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Purposes
Features
Partners
We and our 944 advertising partners process your personal data using technology such as cookies in order to serve advertising, analyse our traffic and deliver customised experiences for you. You have a choice in who uses your data and for what purposes.
Some partners do not ask for your consent to process your data, instead, they rely on their legitimate business interest. View our list of partners to see the purposes they believe they have legitimate interest for and how you can object to it.
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Purposes
Decide how you want your data to be used based on the purposes. Each purpose has a description so you know how we and our partners use your data.
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You can set your consent preferences and determine how you want your data to be used based on the purposes below. Each purpose has a description so that you know how we and our partners use your data.
Cookies, device or similar online identifiers (e.g. login-based identifiers, randomly assigned identifiers, network based identifiers) together with other information (e.g. browser type and information, language, screen size, supported technologies etc.) can be stored or read on your device to recognise it each time it connects to an app or to a website, for one or several of the purposes presented here.
Examples:
Most purposes explained in this notice rely on the storage or accessing of information from your device when you use an app or visit a website. For example, a vendor or publisher might need to store a cookie on your device during your first visit on a website, to be able to recognise your device during your next visits (by accessing this cookie each time).
Vendors 725
Advertising presented to you on this service can be based on limited data, such as the website or app you are using, your non-precise location, your device type or which content you are (or have been) interacting with (for example, to limit the number of times an ad is presented to you).
Examples:
A car manufacturer wants to promote its electric vehicles to environmentally conscious users living in the city after office hours. The advertising is presented on a page with related content (such as an article on climate change actions) after 6:30 p.m. to users whose non-precise location suggests that they are in an urban zone.
A large producer of watercolour paints wants to carry out an online advertising campaign for its latest watercolour range, diversifying its audience to reach as many amateur and professional artists as possible and avoiding showing the ad next to mismatched content (for instance, articles about how to paint your house). The number of times that the ad has been presented to you is detected and limited, to avoid presenting it too often.
Vendors 676
Information about your activity on this service (such as forms you submit, content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (for example, information from your previous activity on this service and other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (that might include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present advertising that appears more relevant based on your possible interests by this and other entities.
Examples:
If you read several articles about the best bike accessories to buy, this information could be used to create a profile about your interest in bike accessories. Such a profile may be used or improved later on, on the same or a different website or app to present you with advertising for a particular bike accessory brand. If you also look at a configurator for a vehicle on a luxury car manufacturer website, this information could be combined with your interest in bikes to refine your profile and make an assumption that you are interested in luxury cycling gear.
An apparel company wishes to promote its new line of high-end baby clothes. It gets in touch with an agency that has a network of clients with high income customers (such as high-end supermarkets) and asks the agency to create profiles of young parents or couples who can be assumed to be wealthy and to have a new child, so that these can later be used to present advertising within partner apps based on those profiles.
Vendors 536
Advertising presented to you on this service can be based on your advertising profiles, which can reflect your activity on this service or other websites or apps (like the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects.
Examples:
An online retailer wants to advertise a limited sale on running shoes. It wants to target advertising to users who previously looked at running shoes on its mobile app. Tracking technologies might be used to recognise that you have previously used the mobile app to consult running shoes, in order to present you with the corresponding advertisement on the app.
A profile created for personalised advertising in relation to a person having searched for bike accessories on a website can be used to present the relevant advertisement for bike accessories on a mobile app of another organisation.
Vendors 534
Information about your activity on this service (for instance, forms you submit, non-advertising content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (such as your previous activity on this service or other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (which might for example include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present content that appears more relevant based on your possible interests, such as by adapting the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find content that matches your interests.
Examples:
You read several articles on how to build a treehouse on a social media platform. This information might be added to a profile to mark your interest in content related to outdoors as well as do-it-yourself guides (with the objective of allowing the personalisation of content, so that for example you are presented with more blog posts and articles on treehouses and wood cabins in the future).
You have viewed three videos on space exploration across different TV apps. An unrelated news platform with which you have had no contact builds a profile based on that viewing behaviour, marking space exploration as a topic of possible interest for other videos.
Vendors 237
Content presented to you on this service can be based on your content personalisation profiles, which can reflect your activity on this or other services (for instance, the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects. This can for example be used to adapt the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find (non-advertising) content that matches your interests.
Examples:
You read articles on vegetarian food on a social media platform and then use the cooking app of an unrelated company. The profile built about you on the social media platform will be used to present you vegetarian recipes on the welcome screen of the cooking app.
You have viewed three videos about rowing across different websites. An unrelated video sharing platform will recommend five other videos on rowing that may be of interest to you when you use your TV app, based on a profile built about you when you visited those different websites to watch online videos.
