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Cookies on Essential Comps

We use essential cookies to run the site — your basket and sign-in. With your permission we’d also use optional cookies to see how visitors find and use the site, to measure and improve our adverts, and to play Live Draw videos automatically. We also count visits in total, without cookies or anything that identifies you, to improve the site — you can switch this off in Manage preferences. Cookie Policy ·

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Privacy Policy

We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal information. This page explains what information we collect, why we collect it, how we use it, who we share it with and the choices you have.

Last updated: 17 October 2026

Who we are

Essential Comps Ltd is the data controller for the personal information collected through this website.

Company number: 16657261
Registered office: Office 1, Izabella House, 24–26 Regent Place, City Centre, Birmingham, B1 3NJ
Email: info@essentialcomps.co.uk

Information we collect

We only collect the information we need to run your account and our competitions, deliver prizes, look after our customers, tell you about our competitions where you have agreed, and meet our legal obligations.

  • Account details: your name, email address, mobile number, postal address and date of birth, and your login details. Your password is stored in encrypted (hashed) form and we cannot read it.
  • Orders and payments: what you bought, when, how much you paid, any discount or promotion applied, and any refund. Card payments are made in the secure payment window of our payment provider, DNA Payments. We receive the outcome of each payment (for example authorised, declined or refunded), its amount, time and reference, but never your full card details.
  • Competition entries: your entries and ticket numbers, including free postal entries and the details on them, and the results of the draws you entered.
  • Rewards: your Essential Points balance and history, referrals you made or were referred by, promotional and birthday rewards, and how many people clicked the competition links you shared.
  • Responsible Play: your spending limit, any breaks, suspensions or closure requests, and the history of changes to them. Where we have concerns about a customer’s wellbeing or the security of an account, we may keep notes of the steps we take.
  • Winners: if you win, our attempts to contact you, the identity documents you send us and the outcome of our checks, your choice of prize or cash alternative, delivery details and records of any cash payment (including the bank details you give us for it). If you agree, we also keep the photograph, video or review you give us.
  • Communication choices: whether you have agreed to marketing by email, SMS and WhatsApp, and a record of each change you make (when, and where you made it). We also keep a record of the messages we send you and whether they were delivered to our email provider.
  • How you found us: the campaign, advert, shared link or website (its domain only, never the full page address) that brought you to us. When you create an account or place an order, or are signed in, we record this source against your account and order. If you allow analytics & attribution cookies, we also remember it on your device between visits (see our Cookie Policy).
  • Site statistics: daily totals of how our website is used (for example views of each competition, basket and checkout steps, and purchases), with nothing that identifies you stored with them. You can object at any time (see “Site statistics” below).
  • Analytics and advertising information: only if you allow the relevant cookies — how you use our website (for example competitions viewed, basket and checkout steps, sign-ups and purchases), the references of adverts you clicked, and the identifiers set by the tools described below. When you place an order we record the choices you had made at that moment, so that we only ever send information about that order to the tools you allowed.
  • Technical information: like most websites, our servers process technical information such as your IP address and browser type when you visit, including to protect the website and your account from misuse (for example, limiting repeated failed sign-in attempts).
  • Messages: information you give us when you contact us.

Why we use your information

  • To create and manage your account and process your orders, payments and entries — necessary to provide our service to you (contract).
  • To make draws, contact winners, verify identity and deliver prizes — contract, and our legal obligations.
  • To apply your spending limit and the other Responsible Play tools, and to protect customers — our legal obligations and our legitimate interest in running competitions responsibly.
  • To prevent and investigate fraud, abuse and payment disputes, and to keep our website and your account secure — our legitimate interests and legal obligations.
  • To keep financial, transaction and draw records — our legal obligations (including tax and accounting rules).
  • To publish winners and each draw’s verification record as described in our Terms & Conditions — so that our draws can be seen to be fair (legitimate interests). Photographs, videos and reviews are only published with your agreement.
  • To send you service messages about your orders, payments, entries, wins and prizes, your account and its security, and Responsible Play — contract, legal obligations and legitimate interests. These are sent whatever your marketing choices.
  • To send you marketing — new competitions, offers and promotions, rewards and news about Essential Comps — by email, SMS or WhatsApp, only on the channels you have agreed to (consent). Marketing may be tailored to the competitions you have entered and how you use our website. We never send marketing during a break, suspension or closure.
  • To understand which adverts, campaigns and shared links bring customers and orders to us — our legitimate interests for the source recorded with your account and orders; your consent for anything stored on or read from your device, and for analytics and advertising cookies.
  • To produce aggregate site statistics so that we can improve the website — our legitimate interest in understanding, in total, how our website is used. Only totals are kept, and you can object at any time.
  • To measure and improve our website and our advertising, including showing our adverts to people likely to be interested — your consent (through your cookie choices). You can withdraw it at any time.

