way. You may at any time withdraw the specific consent you give to our processing your personal data.
Please note even if you withdraw consent for us to use your personal data for a particular purpose we may continue to rely on other bases to process your personal data for other purposes, where we have a legal right to do so.
Back to topOur Sites use certain cookies, pixels, beacons, log files and other technologies of which you should be aware. Please see our Cookie Policy to find out more about the cookies we use and how to manage and delete cookies.
Back to topWe may share your personal information for the purposes described in section 4 of this Privacy Policy:
Our Sites contain links to third party websites and services, including those of our third party partners. Please remember that when you use a link to go from our Sites to another website or you request a service from a third party, this Privacy Policy no longer applies. Your browsing and interaction on any other websites, or your dealings with any other third party service provider, is subject to that website's or third party service provider's own rules and policies. We do not monitor, control, or endorse the privacy practices of any third parties. We encourage you to become familiar with the privacy practices of every website you visit or third party service provider that you deal with and to contact them if you have any questions about their respective privacy policies and practices.
This Privacy Policy applies solely to personal information collected by us through our Sites and Services and does not apply to these third party websites and third party service providers.
Whenever we collect or process your personal data we will usually keep it for one year after our last interaction with you or otherwise in accordance with our data retention policy, pursuant to which we do not retain personal data for longer than is necessary for the purposes for which it is collected. We will keep personal data you give us in relation to any contract that we have with you for seven years. If your information is only useful for a short period e.g. for specific marketing campaigns we may delete it. At the end of that retention period, your data will either be deleted or anonymised, for example by aggregation with other data so that it can be used in a non-identifiable way for statistical analysis and business planning. We keep the length of time that we hold your personal data for under review.
If your information is only useful for a short period e.g. for specific marketing campaigns or for coronavirus (Covid-19) contact tracing, we may delete it after a shorter period (e.g. 21 days for contact tracing).
Back to topWe are committed to keeping the personal information you provide to us secure and we will take reasonable precautions to protect your personal information from loss, misuse or alteration.
We have implemented information security policies, rules and technical measures to protect the personal information that we have under our control from:
All of our employees and data processors (i.e. those who process your personal information on our behalf, for the purposes listed above), who have access to, and are associated with the processing of personal information, are obliged to respect the confidentiality of the personal information of all users of our Services.
Back to topYou have the following rights in relation to the personal information we hold about you. You can exercise these rights by contacting us using the contact details set out in Section 3 of this Privacy Policy or using any other method described below:
If you have a concern about any aspect of our privacy practices, including the way we've handled your personal information, you can report it to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). You can find details about how to do this on the ICO website at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/ by calling their helpline on 0303 123 1113.
To exercise any of your rights in relation to personal information you have shared with Braintree/PayPal when making payments on our Sites during the payment process (see section 4.1 above), you will need to contact Braintree/PayPal directly. More information is available in their Privacy Notices which can be found at www.braintreepayments.com (payment made using debit/credit/charge cards) and www.paypal.com/myaccount/privacy/privacyhub (payment made using a PayPal account).
To ensure that you are always aware of how we use your personal information we will update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect any changes to our use of your personal information. We may also make changes as required to comply with changes in applicable law or regulatory requirements. We will post any changes on our Sites to keep you aware and if you are a Picturehouse member or have a MyPicturehouse account we will notify you by e-mail of any significant changes. However, we encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically to be informed of how we use your personal information.
Cookies on www.picturehouses.com
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site. 'First-party' cookies are set by the site domain listed in the address bar. 'Third-party' cookies come from other domain sources that have items such as adverts or images embedded on the page.The information below explains the cookies we use and why.
Ticket Purchasing
Our ticket purchasing process sets a session cookie which expires when your browser is closed. The cookie is called session_id, and it is required to remember details of your choices as you proceed through the booking process.
This is a first-party cookie, as it is part of the picturehouses.co.uk domain. No data or personal information is held.
Our website also has a cookie called accepted, and its purpose is to remember people who have clicked on 'Do not show this message again' in response to the following statement: 'this site uses cookies to help make it more useful and reliable. By using the site or by dismissing this banner you are consenting to their use.' It is a first-party, persistent cookie, lasting for 13 months. No data or personal information is held.
Our website also has a cookie called user, and its purpose is to track the names of customers who have logged into My Picturehouse. It is a first-party, persistent cookie, lasting for three years. The only personal information held is the customer's full name.
Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics to collect information about how visitors use our website. We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the site. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from, and the pages they have visited.
Google Analytics uses the following cookies on our site:
_utma (persistent cookie, lasts for two years)
_utmb (session cookie)
_utmc (session cookie)
_utmz (persistent cookie, lasts for six months)
_ga (persistent cookie, lasts for two years)
_ga_
These are all first-party cookies. No data or personal information is held. More info.
Webtrends
Our trailer providers, MyMovies, use a cookie called WT_FPC, which enables them to use Webtrends to track anonymous data like return visits and session length. WT_FPC is a persistent cookie lasting ten years. MyMovies inform us: 'it does not retain any personal information, simply unique ID values attributed to xx user, and unique ID values for xx session so that it can monitor duration.'
AddThis
We use AddThis to enable users to share content from our website. AddThis uses the following cookies on our site:
_atuvc (persistent, two years)
di (persistent, one day)
dt (persistent, one month)
uid (persistent, two years)
uit (persistent, two days)
xtc (persistent, two years)
These are first-party cookies, and you can find out about the data they handle here.
Smart AdServer
We use Smart AdServer to provide advertising on our website. They use the following cookies:
dyncdn (persistent, one day)
pbw (persistent, two years)
pbwmaj6 (persistent, three days)
pdomid (persistent, two years)
pid (persistent, two years)
sasd (session)
TestIfCookie (session)
TestIfCookieP (persistent, two years)
vs (session)
These are third-party cookies, and information about the data they handle can be found here. From that page you can also opt out of having Smart AdServer cookies on your computer.