The Cyber Helpline Privacy Policy

Published: 21st November 2022

Previous notices: Can be found here.

This Privacy Policy explains how we handle your personal information across our website, chatbot, volunteer helpdesk, donations platforms and social media. If you are between the ages of 13 and 18 you can read our Young Persons Privacy Policy.

How do we use your data in practice?

1. Donation processing or transactional purposes: to process your donations or other payments, to claim Gift Aid on your donations and verify any financial transactions. We will need to use your personal information in order to carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us for goods or services, for example, training that we have delivered;

2. Responding to a request: to provide the services or information that you have requested, for example, in response to a query or complaint;

3. Administration: to update you with important administrative messages about your donation, a campaign or services, or to record and deal with a complaint, record a request not to receive further marking information, record what our volunteers have done for us, and for other essential internal record keeping purposes;

4. Monitoring and evaluating our services: we may use your information in order to improve current and future delivery of our services;

5. Processing an application to work with us: we may process your information if you send or fill in an application form or send us your CV or details in respect of an opportunity to work with us in order to evaluate your suitability and respond to you or, where you volunteer with us, to administer the volunteering arrangement;

6. Employment & volunteering: we need to ensure that we meet our obligations as an employer and manage people effectively in the organisation;

7. Working with vulnerable adults: we collect essential information to enable us to safeguard vulnerable adults we work with, for example, in campaigns or events;

8. Fundraising, direct marketing or campaigning: we will only send you marketing information by email, SMS, or telephone you if you have given us specific consent. If you withdraw your consent and then subsequently opt in to receive marketing information again, then your most recent preference will supersede your earlier one. You can opt out of at any time by contacting us or by opting out where asked on specific platforms;

9. Providing and developing our website: we may use your personal information to help provide you with access to our website, personalise your experience, and improve and develop it further;

10. Protecting your vital interests: we may process your personal information where we reasonably think that there is a risk of serious harm or abuse to you or someone else;

11. Market research and surveys: we may invite you to participate in surveys or market research to help us improve our website, fundraising, services and strategic development. Participation is always voluntary and no individuals will be identified as a result of this research, unless you consent to us publishing your feedback;

12. Legal, regulatory and tax compliance: where we are subject to a legal obligation, we may process your personal information to fulfil that obligation;

13. Profiling and analysis: we want to improve how we talk to you and the information we provide through our website, services, products and information. We may occasionally for the purposes of our legitimate interests use your personal information to conduct profiling of our supporters or potential supporters. To do this we sometimes use profiling and screening methods so that we can better understand our supporters, your preferences and needs to provide a better experience for you.

14. Risk management: to provide you will the best possible advice about your situation, including understanding risk and possible measures to reduce risk;

15. Case management: so that if you contact us again you do not need to repeat the history of your situation;

16. Anonymised research and monitoring: the collated data produced may be shared, including with funders, but there will be no identifiable information within these reports;

17. Contact you have consented to: we will ask for your explicit consent to contact you for evaluation, research, case study, or policy and campaign work. We will only contact you if you have given consent and this can be withdrawn at any time.

What personal information do we collect from you?

We collect the following data depending on how you interact with us.

Using, and contacting us through, our website

Using, and contacting us through, the chatbot

Working with one of our volunteers

If you donate

If you apply for a role

If you volunteer or work for us

Contacting us on social media

We operate several social media pages (including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn). Although this notice covers how we will use any data collected from those pages, it does not cover how the providers of social media websites will use your information. Please ensure you read the privacy policy of the social media website before sharing data and make use of the privacy settings and reporting mechanisms to control how your data is used.

When you interact with us on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn we may also obtain some personal information about you. The information we receive will depend on the privacy preferences you have set on each platform and the privacy policies of each platform. To change your settings on these platforms, please refer to their privacy notices.

We may obtain information about your visit to our site, for example the pages you visit and how you navigate the site, by using cookies.

Where is it stored & processed?

Personal data you share with us will be stored in our online databases or in ‘Software as a Service’ solutions that help us use, store and process your data. Where possible we will restrict geographic storage of your personal data to the UK, the European Union or the USA (in that order of preference). 

Who do we share it with?

We do not share or sell your personal data with any organisation unless required to do so by law. 

Other organisations may have partial access to your data -  or be hosting encrypted versions of your data - as we use their tools and technologies to store, process and use the data you provide. 

We may be obliged to share your information with a statutory body – such as the police or safeguarding services – where we have a clear reason to believe that you or another individual (whether a child or adult) is at imminent risk of serious harm. The legal basis for this is our vital interest, namely that this processing is necessary to protect someone’s life.

We may share anonymised case data and statistics about the issues we support our users with to 3rd parties. All of your personal data will have been removed from the data before sharing. 

What are your rights?

You can read about your rights on the Information Commissioner’s Office here - https://ico.org.uk/global/privacy-notice/your-data-protection-rights/. You also have the right to make a complaint to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office.

You can contact our Data Protection Team using the form below:

• have all of the personal data we hold on you erased

• be provided with a copy of your personal data we are processing

• if any of the data we hold is inaccurate or incomplete

• If you are not happy about the way in which we are processing your personal data