TCT Magazine and tctmagazine.com are licensed and operated by ManufacturingIQ Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, number 16634451, with its registered office at Dodleston House, Bell Meadow Business Park, Park Lane, Pulford, Chester CH4 9EP. ManufacturingIQ Ltd is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under number ZC068133.
The privacy policy below applies to TCT Magazine and to every other ManufacturingIQ brand.
ManufacturingIQ Privacy Policy
1. Who we are and what this policy covers
This policy explains how ManufacturingIQ uses personal data about the people who read, subscribe to, attend and work with our brands.
Who we are. ManufacturingIQ Ltd ("ManufacturingIQ", "we", "us") is a company registered in England and Wales, number 16634451, with its registered office at Dodleston House, Bell Meadow Business Park, Park Lane, Pulford, Chester CH4 9EP. We are the controller of your personal data, which means we decide how and why it is used. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) under number ZC068133.
The law. We handle your data in line with UK data protection law: the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018, and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR), which cover email marketing and cookies.
Our brands. This policy covers all ManufacturingIQ brands, including TCT Magazine and tctmagazine.com, Additive IQ, Med-Tech Insights, Med-Tech Expo and PharmaManufacturingIQ, across our websites, newsletters, magazines, events, webinars and awards.
Who this covers. Readers, newsletter subscribers, event and webinar registrants and attendees, awards entrants, editorial contributors and speakers, and people at the companies we do business with.
Contact us. For any privacy question or to use your rights, email subscriptions@rapidnews.com, write to us at the address above, or call +44 (0)1244 680222.
2. What we collect and where it comes from
We mostly collect business contact and professional details that you give us directly.
| Type of data | Examples | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Contact details | Name, work email, phone, company, job title, country | You, when you subscribe, register or contact us |
| Professional profile | Industry, job function, company size, areas of interest | You, through sign-up forms and preferences |
| Event and webinar data | Registrations, attendance, sessions viewed, questions asked | You, and the event or webinar platforms we use |
| Account data | Login details, reading preferences, saved content | You, when you create an account on our sites |
| Purchase data | Orders, invoices, billing address | You or your employer, when you buy from us |
| Engagement data | Newsletter opens and clicks, pages read | Our email and website tools |
| Technical data | IP address, browser, device | Our websites and email tools |
| Contributor data | Biography, photo, quotes, recordings | You, when you speak, write or are interviewed |
| Business data from others | Work contact details | Your colleagues, event partners, and public sources such as company websites, LinkedIn and Companies House |
We don't knowingly collect sensitive data such as health, ethnicity or religion. We don't store payment card details; our payment providers handle those.
Third-party data. If we receive your details from a third party (such as a partner or public source), we will notify you and provide a link to this policy within one month or upon our first communication with you.
Event photography. As we run trade shows and conferences, we occasionally take photographs and video on-site for promotional purposes, relying on legitimate interests. You can ask event staff not to be featured.
3. How we use your data and our lawful basis
UK data protection law requires a lawful basis for each use. Ours are set out below.
| What we do | Lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Send newsletters you've signed up for | Consent |
| Run your account and premium content access | Contract |
| Register you for events and webinars and deliver them | Contract |
| Share webinar and sponsored content registrations with the named sponsor (section 4) | Legitimate interests |
| Send you information about our other events, products and services | Legitimate interests (business contacts) or consent, depending on how you signed up |
| Process orders, invoices and payments | Contract and legal obligation |
| Understand what our audience reads and improve our content | Legitimate interests |
| Show adverts on our sites and in our newsletters, and count views and clicks | Legitimate interests |
| Publish contributor content, quotes and recordings | Legitimate interests, or contract where agreed |
| Keep records for tax, accounting and legal claims | Legal obligation and legitimate interests |
| Keep our systems secure and prevent fraud | Legitimate interests |
Our legitimate interests are running a B2B media and events business: telling relevant professionals about content, events and suppliers in their industry, and keeping our sponsored content model working. We've assessed these against your interests, and you can object at any time (section 11).
Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time, for example by unsubscribing.
4. Sponsored content, webinars and sharing with sponsors
Some of our webinars, white papers and other content are provided or funded by a sponsor. When you register for sponsored content, we share your registration details with that sponsor.
We always tell you first. The registration form names the sponsor and lists the details shared, before you submit.
- What's shared: the details on the form, usually your name, job title, company, email and country.
- Why: so the sponsor can contact you about its products, services and events relevant to the content.
- What the sponsor can do with it: once it receives your details, the sponsor is responsible for its own use of them under its own privacy policy, which the form links to. Our agreements with sponsors limit use to that purpose and prohibit selling your data on.
- Your choice: you don't have to register. If you do and later change your mind, you can unsubscribe from the sponsor's messages, ask the sponsor to delete your data, or ask us to tell them you object.
We only share with the sponsors named at the time you registered. If a sponsor is added later, we don't share your earlier registration with them.
Newsletter subscriptions are different: we don't share newsletter subscribers with sponsors. Sponsored messages in newsletters are sent by us, and the sponsor doesn't receive your details unless you choose to respond to them directly.
5. Marketing and newsletters
You'll only get our newsletters if you sign up for them, and every email has an unsubscribe link.
Newsletters may include sponsored content and advertising from companies in your industry. These are sent by us; your details stay with us.
How we measure newsletters. Our emails contain a small image that records when the email is opened, and the links in them record when they are clicked. We use this to see which articles and subjects our readers find useful, to improve the newsletters, and to report total results to sponsors. Sponsors receive totals only, never names or addresses. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in every email.
Our own events and products: if you've registered for, attended or bought something from us, or you're a business contact, we may tell you about similar ManufacturingIQ events, publications and services. You can opt out at any time.
