The world's local bank
We know that you are concerned with how your personal and financial information is dealt with. This privacy statement sets out our current policies and demonstrates our commitment to your financial privacy. We may change the content or services found on our website at any time without notice, and consequently our privacy policy may change at any time in the future. You agree to revisit this page regularly and your continued access to or use of the website will mean that you agree to the changes.
If you register to use the password-protected portions of the website, we will ask you to provide us with certain up to date data about yourself, which we will handle in accordance with the United Kingdom's Data Protection legislation. We maintain strict security standards and procedures with a view to preventing unauthorised access to your data by anyone, including our staff. We use leading technologies such as (but not limited to) data encryption, firewalls and server authentication to protect the security of your data. All Group companies, all our staff and whenever we hire third parties to provide support services, we will require them to observe our privacy standards and to allow us to audit them for compliance.
HSBC works with third parties to research certain usage and activities on our website on our behalf. No personal information about you is shared, however in the course of conducting this research these third parties may place a unique 'cookie' on your browser.
Our public website and Internet Banking services, along with most other major websites, use cookies. Cookies are pieces of information that a website transfers to the cookie file on your computer's hard disk. Cookies enable users to navigate around the website and (where appropriate) enable us to tailor the content to fit the needs of visitors who have accessed the site.
We use two types of cookie on our website.
Session cookies, which are temporary cookies that remain in the cookie file of your computer until you close your browser at which point they are deleted.
Persistent or stored cookies that remain permanently on the cookie file of your computer.
Cookies cannot look into your computer and obtain information about you or your family or read any material kept on your hard drive and, unless you have logged onto Internet Banking, cookies cannot be used to identify who you are.
Cookies cannot be used by anyone else who has access to the computer to find out anything about you, other than the fact that someone using the computer has visited a certain website. Cookies do not in any way compromise the security of Internet Banking.
Cookies will not be used to contact you for marketing purposes other than by means of advertisements offered within our Internet Banking services.
Cookies may be used to record details of pages relating to particular products and services that you have visited on our websites. This is to provide us with generic usage statistics to allow us to improve our websites and to provide you with information about products and services that may interest you. Information on products and services may be provided via the website or by other means.
This does not affect your right to opt-out from receiving marketing material from us.
The web browsers of most computers are initially set up to accept cookies. If you prefer, you can set your web browser to disable cookies or to inform you when a website is attempting to add a cookie. You can also delete cookies that have previously been added to your computer's cookie file.
You can set your browser to disable persistent cookies and/or session cookies but if you disable session cookies, although you will be able to view our public unsecured website, you will not be able to log onto Internet Banking.
If the computer that you are using is set to disable persistent cookies, you will be able to access Internet Banking; however, your navigation of the website may be less enjoyable.
In order to develop our website in line with customer needs HSBC is working with WebTrends to track usage on our website. Webtrends provide HSBC with statistics to show us which pages on our website are visited most frequently and how long visitors spend on our website. We use this information to help us plan how we should improve the website.
WebTrends uses a cookie to track the number of unique users of the site. It basically tells us whether we have a small number of regular visitors to the website or a large number of infrequent visitors. None of the information can be traced to an individual – we do not know who you are as a unique user, merely that there are a certain number of people using the website. The cookie only relates to what goes on in the HSBC website and the information cannot be used for marketing on an individual basis. For more information about how WebTrends collects data, please read their privacy policy.
HSBC web pages including Internet Banking may contain electronic images, known as web beacons or spotlight tags. These enable HSBC to count users who have visited certain pages on our website. Web beacons and spotlight tags are simply tools used to obtain generic information about the web pages visited. They are not used to obtain information about specific users.
Please visit Interactive Advertising Bureau UK to discover how to disable and delete cookies.
If you have any queries regarding privacy issues, then email us or visit any of our branches for more information. To ensure that we carry out your instructions accurately, to help us continually improve our service and in the interests of security, we may monitor and/or record your telephone calls with us. Please see our Important Notes for more details on the use of our website.
