Privacy Policy

The Financial Times provides premium news, insight and analysis to a growing audience of global decision makers. We have held true to our values of integrity, authority and independence for more than 130 years. Central to this mission is our commitment to upholding the highest standards of data protection for our customers. 

This Privacy Policy applies to all websites and web applications which link to this policy and are published by FT companies (“Sites”). 

If you wish to amend any of the personal information that we hold about you, or update your marketing preferences, you can do so at any time through your account.

If you have any queries about how we use your personal information, please contact our Data Protection Officer at privacy.officer@ft.com.

Information we collect

This section details the information we may collect about you. We explain why, and how, we use it in later sections.

Account information

If you decide to create an account or enquire about one of our products or services, we’ll ask you to provide us with some specific information, for example:

• Basic personal details - such as name, title and date of birth;
• Personal contact details - such as home address, delivery address, home phone number, mobile phone number, and email address;
• Work details - such as job title, department, company name, company address, work email address and office phone number;
• Student or institution details, if you are signing up to a subscription of an educational establishment - such as student status, graduation year, establishment name;
• Log in details - such as username and password;
• Payment details - such as your bank account and payment card information.

We may also use your account information, such as your title, name and country, to infer your gender.

Additional information

On occasion, we will ask you to voluntarily provide additional information, for example:

• Your opinion of our products and services;
• Your preferences, including newsletters or myFT topics; 
• Your investment details if you use our portfolio tool to store your holdings;
• Information such as your dietary preferences and accessibility requirements when attending an FT event;
• Information about your ethnicity and gender to support our diversity and inclusion goals;
• Information about your role, area of study, and areas of interest to help us personalise your FT experience;
• Information contained in your CV, including qualifications and biography, and any learning accessibility requirements if you are completing one of our courses.

Information we obtain from partners and public sources

In some circumstances, we collect information about you from our partners or from publicly available sources to help us better understand our audience and enhance the relevance of our content and marketing. For example, in some cases we obtain the contact details of potential speakers for FT Live events from public websites. We also obtain some information from publicly available sources for the purpose of inclusion in our directories, such as MandateWire.

Information we obtain through cookies and similar tools

We use cookies (and similar technologies) and analytics tools across our Sites to collect information about you. This information can be used to improve the performance of the site, make advertising more relevant and enhance your user experience. We provide detailed information about cookies and similar technologies within our Cookie Policy; examples include:

• Your location - we use cookies to display the version of the site that is most relevant to your location. For example, if you log in to FT.com from the US, you will be shown a US version of the site.
• Your usage - we use cookies to understand how our customers use our Sites, and interact with our communications and journalism. For example, we use technology on our Sites which records user movements, including page scrolling, clicks and text entered. (It does not record payment details.) This helps us to identify usability issues and improve the assistance we can provide to users and is also used for aggregated and statistical reporting purposes.
• Your device - we use cookies to understand what type of device you are using to show you the best version of the site.
• Your engagement with advertisements - we use cookies to understand what advertisements you have been shown, or clicked on, to bill our advertising partners, and to present you with advertisements that are more relevant to you.

If you wish to manage your cookies, please follow the instructions on our Manage Cookies page.

Lawful basis for processing

We only process personal information where we have a lawful basis for doing so, such as the following:

• User consent
  This is where you have given us permission to process personal information for a given purpose. For example, if you complete one of our general enquiry forms, we would ask for your consent if we wanted to use your personal information for any other purpose. You have the right to withdraw this consent at any time. You can manage your preferences within your account or by contacting customer services.
• Legitimate business purposes
  This is where we have a legitimate interest, as a business, to process personal information. For example, where we are aware of copyright infringements on our Site, it is in our legitimate interests as a business to identify those responsible. We take due care to balance our interests against your right to privacy.
• Contractual necessity
  This is where we have to process personal information to meet our contractual obligations. For example, if you are a print subscriber, we would need to process your delivery address to fulfil your subscription.
• Legal obligation
  This is where we have to process personal information in order to comply with the law. For example, we process and retain customer invoice information to comply with financial regulations.

We may also rely on relevant exemptions under the GDPR to the requirement to identify a lawful basis for processing.

