Privacy Notice

On The Square Auctions Limited is the data controller for the personal information described in this notice. That means we decide what information is collected and what happens to it, and we are responsible for looking after it.

Company

On The Square Auctions Limited

Company number

NI620711 (registered in Northern Ireland)

Address

79 Cootehall Road, Bangor, BT19 1UP

Email

info@onthesquareemporium.com

Phone

028 9043 4290

We are a separate company from On The Square Emporium, the retail shop at the same address. This notice covers the auction business only.

When you submit an item through this website, or when we enter one on your behalf after you contact us by phone, email, WhatsApp or in person, we collect:

• Your name, email address and phone number.
• A description of the item, its provenance, any certifications, and what you believe it is worth.
• Any photographs you upload.
• If we accept the item: your postal address and your signature, on the consignment agreement.
• As the sale progresses: the reserve you agree, delivery arrangements, and what your lot made on the day.

We use this to value your item, decide whether to accept it, prepare the consignment agreement, catalogue and sell the lot, and pay you afterwards. Our legal basis is the performance of our contract with you, and taking steps at your request before entering into that contract. Where we keep records for tax or anti-money-laundering purposes, our basis is our legal obligations.

If we decide not to accept an item, we keep the submission for a limited period so we have a record of what was offered and what we said, then delete it.

Bidding does not happen on this website. Our sales run on Easy Live Auction and are also listed on the-saleroom. You register and bid with those platforms, they hold your account and bidding details, and their own privacy notices apply to that relationship.

From them we receive what we need to complete your purchase: your name, contact details, billing address, the lots you won and what you paid. We use it to invoice you, arrange collection or shipping, handle any dispute, and meet our tax and anti-money-laundering obligations. Our legal basis is the performance of our contract with you, and our legal obligations.

Where it is necessary to complete a sale or to enforce our terms, our conditions of sale allow us to pass a buyer's details to the seller of a lot, and the other way round.

We store your email address and the date you subscribed. That is all — we do not collect your name, and we do not track whether you open our emails.

Our legal basis is your consent. You can withdraw it at any time by replying to any email from us or writing to the address above, and we will remove you. We use the list to tell you when a catalogue goes live, when viewing opens and when a sale is closing. We do not sell or share it.

The site is hosted by Cloudflare, who keep standard server and security logs including IP addresses. These protect the site from attack and abuse, and our legal basis is our legitimate interest in keeping it available and secure.

The item submission form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that a submission comes from a person rather than a bot. It looks at signals from your browser to make that judgement. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in preventing spam and fraudulent submissions — this form has been flooded by bots before.

The website itself sets one cookie, and only for staff: a session cookie when an administrator signs in to the admin area. It is strictly necessary for that sign-in to work and is not used for anything else. Ordinary visitors are not given a cookie by the site.

We also use Google Analytics to understand how many people visit and which pages they read. It sets cookies in your browser and collects your approximate location, the pages you view, and information about your device and browser. It does not tell us who you are.

You can stop this by blocking or deleting cookies in your browser settings, or by installing Google's opt-out browser add-on at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Most browsers also offer a Do Not Track or anti-tracking setting.

We do not sell personal information. We share it only where we need to, with:

Easy Live Auction, ATG and the-saleroom

The platforms our sales run on and are listed with.

Cloudflare

Hosting, the database, photo storage and site security.

Mailgun

Sending our emails. We use their European region, so the messages are processed in the EU.

DocuSeal

Signing consignment agreements. We run this on our own server rather than a third party's.

Google

Website analytics, as described above.

Advisers and authorities

Our accountants, insurers and legal advisers, and HMRC, the police or other authorities where the law requires it.

Most of the information we hold stays in the UK or the European Economic Area. Some of the services above, Google Analytics in particular, involve transferring information to the United States. Where that happens we rely on the safeguards allowed by UK data protection law, such as an adequacy decision or the UK International Data Transfer Agreement. You can ask us for more detail.

We keep personal information only as long as we need it, and no longer:

Sale records, invoices and consignment agreements

Six years after the end of the financial year they relate to, so we can meet tax requirements and deal with any later claim.

Anti-money-laundering records

Five years from the end of the transaction or business relationship, as the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 require.

Items we did not accept

Twelve months from the date you submitted them, including any photographs.

Mailing list

Until you unsubscribe.

Admin sign-in sessions

Seven days, then they expire automatically.

Under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 you have the right to:

• Ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Have inaccurate information corrected.
• Ask us to delete information, where we do not have a legal reason to keep it.
• Ask us to restrict how we use it, or object to us using it.
• Ask for the information you gave us in a portable format.
• Withdraw your consent at any time, where consent is what we relied on.

Email us at info@onthesquareemporium.com and we will respond within one month. There is no charge. We do not make any decisions about you by automated means, and we do not profile you.

Some rights have limits. If you ask us to delete a consignment record we are required to keep for tax or anti-money-laundering purposes, we will explain what we have to retain and why.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. Complaining to us does not affect that right.

We update this notice when what we do with personal information changes. The date at the top tells you when it last changed. This version is dated 10 September 2026.