Vendors 212
Information regarding which advertising is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used to determine how well an advert has worked for you or other users and whether the goals of the advertising were reached. For instance, whether you saw an ad, whether you clicked on it, whether it led you to buy a product or visit a website, etc. This is very helpful to understand the relevance of advertising campaigns.
Examples:
You have clicked on an advertisement about a “black Friday” discount by an online shop on the website of a publisher and purchased a product. Your click will be linked to this purchase. Your interaction and that of other users will be measured to know how many clicks on the ad led to a purchase.
You are one of very few to have clicked on an advertisement about an “international appreciation day” discount by an online gift shop within the app of a publisher. The publisher wants to have reports to understand how often a specific ad placement within the app, and notably the “international appreciation day” ad, has been viewed or clicked by you and other users, in order to help the publisher and its partners (such as agencies) optimise ad placements.
Vendors 785
Information regarding which content is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used to determine whether the (non-advertising) content e.g. reached its intended audience and matched your interests. For instance, whether you read an article, watch a video, listen to a podcast or look at a product description, how long you spent on this service and the web pages you visit etc. This is very helpful to understand the relevance of (non-advertising) content that is shown to you.
Examples:
You have read a blog post about hiking on a mobile app of a publisher and followed a link to a recommended and related post. Your interactions will be recorded as showing that the initial hiking post was useful to you and that it was successful in interesting you in the related post. This will be measured to know whether to produce more posts on hiking in the future and where to place them on the home screen of the mobile app.
You were presented a video on fashion trends, but you and several other users stopped watching after 30 seconds. This information is then used to evaluate the right length of future videos on fashion trends.
Vendors 388
Reports can be generated based on the combination of data sets (like user profiles, statistics, market research, analytics data) regarding your interactions and those of other users with advertising or (non-advertising) content to identify common characteristics (for instance, to determine which target audiences are more receptive to an ad campaign or to certain contents).
Examples:
The owner of an online bookstore wants commercial reporting showing the proportion of visitors who consulted and left its site without buying, or consulted and bought the last celebrity autobiography of the month, as well as the average age and the male/female distribution of each category. Data relating to your navigation on its site and to your personal characteristics is then used and combined with other such data to produce these statistics.
An advertiser wants to better understand the type of audience interacting with its adverts. It calls upon a research institute to compare the characteristics of users who interacted with the ad with typical attributes of users of similar platforms, across different devices. This comparison reveals to the advertiser that its ad audience is mainly accessing the adverts through mobile devices and is likely in the 45-60 age range.
Vendors 493
Information about your activity on this service, such as your interaction with ads or content, can be very helpful to improve products and services and to build new products and services based on user interactions, the type of audience, etc. This specific purpose does not include the development or improvement of user profiles and identifiers.
Examples:
A technology platform working with a social media provider notices a growth in mobile app users, and sees based on their profiles that many of them are connecting through mobile connections. It uses a new technology to deliver ads that are formatted for mobile devices and that are low-bandwidth, to improve their performance.
An advertiser is looking for a way to display ads on a new type of consumer device. It collects information regarding the way users interact with this new kind of device to determine whether it can build a new mechanism for displaying advertising on this type of device.
Vendors 586
Content presented to you on this service can be based on limited data, such as the website or app you are using, your non-precise location, your device type, or which content you are (or have been) interacting with (for example, to limit the number of times a video or an article is presented to you).
Examples:
A travel magazine has published an article on its website about the new online courses proposed by a language school, to improve travelling experiences abroad. The school’s blog posts are inserted directly at the bottom of the page, and selected on the basis of your non-precise location (for instance, blog posts explaining the course curriculum for different languages than the language of the country you are situated in).
A sports news mobile app has started a new section of articles covering the most recent football games. Each article includes videos hosted by a separate streaming platform showcasing the highlights of each match. If you fast-forward a video, this information may be used to select a shorter video to play next.
Vendors 145
Special Purposes
These purposes are essential to the delivery of advertising. You cannot opt out of these purposes.
Your data can be used to monitor for and prevent unusual and possibly fraudulent activity (for example, regarding advertising, ad clicks by bots), and ensure systems and processes work properly and securely. It can also be used to correct any problems you, the publisher or the advertiser may encounter in the delivery of content and ads and in your interaction with them.
Examples:
An advertising intermediary delivers ads from various advertisers to its network of partnering websites. It notices a large increase in clicks on ads relating to one advertiser, and uses data regarding the source of the clicks to determine that 80% of the clicks come from bots rather than humans.
Certain information (like an IP address or device capabilities) is used to ensure the technical compatibility of the content or advertising, and to facilitate the transmission of the content or ad to your device.
Examples:
Clicking on a link in an article might normally send you to another page or part of the article. To achieve this, 1°) your browser sends a request to a server linked to the website, 2°) the server answers back (“here is the article you asked for”), using technical information automatically included in the request sent by your device, to properly display the information / images that are part of the article you asked for. Technically, such exchange of information is necessary to deliver the content that appears on your screen.