How we use your personal information

We collect personal information for the following main reasons:

1. To provide our service
   We require some of your basic personal information so our services work as you would expect, for example, delivering the newspaper to your correct address, providing access to our digital content, notifying you of changes to our services and dealing with customer services queries. We record customer calls for monitoring and training purposes. Our Customer Care team may need to access your account to assist you with queries.
2. To maintain performance and improve our products and services
   In order to provide you with the best possible user experience and value, we need to make sure that our products and services work as they should. Using personal information helps us understand how our readers experience our Sites and services, so we can make improvements. This includes analysing onsite data to test new and existing events, products and developments for the FT group; contacting customers with market research surveys or for telephone and video interviews; and hosting subscriber focus groups. We may link the answers you provide with other data we hold about you, for example, your account information and usage data about your use of our sites. 
3. To bill our customers
   We, along with our authorised payments processors, securely process your payment information to take payments, give refunds and to detect and prevent fraudulent activity. We will also update your payment information in the event that a payment is unsuccessful. You can manage your payment information at any time by contacting customer services. If your subscription is provided under a group subscription or trial, we will report information about your activity on our Site(s) for the purposes of billing.
4. To monitor compliance with our policies and terms
   We monitor for breaches of our terms and conditions and copyright policies. For example, we reserve the right to inform the subscription holder if, through use of a group subscription, you are using our content in breach of the terms and conditions or copyright policies of our Sites. We also monitor activity on our Sites to detect and prevent invalid or fraudulent traffic.
5. To personalise our products and services
   We improve your experience of our products and services by personalising parts of our Sites and apps with the information you give us and what we learn about you. This includes showing you articles you may be interested in and recommending emails you may wish to sign up to. Where our Sites have such functionality, you can manage elements of personalisation in your account.
6. To communicate product changes and offers
   We want you to get the most out of our products and services, including showcasing our latest content and newsletters. We will contact you with carefully-curated FT offers and promotions, exclusive event invitations and feature announcements. For example, if there are no updates on topics you follow in MyFT, we will send you articles on other topics that we think you might be interested in. You are able to change your preferences at any time through your account or by contacting customer services.
   We also personalise our communications for strategic purposes. For example, we might offer group subscriptions to portfolio managers.
7. For the purpose of advertising
   We rely on advertising revenue in part to support our award-winning journalism. We need to process your information to understand the effectiveness of the advertising we serve to you and others, and to deliver relevant personalised advertising. We use the information you give us, the information we collect about you, and the information we infer, to serve you with the most appropriate advertisements.
   You can manage your advertising settings for the Sites that carry out this activity in your account. If you do decide to turn off personalised advertisements or advertisements tailored to you, you will still see the same number of advertisements but they may be less relevant to you. You may continue to see advertisements that are targeted to you based on other non-personal information, for example, the article that you are reading.
8. For the purpose of marketing 
   We use your personal information to show you offers and promotions for FT subscriptions and events. For example, we may send you emails or show you adverts on our websites or on other third party websites; where we do this, we may also use information to monitor how our adverts perform.
9. Recruitment - If you apply for a role via one of our Sites, we will process your information in order to facilitate the application process.
10. To build directories - A number of our sites (including The Banker, fDi Intelligence and MandateWire) process personal information to create databases and directories. These directories provide key business insights and profiles to those that have licensed access. Where we make an individual’s contact details accessible in our directories, we inform the individual and provide instructions on how to have their contact details removed.
11. To administer prize draws and competitions
    If you enter a prize draw or competition, we will process your information in order to run the competition or administer the prize draw. For example, we will process your address information if you are a winner and we need to send your prize by post. We may be required to publish or otherwise make available your name and/or region if you are selected as a winner in a competition or prize draw.
12. For the purpose of diversity & inclusion initiatives
    We rely on information, such as gender, or inferred gender, and ethnicity to understand the composition of our audience and ensure that our products and services are engaging across our audience.
13. To facilitate networking communities 
    Where our events or courses provide the opportunity to network, some of your personal information may be visible to other community members. Where this happens, you will be informed and provided with information about how to opt-out.

Who we share your personal information with

We disclose personal information to facilitate the running of our business or to provide specific services you have requested. Commonly, we will disclose information to:

