The security and privacy of your personal information are very important to Action for Family Carers. We promise to respect any personal data you share with us and keep it safe. We aim to be clear when we collect your data and not do anything you wouldn’t reasonably expect. We will only collect and use personal data in ways that are described here, and in a way that is consistent with our obligations and your rights under the law.
1. Information About Us
Action for Family Carers:
A registered charity registered in England under charity number 1127164.
Registered address:
Brickhouse Farm, Poulton Close, Maldon, CM9 6NG.
Data Protection Officer contact details:
Data Projection Officer
Action for Family Carers
Telephone number: 0300 7708090
Postal address: Brickhouse Farm, Poulton Close, Maldon, CM9 6NG.
2. What Does This Notice Cover?
This Privacy Information explains how we use your personal data: how it is collected, how it is held, and how it is processed. It also explains your rights under the law relating to your personal data.
3. What Is Personal Data?
Personal data is defined by the General Data Protection Regulation (EU Regulation 2016/679) (the “GDPR”) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (collectively, “the Data Protection Legislation”) as ‘any information relating to an identifiable person who can be directly or indirectly identified in particular by reference to an identifier’.
Personal data is, in simpler terms, any information about you that enables you to be identified. Personal data covers obvious information such as your name and contact details, but it also covers less obvious information such as identification numbers, electronic location data, and other online identifiers.
The personal data that we use is set out in Part 5, below.
4. What Are My Rights?
Under the Data Protection Legislation, you have the following rights, which we will always work to uphold:
a. The right to be informed about our collection and use of your personal data. This Privacy Notice should tell you everything you need to know, but you can always contact us to find out more or to ask any questions using the details in Part 11.
b. The right to access the personal data we hold about you. Part 10 will tell you how to do this.
c. The right to have your personal data rectified if any of your personal data held by us is inaccurate or incomplete. Please contact us using the details in Part 11 to find out more.
d. The right to be forgotten, i.e. the right to ask us to delete or otherwise dispose of any of your personal data that we hold. Please contact us using the details in Part 11 to find out more.
e. The right to restrict (i.e. prevent) the processing of your personal data.
f. The right to object to us using your personal data for a particular purpose or purposes.
g. The right to withdraw consent. This means that, if we are relying on your consent as the legal basis for using your personal data, you are free to withdraw that consent at any time.
h. The right to data portability. This means that, if you have provided personal data to us directly, we are using it with your consent or for the performance of a contract, and that data is processed using automated means, you can ask us for a copy of that personal data to re-use with another service or business in many cases.
i. Rights relating to automated decision-making and profiling. We do not use your personal data in this way.
For more information about our use of your personal data or exercising your rights as outlined above, please contact us using the details provided in Part 11.
It is important that your personal data is kept accurate and up to date. If any of the personal data we hold about you changes, please keep us informed as long as we have that data.
Further information about your rights can also be obtained from the Information Commissioner’s Office or your local Citizens Advice.
If you have any cause for complaint about our use of your personal data, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office. We would welcome the opportunity to resolve your concerns ourselves, however, so please contact us first, using the details in Part 11.
5. What personal data do we collect?
Depending upon your use of our Site and Services, we may collect and hold some or all of the personal and non-personal data set out in the table below.
| Data Collected |
| Identity Information including name, address, date of birth |
| Contact information including email address, phone number, emergency contacts |
| Profile information including medical details, doctor, family detail, education, language spoken, marital status, sexuality, religion, age, ethnicity, gender, information relating to you and your health, dietary requirements and next of kin to keep you safe |
| Data from third parties including Local Authorities, NHS and other charities. |
| Identity information including name, address date of birth for charitable donors and publicly available information e.g., listed directorships on Companies House, trusteeships, or support of other charities. |
| If you volunteer for us or apply for a job with us, information necessary for us to process these applications and assess your suitability (this may include documents as proof of your identity) |
| If you have left us a legacy, any information regarding next of kin with which you may have provided us to administer this |
| Photographs and films |
6. How we collect information about you
We collect information about you in different ways including;
Directly: you may give us your information to benefit from one of our services, sign up as a volunteer, tell us your story, make a donation or communicate with us. It also includes when you give us feedback or contact us for any other reason. The information may be provided by you through a form on our website, in an email, telephone call or by sending us something in the post.
Indirectly: we may receive personal data about you from third parties (e.g. a referral from a professional) and, for volunteers/staff, through DBS checks.
Your information may also be shared with us by fundraising sites like Just Giving or by independent event organisers that are organising places at fundraising challenge events (for example, Global Adventure Challenges). We may collect information from event platforms such as Eventbrite and payment processing providers such as Stripe, Paypal and others. You should check their privacy policy when you provide your information to them to understand fully how they will process your data.
Depending on your settings or the privacy policies for other online services like Facebook or X (previously Twitter), you might give us permission to access information from those accounts or services. The information we get from those services depends on your settings, so you should regularly check them.
Automated Technologies: we automatically collect technical data about the devices, browsing patterns and actions of visitors to our website.
We collect this data by using cookies and other similar technologies.
Our website does not store any information that would, on its own, allow us to identify individual users of this service without their permission. We collect non-personal information such as;
- IP addresses (the location of the computer on the internet)
- The pages you visit
- How long you spend on each page
- How you got to the site
- What you click on while you’re visiting the site.
This helps us to determine how many people use our site, how many people visit on a regular basis, the typical user paths through the site and how popular our pages are. This information doesn’t tell us anything about who you are or where you live. It simply allows us to monitor and improve our service and contribute to our social impact.