Across our brands: we may tell you about other ManufacturingIQ brands relevant to your industry.
No selling of data. We don't sell or rent your data. The only time a third party receives your details for their own marketing is the sponsored content sharing in section 4.
To stop marketing, use the unsubscribe link, update your preferences in your account, or email subscriptions@rapidnews.com. We'll keep a note of your email so we don't contact you again.
6. Advertising on our sites and newsletters
Adverts on our sites and in our newsletters are served by our own ad server, run by ManufacturingIQ. We don't use Google or any other third-party advertising network.
When an advert is shown or clicked, our ad server records that it happened, together with a one-way scrambled form of your internet address and your browser type. We use this to count views and clicks, to filter out automated traffic and bots, and to make sure a pop-up advert is shown to the same reader at most once a day. The scrambling is one-way, so the record cannot be turned back into your internet address.
Our ad server stores nothing in your browser. It sets no cookies and no other identifier on your device.
Advertisers receive totals only, such as how many times their advert was shown and how many times it was clicked. They never receive names, email addresses or any other detail about individual readers.
We keep the detailed advert records for 13 months, then keep only daily totals.
No third-party tracking. We don't allow advertisers' tracking pixels or ad tags on our sites or in our emails. No advertiser or ad network can place code that follows you around our sites or across the web.
7. Who else we share data with
Apart from sponsors (section 4), we share data only with the service providers who run our business and a few others where needed.
| Who | Why | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Website and publishing platforms | Hosting our sites, managing accounts, and publishing content | Ghost |
| CRM and marketing tools | Managing subscriber contacts and delivering email campaigns | HubSpot |
| Event and webinar platforms | Registration, ticketing, streaming, and managing attendee data | GoToWebinar |
| Office and data tools | Email hosting, file storage, and internal records | Microsoft 365 |
| AI and productivity tools | Helping our team draft, summarise and analyse information | Claude (Anthropic) |
| Payment providers | Securely processing payments for products and events | Our secure payment providers |
| Professional advisers | Legal, accounting, audit, and insurance | Our solicitors, accountants, and insurers |
| Buyers of our business | If we sell or merge all or part of the business | A prospective or actual buyer |
| Authorities | Where the law requires it | HMRC, police, courts, regulators |
Service providers act on our instructions under contracts that protect your data. They can't use it for their own purposes.
8. International transfers
Some of our service providers and sponsors are outside the UK, including in the EU and the USA. When your data goes outside the UK, we make sure it stays protected using one of these:
- Adequacy. The UK government has recognised the country as protecting data to a UK standard. This includes the EU and EEA, and countries such as Switzerland, Japan, Canada and South Korea.
- The UK-US Data Bridge. For US organisations certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
- Approved contracts. The ICO's International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, with a check that the protection is not materially lower than in the UK.
Contact us if you'd like details of the safeguard used for a particular transfer.
9. How long we keep data
We keep data only as long as we need it, then delete or anonymise it.
| Data | How long |
|---|---|
| Newsletter subscriptions | Until you unsubscribe, or after 3 years with no opens or clicks |
| Accounts | While the account is active, then 2 years after last login |
| Event and webinar registrations | 3 years after the event |
| Business contacts with no other activity | 3 years after last contact |
| Orders, invoices and contracts | 6 years after the end of the financial year, for tax and legal reasons |
| Unsubscribe and objection records | As long as needed to make sure we don't contact you again |
| Published content, recordings and quotes | As long as the content is published, unless you ask us to review it |
| Advert view and click records | 13 months in detail, then daily totals only |
| Raw exports from webinar platforms | Deleted once processed and shared |
10. Security, cookies, statistics, children and automated decisions
Security. We limit access to staff and suppliers who need it, use secure systems and transfer methods, and require our suppliers to do the same. If a breach is likely to put you at risk, we'll tell you and the ICO as the law requires.
Cookies. We don't use advertising cookies, and we don't use third-party analytics cookies. The only cookies set when you visit our sites are these:
- Our sign-in cookie. Set by Ghost, the platform our sites run on, when you sign in to an account, so that the site remembers you are signed in.
__stripe_midand__stripe_sid. Set by Stripe, our payment provider, to prevent fraud on membership payments. Because TCT Magazine sells memberships, Stripe's script runs on every page, so these two are set across the site rather than only at the point of payment.
All of these are strictly necessary, which means they don't need your consent under the cookie rules. You can block them in your browser settings, but you will not then be able to sign in or pay.
Our signup form. When you submit our signup form, your browser keeps a copy of what you submitted for a short time, until it has reached us. It is then deleted. This is so your details are not lost if the connection drops while the form is being sent.
Website statistics. We count how many times pages are read using the statistics built into Ghost. These don't use cookies and don't identify you.
Children. Our content and services are for professionals. We don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.
Automated decisions. We don't make decisions about you by automated means that have legal or similarly significant effects. We do group subscribers by interests and engagement to send relevant content.
11. Your rights, complaints and contact
You have the right to:
- access the data we hold about you and get a copy
- correct data that's wrong or incomplete
- delete your data where we no longer have a good reason to keep it
- object to us using your data based on legitimate interests, including sharing with sponsors, and to stop direct marketing at any time
- restrict how we use your data while a concern is looked into
- move data you gave us to another organisation, where we rely on consent or contract
- withdraw consent at any time where we rely on it
To use any of these rights, email subscriptions@rapidnews.com. It's free. We'll reply within one month, or tell you if we need longer for a complex request. We may ask you to confirm your identity.
Complaints. If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, please tell us first at subscriptions@rapidnews.com and we'll look into it and respond. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.
12. Changes to this policy
We'll update this policy when the law or what we do changes, and post the new version here with its date. If a change significantly affects how we use your data, we'll tell you by email.
Last updated: 4 November 2026.