• Service providers
  We engage service providers who help to support our business and improve our products. These service providers include, for example, fulfilment providers for delivery of our digital content and marketing; customer service agencies; hosts, organisers and sponsors of our events; organisations that host our Sites, events or databases; and providers of online surveys. We also work with a number of distribution partners to deliver subscriptions. We have contracts in place with suppliers who process data to provide these services and they can only use your personal information under our instruction. For example, if you have a print subscription with us, we will disclose your information (address, contact details) to our distribution partners to facilitate delivery of the newspaper or magazine. 
• Advertisers
  We, and our advertising partners, use cookies to collect personal information and serve you with advertisements that we believe are relevant to you and your interests. There is more specific information about our advertising partners and data sharing in our Cookie Policy.
• Institutional customers
  If your subscription is provided under a group subscription or trial, we will provide our client with information about your activity on our Site(s) for the purposes of user management, licence administration, content suggestion and billing. We may also make online tools available to our client for these purposes. Information about your activity is provided at a high level and our client cannot track exactly what articles you have read. We may also provide current or prospective clients with activity information about individual subscribers who registered using that entity’s email address. We will always contact individual subscribers before doing so, and will respect any requests not to share this information.
• Complimentary subscription/access provided by our corporate partners
  If you take up a complementary or trial subscription / access at the invitation of one of our corporate partners or clients, we will provide them with some information about your use. This may include: your name and email address, whether or not you activated the subscription and, if so, start and expiry dates, recency of use, and the volume of articles read.
• Social media providers
  Information will be shared with social media platforms where you log in to our Sites via a social media account, or use components on our Sites provided by social media platforms (e.g. if you choose to share our content via LinkedIn using one of the buttons on our website). We also share the information of our customers with social media partners for the following reasons:
  • To prevent existing subscribers from being targeted with subscription offerings on social media platforms;
  • For the purposes of targeted advertising on social media platforms, and to create lookalike audiences for these purposes;
  • To encourage users to get the most out of their subscription.
    If you would like to opt out of the sharing of your personal data with social media platforms, please let us know by emailing privacy.officer@ft.com.
• Microsoft Teams
  If you choose to access our Sites through the Financial Times App for Microsoft Teams, we and Microsoft may share some information about you for transactional purposes such as to link your Microsoft Teams account with your FT.com account.
• Other users
  Our Sites are publicly accessible and anyone around the world who accesses our Sites will be able to see anything you post, such as comments about an article. We encourage you to use a pseudonym when commenting on our Sites if you do not wish to be identifiable to other readers.
• FT group
  We share your information with other companies within the FT group to provide our services and to better understand the relationship between our products. More information about the FT group is on our “About us” page. Sometimes services are provided between legal entities in the FT group, which may involve the processing of personal data by one entity on behalf of another. For example, we may share publicly available personal data with F.T. Specialist Inc. for inclusion in our MandateWire directories; or, we may share information about our subscribers with our parent company, Nikkei Inc., for the purposes of sharing joint subscription offers with our customers.
• Legal processes and successors in title
  We, and our suppliers, may also disclose your information to comply with applicable laws and regulations, court orders or other valid legal processes, and to enforce or apply our terms of use, any subscription agreement, or any of our other rights.
  We may transfer or disclose your personal information to any entity which takes over or acquires the relevant FT business.

We also share aggregated, non-identifiable information with third parties. Before sharing this information, we ensure that it cannot identify you as an individual. For example, we regularly release information about the size and growth of our audiences.

How long we retain your personal information

We retain the majority of your personal information for as long as your account is active and therefore open; this allows you to continue accessing our content, products and services.

If you become inactive and are not a subscriber, we may delete elements of the information associated with your account. We will normally warn you if your access is going to be withdrawn and give you the opportunity to retain your account. 

Where we don’t need to keep all of your information in full, we may obfuscate or aggregate it, for example, web activity logs and survey responses. This is to ensure that we do not retain your information for any longer than is necessary.

A summary of how long your personal information is retained can be found below:

It is sometimes necessary for us to keep your personal information for longer periods of time, for example:

• If there is a statutory requirement to retain it;
• If we require the information for legal reasons or there is a legitimate business need for us to retain it;
• To ensure we do not contact you if you have asked us not to.

How we keep your personal information secure

We have appropriate technical and administrative security measures in place to help ensure that our users’ information is protected against unauthorised or accidental access, use,  alteration, or loss. To demonstrate our commitment to security, we have achieved the UK Cyber Essentials accreditation. We use encryption technology, such as Transport Layer Security (TLS), to protect your personal information when you order products or services from us. More information about our approach to cyber security can be found in our Cyber Security Statement.

We operate a global business, so your personal information may be processed and stored outside the UK and the European Economic Area (EEA). For example, our global customer services team need to access information about you in order to respond to your queries. We put in place safeguards, such as standard contractual clauses, to protect information that is transferred in this way.  

Your rights

Under data protection laws, you may have rights as an individual in relation to the personal data we hold about you. These rights include:

• The right to object to direct marketing - your preferences, including in relation to direct marketing, can be found in your account;
• The right to access the personal data that we process about you;
• The right to request the deletion of your personal data;
• The right to request the rectification of your personal data - you can manage some of this information in your account.

You can exercise these rights through your account or by contacting Customer Care (for FT.com) or the relevant customer services department for our other products.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. In the UK, this is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Where this Privacy Policy applies

Personal information is collected by The Financial Times Limited on behalf of the Financial Times group of companies and its trading entities (including FDI Intelligence and MandateWire).

Our Sites are not intended for children under 16 years of age. We do not intentionally collect or use any information from children.

Our Sites contain links to third party websites which are not subject to this privacy policy. We are not responsible for their content, use of personal information, or security practices.

If you have a query in regards to the processing of your personal information, please contact our Data Protection Officer directly at Privacy.Officer@ft.com.