The choices you make regarding the purposes and entities listed in this notice are saved and made available to those entities in the form of digital signals (such as a string of characters). This is necessary in order to enable both this service and those entities to respect such choices.
Examples:
When you visit a website and are offered a choice between consenting to the use of profiles for personalised advertising or not consenting, the choice you make is saved and made available to advertising providers, so that advertising presented to you respects that choice.
Features
Features tell you the techniques and types of data our partners use to carry out a purpose. Some features can be blocked by privacy settings on your device. If you reject all purposes, you can limit how features are used by our partners.
Information about your activity on this service may be matched and combined with other information relating to you and originating from various sources (for instance your activity on a separate online service, your use of a loyalty card in-store, or your answers to a survey), in support of the purposes explained in this notice.
In support of the purposes explained in this notice, your device might be considered as likely linked to other devices that belong to you or your household (for instance because you are logged in to the same service on both your phone and your computer, or because you may use the same Internet connection on both devices).
Your device might be distinguished from other devices based on information it automatically sends when accessing the Internet (for instance, the IP address of your Internet connection or the type of browser you are using) in support of the purposes exposed in this notice.
Special Features
These features and the data associated with them, can only be used with your consent.
With your acceptance, your precise location (within a radius of less than 500 metres) may be used in support of the purposes explained in this notice.
With your acceptance, certain characteristics specific to your device might be requested and used to distinguish it from other devices (such as the installed fonts or plugins, the resolution of your screen) in support of the purposes explained in this notice.
See the partners we work with below. Expand each one to see how they process your data. You can object to legitimate interest processing per vendor.
Vendors who are part of the IAB TCF
Partners will only use your data in line with the purposes you have allowed, using the features declared.
To give consent, choose ‘Accept all’ or tick the box next to the partner. To remove consent, untick the box next to the partner.
To reject legitimate interest, untick the relevant legitimate interest box.
To reject legitimate interest and remove consent for all partners, choose ‘Reject all’.
To manage partners we work with outside the Internet Advertising Bureau framework who are not in this list, go to Google and Amazon to update your settings.
See the partners we work with and how they use your data:
SERU, Topographical and B1 English Language Requirements
Request ID: FOI-0168-2425 Date published: 13 May 2024
You asked
I will appreciate if you resolve the following questions for me.
1. As of today how many private hire drivers are in London? How many drivers have undertaken the SERU assessment, how many of them passed the test and what is the pass percentage? How many more drivers are still need to pass their SERU assessment?
2. Since October 2021 how many private hire drivers and applicants have undertaken the B1 Speaking and Listening test, how many passed the test and what is the success percentage? How many more drivers and applicants need to the test?
3. Since 1st January 2023 to date, how many applicants for London Private Hire Driver Licence undertook the topographical skills assessment, how many passed and what is the pass percentage?
I will appreciate your response.
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-0168-2425
Thank you for your request which we received on 15 April 2024, asking for information about private hire driver assessments.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) and our Information Access Policy. I can confirm that we hold some of the information you require. You asked:
As of today how many private hire drivers are in London? How many drivers have undertaken the SERU assessment, how many of them passed the test and what is the pass percentage? How many more drivers are still needed to pass their SERU assessment?
As of the week ending on Tuesday, 7May 2024, there were 106,229 licensed private hire drivers in London. We regularly publish this, in addition to other licensing information, on the TfL website.
As of Monday, 29 April 2024, we delivered 76,965 safety, equality and regulatory understanding requirement (SERU) assessments. A total of 55, 874 candidates have passed the SERU assessment, please note that applicants may take the SERU assessment more than once. The overall pass rate is 73 per cent.
There are 58,376 licensed private hire drivers who are still required to pass the SERU assessment. In January we provided an update on the SERU and English Language Requirement for private hire drivers.
Since October 2021 how many private hire drivers and applicants have undertaken the B1 Speaking and Listening test, how many passed the test and what is the success percentage? How many more drivers and applicants need to the test?
As of Monday, 29 April 2024, we delivered 33,731 English speaking and listening assessments. A total of 30,816 candidates passed the assessment within this period – noting that candidates are permitted to take the assessment more than once. The overall pass rate is 91 per cent.
There are 18,065 licensed private hire drivers who are still required to complete the assessment.
Since 1st January 2023 to date, how many applicants for London Private Hire Driver Licence undertook the topographical skills assessment, how many passed and what is the pass percentage?
Between 1 January 2023 and 29 April 2024, we have delivered 31,947 topographical skills assessments. A total of 16,897 candidates passed the assessment within this period – noting that candidates are permitted to take the assessment more than once. The overall pass rate for this period is 51 per cent.
Full details of the requirements to become licensed as a private hire driver in London, can be found on the TfL website.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright.