Marketing and your choices

  • You choose email, SMS and WhatsApp marketing separately when you create an account, at checkout and at any time in Marketing Preferences in your account.
  • Every marketing email has an unsubscribe link. Withdrawing consent stops marketing on that channel; it does not stop the service messages you need about your orders, entries, wins, prizes, account and Responsible Play.
  • We use an email marketing service to send marketing emails on our behalf. It receives the details needed to send them (such as your name, email address, your choices and, where relevant, the competitions you have entered) and may tell us whether an email was opened or a link clicked.

Site statistics

Our website counts, in total, how it is used so that we can improve it — for example how many times each competition is viewed, how many tickets are added to baskets, how many baskets reach checkout and how many purchases follow. Each visit adds one to a daily total; no record of your individual visit is kept, and nothing that identifies you, your device or your account (such as your name, account, order, IP address, browser details, a visitor identifier or the website you came from) is stored with the totals. The totals are not shared with advertisers, not used for advertising and not used to make decisions about anyone. When we report on them, we don’t show figures small enough to single anyone out.

No cookie is set for site statistics. Counting basket activity involves the essential basket cookie your browser already sends us, which UK law allows for statistics about how our website is used, with a view to improving it, as long as you can object.

You can object at any time, free of charge: switch off Site statistics in Cookie settings at the bottom of every page, or use the button in the Cookie Policy. From then on your visits on that browser are not counted. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as an objection too.

Analytics and advertising

We use Google Analytics (from Google) and Meta’s advertising tools (for Facebook and Instagram) only if you allow them in your cookie choices (see our Cookie Policy). Until you do, neither is loaded and nothing about your visit is sent to them. You can change your mind at any time using Cookie settings at the bottom of every page.

Google Analytics — only with analytics consent

  • What is sent: the pages and competitions you view, your basket, checkout, sign-up and Instant Win steps, and the value and competitions of your purchases and refunds (identified by our order reference), together with Google’s own cookie identifier for your browser and your device and browser type. Google also receives your IP address when your browser connects to it.
  • What is not sent: your name, email address, phone number, postal address or account details.
  • Purchases and refunds are sent from our servers when your payment or refund is confirmed, using the identifier Google’s cookie had given your browser where there is one — and only if you had allowed analytics when you placed the order.
  • We use Google Analytics for analytics only: Google signals and ad personalisation are switched off, and if you allow analytics but not marketing we also tell Google that advertising storage is not allowed.
  • Google provides Google Analytics to us as a data processor under Google’s data processing terms, which means it uses this information to provide the service to us (and to maintain and protect it). We keep Google Analytics’ optional data-sharing settings switched off, and Google Analytics keeps your information for two months.

Meta Pixel and Conversions API — only with marketing consent

  • What is sent: the pages and competitions you view, items added to your basket, starting checkout, creating an account, and purchases (what you bought and its value), together with Meta’s cookie identifiers (_fbp, and _fbc if you came from a Meta advert), your browser details and your IP address.
  • Purchases and account sign-ups are also sent directly from our servers (Conversions API), with your customer number protected by one-way encryption so that Meta can match them to the same visit without seeing it. Meta uses a shared reference to count each one only once.
  • What is not sent: your name, email address, phone number or postal address.
  • Only if you had allowed marketing when you placed the order or created your account.
  • Never while your account is on a Responsible Play break, suspended, self-excluded, closed or frozen: in that case nothing about you is sent to Meta, from your browser (when you are signed in) or from our servers, including purchases queued before the restriction began.
  • Under Meta’s Business Tools Terms, we and Meta are jointly responsible for collecting this information and sending it to Meta. Meta is responsible for what it does with it after that, as described in its privacy policy.

Advertising click references

Links from Google and Meta adverts can carry a reference to the advert you clicked (gclid, gbraid, wbraid or fbclid). With marketing consent, and only while we use that provider’s advertising tools, we keep it for 90 days in a cookie and with your order so that a purchase can be credited to the advert. Without marketing consent we ignore it.

Your choices

  • Withdrawing a choice in Cookie settings stops that tool straight away and deletes the cookies we can remove. Orders you place afterwards are not sent to it. Information sent before you changed your mind stays with the provider under its own policy.
  • Meta uses the information it receives as described in its privacy policy — for example to show adverts to you and to people like you. Google’s privacy policy is here.
  • We do not use these tools, or our site statistics, to make decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects. Winners are chosen only by the draw process described in our Terms & Conditions.

