INTRODUCTION
In its everyday business operations, Robinson Thirsk makes use of a variety of data about identifiable individuals, including data about:
In collecting and using this data, the organisation is subject to a variety of legislation controlling how such activities may be carried out and the safeguards that must be put in place to protect it. The purpose of this policy is to set out the relevant legislation and to describe the steps Robinson Thirsk is taking to ensure that it complies with it. This control applies to all systems, people and processes that constitute the organisation’s information systems, including board members, directors, employees, suppliers and other third parties who have access to Robinson Thirsk systems.
The following policies and procedures are relevant to this document:
THE GENERAL DATA PROTECTION REGULATION
The General Data Protection Regulation 2016 (GDPR) is one of the most significant pieces of legislation affecting the way that Robinson Thirsk carries out its information processing activities. Significant fines are applicable if a breach is deemed to have occurred under the GDPR, which is designed to protect the personal data of citizens of the European Union. It is Robinson Thirsk’s policy to ensure that our compliance with the GDPR and other relevant legislation is clear and demonstrable at all times.
DEFINITIONS
There are a total of 26 definitions listed within the GDPR and it is not appropriate to reproduce them all here. However, the most fundamental definitions with respect to this policy are as follows:
Personal data is defined as:
any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
‘processing’ means:
any operation or set of operations which is performed on personal data or on sets of personal data, whether or not by automated means, such as collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction;
‘controller’ means:
the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data; where the purposes and means of such processing are determined by Union or Member State law, the controller or the specific criteria for its nomination may be provided for by Union or Member State law;
PRINCIPLES RELATING TO PROCESSING OF PERSONAL DATA
There are a number of fundamental principles upon which the GDPR is based.
These are as follows:
Personal data shall be:
(a) processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency’);
(b) collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes; further processing for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes shall, in accordance with Article 89(1), not be considered to be incompatible with the initial purposes (‘purpose limitation’);
(c) adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed (‘data minimisation’);
(d) accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date; every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that personal data that are inaccurate, having regard to the purposes for which they are processed, are erased or rectified without delay (‘accuracy’);
(e) kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed; personal data may be stored for longer periods insofar as the personal data will be processed solely for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) subject to implementation of the appropriate technical and organisational measures required by this Regulation in order to safeguard the rights and freedoms of the data subject (‘storage limitation’);
(f) processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage, using appropriate technical or organisational measures (‘integrity and confidentiality’).
RIGHT OF THE INDIVIDUAL
The data subject also has rights under the GDPR. These consist of:
Each of these rights must be supported by appropriate procedures within Robinson Thirsk that allow the required action to be taken within the timescales stated in the GDPR.
These timescales are:
CONSENT
Unless it is necessary for a reason allowable in the GDPR, explicit consent must be obtained from a data subject to collect and process their data. In case of children below the age of 16 parental consent must be obtained. Transparent information about our usage of their personal data must be provided to data subjects at the time that consent is obtained and their rights with regard to their data explained, such as the right to withdraw consent. This information must be provided in an accessible form, written in clear language and free of charge.
If the personal data is not obtained directly from the data subject then this information must be provided within a reasonable period after the data are obtained and definitely within one month.
PRIVACY BY DESIGN
Robinson Thirsk has adopted the principle of privacy by design and will ensure that the definition and planning of all new or significantly changed systems that collect or process personal data will be subject to due consideration of privacy issues, including the completion of one or more data protection impact assessments.
The data protection impact assessment will include:
Use of techniques such as data minimization and pseudonymisation should be considered where applicable and appropriate.
TRANSFER OF PERSONAL DATA
Transfers of personal data outside the European Union must be carefully reviewed prior to the transfer taking place to ensure that they fall within the limits imposed by the GDPR. This depends partly on the European Commission’s judgement as to the adequacy of the safeguards for personal data applicable in the receiving country and this may change over time.
Intra-group international data transfers must be subject to legally binding agreements referred to as Binding Corporate Rules (BCR) which provide enforceable rights for data subjects.
PERSONAL INFORMATION THAT THIS WEBSITE COLLECTS AND WHY WE COLLECT IT
This website collects and uses personal information for the following reasons:
Like most websites, this site uses Google Analytics (GA) to track user interaction. We use this data to determine the number of people using our site, to better understand how they find and use our web pages and to see their journey through the website.
