Privacy Policy

The UK Safer Internet Centre is a partnership of three leading charities – ChildnetInternet Watch Foundation (IWF) and South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL) – with a shared mission to make the internet a better place for children and young people.

The safety of your personal information is something that we take very seriously and we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. You may have heard of the General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR); if you haven’t, it is a change in the legislation regarding how personal data can be stored and used and is effective from 25th May 2018. This updated Privacy Policy has been written in accordance with GDPR.

Each organisation within the partnership (Childnet, IWF and SWGfL) may publish its own data protection and privacy documentation, which we advise you to review. As we are a partnership of three charities, we may disclose your personal information to any member of this partnership, which includes any subsidiaries or holding companies as defined in section 1159 of the UK Companies Act 2006, should such subsidiaries or holding companies exist.

This Privacy Policy explains how we use, process and protect your personal information for the purposes of communications, marketing and delivery of certain services. This includes data which we gather from you for email updates that we send, the use of our website and at events run by us (or on our behalf) which you attend. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal information and how we will treat it.

If you have any questions about what we have set out below then please contact us at privacy@saferinternet.org.uk

How do we collect your personal information?

Personal information is anything that can identify you, for example your name, email address, how you found out about our services, or how you’ve accessed our sites. We collect information about you if you have:

  • consented to our newsletters
  • accessed our website
  • attended one of our events
  • signed up as a supporter
  • taken part in research, evaluation or a survey
  • contacted our Professionals Online Safety Helpline (POSH) for support with an online safety issue

In this policy we will go through each of these areas and explain how we collect your personal information and use it. For POSH we will provide a summary.

We will also go through:

  • how we share your information with other organisations
  • ​your rights
  • if you have any complaints
  • how to contact us

If you have consented to newsletters

When you subscribe to newsletters or emails from us, we require:

  • your name
  • your email address
  • in some cases, information about your organisation and role

We will collect this information as part of your subscription to our mailing lists.

A subscription to our mailing lists means that you will automatically receive email updates about UK Safer Internet Centre related activities. We will not email you unnecessarily or for a purpose that you have not agreed to.

Our use and storage of personal information for email marketing and communications is based on your consent for us to do so. Therefore you will only receive emails and other information that you have consented to receive. We make sure that our consent process is double-opt in, which means that your consent is validated before we send any communications to you.

You may withdraw your consent at any time by using the ‘unsubscribe’ link on any of our newsletters.

If you unsubscribe from our emails or withdraw your consent for us to use your personal information in this way, we will retain your information within our systems to prevent emails from being sent to you by us. We will retain this information for one year after you have unsubscribed. 

We use external platforms to manage our email marketing and communications. Such platforms may be located outside the EEA, however any such platforms shall be compliant with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. The details of MailChimp and Constant Contact, two platforms that we use, can be found at the links above.

Our emails may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of third parties. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

If you have accessed our website

Accessing our website

For security purposes we do collect some personal information about you, for example your IP address. This is so that we can block someone if they try and get into our site.  We will store this information for six months. 

Browsing our website

Whilst using our website we collect anonymous information about your browsing session to help us improve our website. We are committed to ensuring that this information is collected, stored and used in an ethical way which observes UK data protection legislation.

We use a tool called Google Analytics to collect this data. All of the data is stored securely on Google’s servers. In order to track your browsing across sessions, Google analytics will place a ‘cookie’ on your machine (a small text file that websites use to track and remember information across several browsing sessions). You can tell your web browser not to accept cookies if you don’t your data to be collected in this way (refer to your web browser’s help file for more information).

For further details on Google Analytics, and the Google Analytics privacy policy, please visit the Google Analytics website.

You can read our Cookie Policy here.

The kind of data we collect includes the pages that you visit on the UK Safer Internet Centre website, the number of times that you visit them, your operating system, your screen resolution, the version of your web browser and the country you’re visiting from.

This data helps us:

  • To plan for future site developments
  • To identify and better promote our most popular content, and likewise, our less popular content
  • To gauge the success of our campaigns and resources
  • To identify periods of heavy site usage, to help forecast when is best to perform maintenance work on our server.

Giving us your information via our website

Sometimes we may ask you to provide us your personal information on our website if you are subscribing to services advertised via our website, completing surveys or evaluation via our website, posting material or requesting further services. When you use these  elements of our website, we may require:

  • your name
  • your email address
  • in some cases, your postal address
  • in some cases, information about your organisation and role

We will use this information:

  • to carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us
  • to notify you of changes to our services, and to provide you with support in using our services. If you contact us for support in using our website, and we may keep records of such contact.
  • to provide you with information or services that you may have requested

The use and storage of any personal information within the website will be based on legitimate interests. The legitimate interests we are pursuing are the operation of our website and provision of our services.

We will retain this information only for as long as we require it for these purposes.

We will store information you provide to us on our secure servers or on secure servers provided by our service providers. All data will be stored within the EEA or with service providers that are compliant with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework.

Security of our website

This website was designed, and is maintained by Contra, an independent digital agency who take the security of any personal data processed on their websites seriously. Each member of the partnership is equally committed to information security and is responsible for their own systems to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and security of any personal data they process. Do consult their respective Privacy Policies for more information.