Sharing your information

We never sell your personal information. We only share it where necessary with:

  • our payment provider, DNA Payments, to take payments and process refunds (DNA Payments also handles payment information under its own privacy policy). To authenticate card payments and prevent fraud, DNA’s secure payment window uses security and fraud-prevention services — including checks of your device, browser and connection (such as your IP address) by providers such as Signifyd and LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ ThreatMetrix — and card-scheme authentication (such as Mastercard’s). These process information to keep payments secure and prevent fraud, not for our advertising, under DNA’s and their own privacy notices;
  • our website hosting provider, which stores our website and database and sends our service emails on our behalf;
  • our backup storage provider, which keeps encrypted copies of our database in the European Union so that it can be restored if something goes wrong (it cannot read them);
  • our email marketing service, to send marketing you have agreed to;
  • analytics and advertising providers — Google (Google Analytics) and Meta (Facebook and Instagram advertising) — only with your permission, as described above (our site statistics are never shared with them);
  • prize suppliers and couriers, to deliver your prize;
  • our bank, to pay cash prizes;
  • professional advisers, such as accountants and lawyers;
  • the police, regulators or other authorities where we are required to by law or to prevent fraud.

Some providers process personal information outside the United Kingdom — for example Google and Meta, and some email services, in the United States. Where we send it, or a provider processes it for us, we rely on the safeguards UK data protection law requires, such as UK adequacy regulations or the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, as set out in the provider’s terms. Where Meta uses information for its own purposes, its own privacy policy explains how it transfers it.

Live draws are broadcast on our YouTube channel and other official channels, and may show winning ticket numbers and winners’ names. If you watch a live draw or video on our website, the video is provided by YouTube (see our Cookie Policy).

Identity checks for winners

  • Before releasing a cash or physical prize, we check the winner’s identity. When we contact you, we will ask you to email the documents we need (normally a passport or driving licence, and sometimes proof of address) to winners@essentialcomps.co.uk.
  • Our team checks them by hand. We record the outcome of the check in your account; we do not store copies of your documents in our competition systems.
  • We delete the email and its attachments within 30 days of our verification decision.
  • We do not currently use an external identity-verification service. If we start to, we will update this policy before we do.

How long we keep information

We keep personal information only for as long as we need it for the purposes above.

  • Order, payment, refund, entry, draw, winner, prize, Essential Points and Responsible Play records are kept for six years, which is the period in which a legal claim about them could be brought and covers our tax and accounting obligations, or longer where the law requires.
  • When an account is closed, we keep the records above and the history needed to respect a closure or suspension. After six years your name and contact details are removed from them (anonymised) rather than deleted, so that the records themselves stay accurate.
  • Identity documents sent to us by email are deleted within 30 days of our verification decision; the outcome of the check is kept with your winner record.
  • A record of your marketing choices is kept for as long as we hold your account and for six years afterwards, so we can show what you agreed to.
  • Site statistics are kept as daily totals (with nothing identifying anyone) for 25 months, so that we can compare one year with the next.
  • If you allow analytics cookies, the record of your journey through the site under a coded visitor reference is deleted after 90 days.
  • Advertising and analytics identifiers recorded with an order (Google’s and Meta’s references, advert click references, browser details and IP address), and the copies of what we sent to Google or Meta, are deleted after 90 days. We keep the record of the cookie choices you had made, with the order, for as long as the order is kept, to show we respected them.
  • Cookies are kept for the periods shown in our Cookie Policy. Google and Meta keep the information they receive for the periods set in their own policies and our settings with them.

Your rights

You have the right to:

  • access the personal information we hold about you;
  • have inaccurate information corrected;
  • ask us to delete your information, where we are not required to keep it;
  • ask us to restrict or object to how we use it, including objecting to marketing at any time and to site statistics (in Cookie settings);
  • receive information you gave us in a portable format, where the law provides for it;
  • withdraw consent at any time — for marketing, in Marketing Preferences in your account or with the unsubscribe link; for cookies, in Cookie settings at the bottom of every page;
  • complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

To make a request, email info@essentialcomps.co.uk. We may need to confirm your identity first. Our competitions are only for people aged 18 or over, and we do not knowingly collect information about anyone younger.

Security

We protect your information with encrypted connections, restricted and protected staff access, encryption of the credentials we use to connect to our providers, and regular reviews of our security measures.

Cookies

Information about the cookies we use, and how to change your choices, is in our Cookie Policy.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy to reflect changes to our services, the law or how we use personal information. The latest version is always on this page with its last updated date.