We reserve the right to attempt to identify and track any individual who is reasonably suspected of trying to gain unauthorised access to computer systems or resources operating as part of our web services.
7. How Do You Use My Personal Data?
We will only use your personal data to the extent the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data on the following legal bases:
- where we need to perform a contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you;
- where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests; or
- where we need to comply with a legal obligation (e.g. providing information for a criminal case).
We may process your personal data for more than one lawful basis at a time, depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your data.
These legal bases may allow us to use your personal data for the following purposes:
| What we do | Our Lawful Basis |
| Supplying our services to you. | Consent and contract |
| Personalising and tailoring our services for you. | Consent and contract |
| Communicating with you. | Consent and legitimate interest |
| Supplying you with information by email and post that you have opted-in-to (you may opt-out at any time by contacting us.) | Consent |
| Working with other agencies to provide support | Consent |
| Administering your donations or support your fundraising, including processing gift aid | Consent and legitimate interest |
| Receive and respond to feedback about our services (including if you make a complaint). | Consent and legitimate interest |
| Supporting you to volunteer or work with us | Consent |
Marketing & updates
With your permission and/or where permitted by law, we may also use your personal data for marketing purposes, which may include contacting you by email and telephone and text message and post with information, news, and updates on our services. You will not be sent any unlawful marketing or spam. We will always work to fully protect your rights and comply with our obligations under the Data Protection Legislation and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, and you will always have the opportunity to opt-out. We do not share your personal data with third parties for marketing purposes.
Sharing your story
You may choose to tell us about your experiences of caring to help further our work. This may include sharing photographs, videos and also sensitive information related to your health and family life in addition to your biographical and contact information.
If we have your written consent to do so, we may share this information at public events, in promotional materials, on our website or in documents such as our annual report.
Withdrawing consent
You may withdraw this consent at any time in which case we will not make any future use of the details you have shared with us (however, your story will continue to be included in materials and publications already in circulation).
We will only use your personal data for the purpose(s) for which it was originally collected unless we reasonably believe that another purpose is compatible with that or those original purpose(s) and need to use your personal data for that purpose. If we do use your personal data in this way and you wish us to explain how the new purpose is compatible with the original, please contact us using the details in Part 11.
If we need to use your personal data for a purpose that is unrelated to, or incompatible with, the purpose(s) for which it was originally collected, we will inform you and explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.
8. How Long Will You Keep My Personal Data?
We only retain your personal data for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for and we review our retention periods for personal information on a regular basis. We are legally required to hold some types of information to fulfil our statutory obligations (for example the collection of Gift Aid). We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity or for the length of grant period with a funder or contract with Essex County Council plus any additional retention period requested by the local authority or funder. We may retain your personal data for a longer period in the event of a complaint.
9. How and Where Do You Store or Transfer My Personal Data?
We will only store or transfer your personal data within the UK. This means that it will be fully protected under the Data Protection Legislation.
The security of your personal data is essential to us, and to protect your data, we take a number of important measures, including the following:
-
- limiting access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors, and other third parties with a legitimate need to know and ensuring that they are subject to duties of confidentiality;
- procedures for dealing with data breaches (the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure of, or access to, your personal data) including notifying you and/or the Information Commissioner’s Office where we arelegally required to do so;
- Information Technology controls including firewall, anti-malware, user access control, vulnerability assessment and user training.
10. Do You Share My Personal Data?
|
Recipient |
Activity Carried Out |
Location |
|
Your local authority or council, who commission us to provide the service, with whom we are a joint data controller |
We provide data in order to monitor and review our contracts. |
Your local authority. |
|
Our service delivery partners. |
We provide information to the organisations we are formally partnered with to deliver a service so they can deliver part of that service to you |
You will be advised of any organisations we are formally partnered with. |
|
Other charities or agencies that provide support |
Your contact information which will only be passed on with your consent |
You will be advised of any organisation that we refer you to. |
If any of your personal data is shared with a third party, as described above, we will take steps to ensure that your personal data is handled safely, securely, and in accordance with your rights, our obligations, and the third party’s obligations under the law, as described above in Part 8.
In some limited circumstances, we may be legally required to share certain personal data, which might include yours, if we are involved in legal proceedings or complying with legal obligations, a court order, or the instructions of a government authority.
11. How Can I Access My Personal Data?
If you want to know what personal data we have about you, you can ask us for details of that personal data and for a copy of it (where any such personal data is held). This is known as a “subject access request”.
All subject access requests should be made in writing and sent to the email or postal addresses shown in Part 11. To make this as easy as possible for you, a Subject Access Request Form is available for you to use. You do not have to use this form, but it is the easiest way to tell us everything we need to know to respond to your request as quickly as possible.
There is not normally any charge for a subject access request. If your request is ‘manifestly unfounded or excessive’ (for example, if you make repetitive requests) a fee may be charged to cover our administrative costs in responding.
We will respond to your subject access request within one month of receiving it. Normally, we aim to provide a complete response, including a copy of your personal data within that time. In some cases, however, particularly if your request is more complex, more time may be required up to a maximum of three months from the date we receive your request. You will be kept fully informed of our progress.
12. How Do I Contact You?
To contact us about anything to do with your personal data and data protection, including to make a subject access request, please use the following details:
Data Protection Officer
Action for Family Carers
Telephone number: 0300 7708090
Postal address: Brickhouse Farm, Poulton Close, Maldon, CM9 6NG.
13. Changes to this Privacy Notice
We may change this Privacy Notice from time to time. This may be necessary, for example, if the law changes, or if we change our business in a way that affects personal data protection.
Any changes will be made available on our website This Privacy Notice was last updated 13th March 2024.