Linking to other websites

Our website may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of third parties. You can also share articles or features of our website through other sites such as Facebook or Twitter. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

If you have attended one of our events

When you attend one of our events, we require:

  • your name
  • your email address
  • in some cases, your postal address
  • in some cases, information about your organisation and role 
  • in some cases, payment information

We will collect this information as part of your confirmation of attending an event.

Our use and storage of personal information in relation to events is based on your consent for us to do so.

We use this personal information to effectively organise and administer the event. Personal information will only be shared with other organisations where it is necessary to do so for this purpose. This includes, for example, providing the names of attendees to venues we are using.

We will retain this information only for as long as we require it for these purposes.

We may use external platforms to manage some of our events. Such platforms may be located outside the EEA, however any such platforms shall be compliant with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. Eventbrite and RegOnline are two of the platforms that we use.

If you attend our events as part of the group of presenters, sponsors or speakers, we may note your involvement in our emails relating to the event and on communication platforms, including social media. Such platforms may continue to store and use personal information according to their own processes.

If you have signed up as a supporter

If you have signed up as an official supporter of one of our activities, for example Safer Internet Day, we will ask you for:

  • Name
  • Email address
  • Information and location of your organisation and your role
  • Logo

We only publish your organisation and logo with your consent and in relation to the activity or event you have said you are supporting. We will not use any of the above information for any other purposes unless you have consented to it.

After one year we will scramble the personal information associated with your registration, meaning that only the information that is posted publicly with your consent will remain.

If you take part in research, evaluation or a survey

We may ask you to evaluate our services, website or activities related to the work of the UK Safer Internet Centre. This means we may ask you for your personal information such as:

  • Name
  • Address
  • Information about your organisation and your role

We will only contact you about your responses if you have consented to being contacted. All results that we publish will be anonymised unless you consent to be identified for any particularly reason (for example you want to provide a quote in support of our work).

We need to store research consent forms for 10 years in order to ensure that we can prove that you have given consent to take part.

If you contact the Professionals Online Safety Helpline (POSH)

If you contact POSH, we will require:

  • your name
  • your contact details (including email address, telephone number and in some cases, postal address)
  • your gender
  • in some cases, information about your organisation and role
  • information regarding the issue you are approaching us about (including, for example, the nature of the issue and the platform that the issue occurred on (including any URLs and screenshots)).

We require this information in order to provide the support to you that you require. You can choose not to provide this information, but this will limit our ability to provide support to you.

Our use and storage of personal information in relation to POSH cases is based on your consent.

We use information from our call management system to produce anonymised reports, including:

  • The number of calls received
  • The number of service users supported
  • Call progress indicators
  • Issue type indicators
  • Case studies to highlight specific trends

We may use external platforms to manage some of our events. Such platforms may be located outside the EEA, however any such platforms shall be compliant with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. See here for details of Zendesk, one of the platforms that we use.

How do we share your information with other companies or organisations?

We do not provide any personal information to third parties for commercial purposes, so we will never rent or sell your personal information to other organisations.

If you have given us permission to contact you, we may pass on your details to third party companies and/or individuals to perform certain functions on our behalf (including delivering events, sending postal mail or email, academic/research projects related to our work, delivering certain aspects of our service, and processing card payments). If they require access to your personal information then we will make sure that:

  • the third party agrees to use it only for the agreed function(s) and not for any other purposes
  • the third party agrees to process the personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy and as permitted by the UK’s data protection legislation

We may also share your personal information with a third party if:

  • it is required or authorised to do so by law
  • it is necessary to enforce or apply our terms and conditions and/or other agreements; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of UKSIC, our customers, or others
  • it is required to arrange attendance at an event or similar benefit
  • we have your consent to do so

Your Rights

Where we use or store personal information relating to you, you have the following rights:

  • the right to be informed how your personal information is being collected, used or stored by us. This Privacy Policy advises you of this.
  • the right to access the personal information we hold which relates to you
  • the right to object to direct marketing by unsubscribing from it
  • the right to object to processing carried out on the basis of legitimate interests
  • the right to erasure of information we use or hold that relates to you
  • the right to data portability, so you can obtain or reuse your personal data for your own purposes across different services from one IT service to another in a safe and secure way
  • the right to have your data changed if its inaccurate or incomplete
  • the right to have your data restricted or blocked from our processing

These rights apply to certain situations, but do not apply to others. The Information Commissioner’s Office’s guidance on each of the rights can be found here. If you do want to exercise any of these rights then please contact us at privacy@saferinternet.org.uk.

Personal data breaches

We take any suggestion of a personal data breach seriously and will fully investigate it. As per the requirements of GDPR, we will alert the ICO within 72 hours if we believe a breach has occurred, and depending on the circumstances, also contact those who may be impacted.

You can learn more about the obligations of organisations regarding personal data breaches on the ICO’s website here.

Where we feel it necessary in the event of a breach, we may employ an external independent Data Protection Officer to investigate the matter on our behalf.

Complaints

If you are concerned about any aspect of our processing or personal information, please contact us at privacy@saferinternet.org.uk

Should we fail to resolve your concerns, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Contacting Us

Please read this notice carefully and contact us if you have any queries by emailing us at: privacy@saferinternet.org.uk

Changing this policy

We reserve the right to change this Privacy Notice from time to time and suggest therefore that you review it periodically. We will make sure that if we do change this policy then it will be in accordance with GDPR.

This version of the Privacy Notice was last updated on 4th June 2018.

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