Darley Abbey Society – New Privacy Policy
The new law on data protection and privacy GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation) came into effect on 25th May 2018 and this has implications for how we handle your data and how we communicate with you in the future.
The Society already takes all reasonable steps to ensure that data collected about its members is treated confidentially. Your Committee believes that we comply with current data protection legislation.
However, as the law on how organisations handle personal data is changing we need to tell you how the Society handles your personal data and to explain how the changes will affect you and your relationship with the Society in the future.
Although the new legislation comes from the EU, the British Government has confirmed that application of the new rules will not be affected by the UK's proposed withdrawal from the EU and we are therefore obliged to implement the new rules.
In the UK, it is the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) which is responsible for enforcing data protection legislation. The ICO is publishing advice and guidance on how the new law will work and what steps organisations must take to prepare for the new legislation but the guidance is still not complete. We know, for example, that the EU law allows member states to take account of the specific needs of small and micro organisations. The Society is already exempt from some provisions of current data protection law but, at the time of writing, the ICO has not published any details of the exemptions that might apply for small organisations such as ours following the introduction of the latest changes so we are working on the basis that there will be no such exemptions. If that changes in the future, we will, of course, let you know.
Darley Abbey Society Privacy Policy
The Society takes all reasonable steps to ensure that the personal data it collects about its members is treated confidentially.
What is 'personal data'?
In this context, personal data is any information about you which allows us to identify you.
The Society keeps the following personal data about you:
Your personal data is stored on computers operated by members of the Society's council on a need to know basis: that means information is usually only held by the membership Secretary, the minutes Secretary, the Chairman and Treasurer but may also be accessed other committee members and any IT manager we may appoint.
Membership records are stored securely. Manual records are also kept securely. If we use a third party to store records they too must comply with the new data protection rules.
We keep the information for as long as we deem necessary within the remit of the legislation. Membership details and Gift Aid authorities will be retained for as long as you are a member. We may also need to keep financial information for a period of six financial years after the end of the financial year in which the transaction occurred so that we can respond to any enquiries from HMRC about our income or applications for Gift Aid.
We only use the information we keep to help us to administer the functions of a membership-based organisation and to notify you of our latest news, activities and events.
As we do now, we may occasionally also tell you about events organised by others that we think may be of interest to members (see below) but we will not pass on your information to third parties without your permission unless we are required to do so in law.
Your rights
You have a right to ask us to tell you what information we hold about you at any time.
You can do this by writing to us at our postal address as shown below or by emailing us at patricia.vaughan@darleyabbey.org.uk.
You also have the right at any time to correct any information we hold about you which is incorrect or out of date.
You have a right to cancel your membership at any time and ask for your details to be removed from our mailing lists. Please note that we may need to keep details of payments you have made to us (and what for) even after your membership ends as explained above.
How we will contact you
At the moment, when you join the Society, we add your name to our mailing lists and then keep you informed of the Society's activities. As a minimum, we will continue to contact you about your membership of the Society and to remind you of when your subscription is due.
In addition, we will continue to tell you about our events and activities unless you ask us to stop.
We will also continue to tell you about civic society related events organised by other organisations within the movement such as Civic Voice, the East Midlands Association of Civic and Amenity Societies (EMACS) and other civic societies in the local area.
We may also inform you about events and activities organised by other organisations in and around Derby where we think the events will be of interest.
We will use our judgement and discretion to decide which events not organised by us that we tell you about.
Please bear in mind that we will usually only contact you in the way we do now. This will usually be by email (if you have provided us with an email address) or by post.
People who have provided us with an email address will receive information from us more frequently than people who have only provided us with a postal address. (This is based primarily on the costs of printing and postage but can also be due to the fact that we sometimes receive information from others at very short notice and there isn't time to issue postal communications to members.)
Very rarely, we may need to contact you by telephone but this would usually only be to let you know about late changes to our events where an email or letter may not reach you in time.
Please keep a copy of the new policy for your records.