Although GA records data such as your geographical location, device, internet browser and operating system, none of this information personally identifies you to us. GA also records your computer’s IP address which could be used to personally identify you but Google do not grant us access to this. We consider Google to be a third party data processor.
GA makes use of cookies, details of which can be found on Google’s developer guides. FYI our website uses the analytics.js implementation of GA.
Disabling cookies on your internet browser will stop GA from tracking any part of your visit to pages within this website.
Should you choose to contact us using the contact form on our Contact us page, the data that you supply will be stored by this website and collated into an email and sent to us over the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Our SMTP servers are protected by TLS (sometimes known as SSL) meaning that the email is sent over an encrypted connection using SHA-2, 256-bit cryptography and received by Google’s secure servers.
If you choose to join our email newsletter, the email address that you submit to us will be forwarded to MailChimp who provide us with email marketing services. We consider MailChimp to be a third party data processor. The email address that you submit will not be stored within this website’s own database or in any of our internal computer systems.
Your email address will remain within MailChimp’s database for as long as we continue to use MailChimp’s services for email marketing or until you specifically request removal from the list. You can do this by unsubscribing using the unsubscribe links contained in any email newsletters that we send you or by requesting removal via email. When requesting removal via email, please send your email to us using the email account that is subscribed to the mailing list.
If you are under 16 years of age you MUST obtain parental consent before joining our email newsletter.
While your email address remains within the MailChimp database, you will receive periodic (approximately once a month) newsletter-style emails from us.
HOW WE STORE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
As detailed above, if you submit a contact form on this website some personal information will be stored within this website’s database. This is currently the only occasion where personal data will be stored on this website. This data is currently stored in an identifiable fashion; a limitation of the content management system that this website is built on (WordPress). In the near future we aim to change the storage of this data to a pseudonymous fashion meaning that the data would require additional processing using a separately stored ‘key’ before it could be used to identify an individual.
Pseudonymisation is a recent requirement of the GDPR which many web application developers are currently working to fully implement. We are committed to keeping it as a high priority and will implement it on this website as soon as we are able to.
ABOUT THIS WEBSITE’S SERVER
This website is hosted by Media Temple within a US data centre.
Some of the data centre’s more notable security features are as follows:
24/7/365 DDoS Security & Intrusion protection, along with:
All traffic (transferral of files) between this website and your browser is encrypted and delivered over HTTPS.
OUR THIRD PARTY DATA PROCESSORS
We use a number of third parties to process personal data on our behalf. These third parties have been carefully chosen and all of them comply with the legislation. All two of these third parties are based in the USA and are EU-U.S Privacy Shield compliant.
Google (Privacy policy)
Mailchimp (Privacy policy)
DATA PROTECTION OFFICER
A defined role of Data Protection Officer (DPO) is required under the GDPR if an organisation is a public authority if it performs large scale monitoring or if it processes particularly sensitive types of data on a large scale. The DPO is required to have an appropriate level of knowledge and can either be an in-house resource or outsourced to an appropriate service provider.
Based on these criteria, Robinson Thirsk does not require a Data Protection Officer to be appointed.
BREACH NOTIFICATION
It is Robinson Thirsk’s policy to be fair and proportionate when considering the actions to be taken to inform affected parties regarding breaches of personal data. In line with the GDPR, where a breach is known to have occurred which is likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals, the relevant Data Protection Authority (DPA) will be informed within 72 hours.
This will be managed in accordance with our Information Security Incident Response Procedure which sets out the overall process of handling information security incidents.
Under the GDPR the relevant DPA has the authority to impose a range of fines of up to four percent of annual worldwide turnover or twenty million Euros, whichever is the higher, for infringements of the regulations.
The following actions are undertaken to ensure that Robinson Thirsk complies at all times with the accountability principle of the GDPR:
CHANGES TO OUR PRIVACY POLICY
This privacy policy may change from time to time inline with legislation or industry developments. We will not explicitly inform our clients or website users of these changes. Instead, we recommend that you check this page occasionally for any policy changes. Specific policy changes and updates will be mentioned in a change log below.
CHANGE LOG
15/03/2018 – Privacy policy instigated.