Who we are
Our website address is: https://southlandsmethodisttrust.org.uk.
Our privacy policy
1. Introduction
The privacy of our website visitors and our contacts is very important to us, and we are committed to safeguarding it. This policy explains what we will do with your personal information when you contact us and when you use our website.
Consenting to our use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this policy when you first visit our website permits us to use cookies every time you visit our website.
Specific data protection policies apply to employees, job applicants, self-employed consultants, trustees and grant applicants/recipients. Please refer to the other policies for those cases.
2. Collecting personal information
The following types of personal information may be collected, stored, and used:
- information, such as your name and email address, that you enter in order to contact us;
- any other personal information that you send to us.
Website-specific:
- information about your computer including your IP address, geographical location, browser type and version, and operating system;
- information about your visits to and use of this website including the referral source, length of visit, page views, and website navigation paths;
- information, such as your name and email address, that you enter in order to contact us via our contact form;
- information that you enter while using the services on our website;
- information that is generated while using our website, including when, how often, and under what circumstances you use it;
- information contained in any communications that you send to us by email or through our website, including its communication content and metadata;
Before you disclose to us the personal information of another person, you must obtain that person’s consent to both the disclosure and the processing of that personal information in accordance with this policy.
3. ‘Contact Us’ form on the website
Your connection to this website is secured via HTTPS and we use an SSL Certificate to warrant the secure connection between your web browser and this website. This helps to prevent third parties viewing your data whilst it is in transit to this site.
When you submit an enquiry or send a message via our contact form, the information you enter is held on this website momentarily whilst it is being forwarded to us. Once the message is despatched to us, the information is deleted from the website. Thus your information is not stored for any longer than is necessary to perform this function.
The message is despatched to us via email with a secure connection to the sending server and our receiving email also employs a secure connection.
4. Using your personal information
Personal information submitted to us through our website or via other means will be used for the purposes specified in this policy or on the relevant pages of the website. We may use your personal information for the following:
- administering our website and business;
- sending you email responses that you have specifically requested;
- sending you our email newsletter, if you have requested it (you can inform us at any time if you no longer require the newsletter);
- dealing with inquiries and complaints made by or about you relating to our website;
- keeping our website secure and prevent fraud; and
- other uses.
We will not supply your personal information to any third party for their or any other third party’s direct marketing.
5. Disclosing personal information
We may disclose your personal information to any of our employees, officers, professional advisers, as reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this policy.
We may disclose your personal information:
- to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
- in connection with any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings;
- in order to establish, exercise, or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk);
- to any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of that personal information where, in our reasonable opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal information.
Except as provided in this policy, we will not provide your personal information to third parties.
6. Retaining personal information
This Section 6 sets out our data retention policies and procedure, which are designed to help ensure that we comply with our legal obligations regarding the retention and deletion of personal information.
Personal information that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.
Notwithstanding the other provisions of this Section 6, we will retain documents (including electronic documents) containing personal data:
- to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
- if we believe that the documents may be relevant to any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings; and
- in order to establish, exercise, or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk).
7. Security of your personal information
We will take reasonable technical and organizational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse, or alteration of your personal information.
We will store all the personal information you provide on our secure servers.
You acknowledge that the transmission of information over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet.
8. Amendments
We may update this policy from time to time by publishing a new version on our website. You should check this page occasionally to ensure you understand any changes to this policy. We may notify you of changes to this policy by email.
9. Your rights
You may instruct us to provide you with any personal information we hold about you; provision of such information will be subject to the supply of appropriate evidence of your identity for this purpose; we will usually accept a photocopy of your passport or driving licence.
We may withhold personal information that you request to the extent permitted by law.
You may instruct us at any time not to process your personal information for marketing purposes.
In practice, you will usually either expressly agree in advance to our use of your personal information for marketing purposes, or we will provide you with an opportunity to opt out of the use of your personal information for marketing purposes.
10. Third party websites
Our website includes hyperlinks to, and details of, third party websites. We have no control over, and are not responsible for, the privacy policies and practices of third parties.
11. Updating information
Please let us know if the personal information that we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated.
12. Cookies on the website
Our website uses cookies. A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies.
- We use Google Analytics on our website to recognize a computer when a user visits the website, to track users as they navigate the website, and to analyze the use of the website. Please see Google Analytics’ privacy policy for matters relating to Google Analytics: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US
- Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies. Blocking all cookies will have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites.
- You can delete cookies already stored on your computer. Deleting cookies will have a negative impact on the usability of many websites.
13. Credit
This document was created by adapting a template from Website Planet, itself modified from one at SEQ Legal.
Last updated: May 2019.