The Financial Times Ltd
Registered Office: Bracken House, 1 Friday Street, London, EC4M 9BT, United Kingdom.
Registered Number: 00227590

FT group

Please also refer to the relevant Privacy Policies for FT Overseas and GIS Planning if you are also using, or have notified us of marketing contact permissions relating to, FT Locations products.

EU Representative

To comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (2016/679) we have appointed a European representative. If you wish to contact them, their details are as follows:

Bird & Bird GDPR Representative Services Ireland 
Deloitte House 
29 Earlsfort Terrace 
Dublin 2 
D02 AY28

EUrepresentative.FinancialTimes@twobirds.com

Key Contact: Vincent Rezzouk-Hammachi

Privacy Notice for United States Consumers 

This section of our Privacy Policy applies to consumers who reside in some US States and supplements the information above, as well as the State-Specific information below. 

Privacy laws in certain US States may give consumers rights with respect to their personal information, which could include:

• The right to access the personal information we process about you;
• The right to request the deletion of your personal information;
• The right to request the correction of your personal information;
• The right to opt out of targeted advertising and profiling;
• The right to opt-out of the sale or sharing of your personal information.

You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of your personal information by clicking the ‘Do Not Sell or Share my Personal Information’ link in the footer of the website. Or, where your personal information is included in one of our Directories, you can email us.privacy@ft.com to exercise your right to opt-out.

In addition, residents of some States also have the right to lodge a complaint with its designated Supervisory Authority. Please refer to guidance provided by your relevant Supervisory Authority for further information.

We take the privacy of all of our customers seriously, regardless of location; where we do not fall into scope for a particular State’s privacy law, we still protect customer data in line with this policy.

Privacy notice for California Consumer Privacy Act

This section is intended for California residents and supplements the above. 

Rights for California residents

If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, (CCPA) may provide you with additional rights regarding the use of your personal information. These rights include: 

• The right to access the personal information we process about you;
• The right to know what personal information is collected about you, whether any information is sold or disclosed, and to whom; 
• The right to request the deletion of your personal information;
• The right to request the correction of your personal information;
• The right to opt-out from the sale and sharing of your personal information;
• The right to opt out of automated decision-making and profiling;
• The right to not be discriminated against for exercising any of the rights above.
• You also have the right to limit the processing of your sensitive personal data, for some purposes; we do not use sensitive personal data for any of these purposes.

You can exercise any applicable rights by emailing ccpa.privacy@ft.com or contacting Customer Care. You may be required to submit proof of your identity and/or address, if we are unable to confirm your identity or cannot verify that you are a California resident. We endeavor to respond to a verifiable consumer request within 45 days. You may also designate an authorised agent to make a request on your behalf, subject to proof of identity and authorisation. 

Summary of consumers’ personal information we have collected in the preceding 12 months

Service Providers

As described in our Privacy Policy above, we share your personal information with third parties for business purposes. Commonly, these include service providers who help to support our business operations and improve our products. 

We also use service providers to serve you with advertisements that we believe are relevant to you. These third parties are permitted to process your personal information only for the purposes of providing services to the FT; this may include the use of their own cookies or similar technologies to collect your personal information (IP address or other unique identifier) as part of providing their services to FT. 

Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

Our Advertising

If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, (CCPA) also provides you with a right to opt-out of the sale and sharing of your personal information. The definitions of 'sell' and 'share' are extremely broad under the CCPA, and may include sharing certain pieces of information with our advertising partners, such as cookie identifiers, geolocation and interactions with advertisements, for the purposes of showing you advertising that is relevant to your interests. 

You can choose to block sharing of this data with advertisers. This means that we turn off  some types of advertising based on information you have given us and your use of our Sites, ensuring that our advertising partners do not receive this data. By opting out, you will stop receiving adverts that are targeted specifically to you; however, you will still see the same number of adverts on our Sites. 

You can opt out using the ‘Do Not Sell or Share My Info’ link located in the footer of the website you are using, if that website shows the types of advertising described above. Alternatively, you can request this by emailing ccpa.privacy@ft.com, or by using a designated opt out preference signal. 

fDi Markets

fDi Markets is an online database that tracks and profiles companies investing overseas and uses this information to understand the trends in FDI on a global basis.  As part of the research process, we identify publicly available details of key individuals who are linked to either project activities or listed as a company contact.

If your contact details have been included in the database, you will have received an email from us containing instructions on how to opt-out, which you can do by calling us on +44 (0)20 7775 6667, or by emailing fDiIntelligence+ccpa@ft.com.

More Information

For more information on how we use your personal information and who we share your personal information with, please see our Privacy Policy above or contact ccpa.privacy@ft.com. 

Changes to this Privacy Policy

This policy was reviewed on 10/06/2024 and last updated on 13/11/24.

Any changes we may make to this privacy policy will be posted on this page. If changes are significant, we may choose to notify you by email or to clearly indicate on our home page that the policy has been updated.