We recognise the importance of your personal privacy. This privacy policy sets out how Bournemouth University Higher Education Corporation (BU/ we/ our/ us) collects, uses and shares your personal information, and your rights in relation to the personal information that you give to us when you use our website: https://www.naturevolunteers.uk/ (our site).

Under the data protection legislation, BU is a data controller of any personal information that could identify you that you provide to us through our site either when you register as a project leader and provide details of your project or when you register your interest in becoming a volunteer. This means that BU has the core legal responsibility to safeguard the information and ensure it is processed in accordance with data protection laws. At present the law is set out in the EU General Data Protection Regulation and the UK Data Protection Act 2018. In particular BU must:

• Provide you with clear information about how and why we process your personal information and the legal basis of the processing: this information is set out below;
• Take steps to ensure that the personal information we process is accurate and up to date;
• Only process your personal information for the specific purposes and in the ways we have told you about, save for exceptional circumstances; and
• Keep your personal information secure.

Information we collect about you

We may collect and process the following personal information about you:

• Information you give to us (submitted information)
  You may give us submitted information by uploading information to our site, filling in the forms on our site or by corresponding with us by email, phone or otherwise.

  If you are a project leader, the information you give us may include your name, email address, mobile number, name of organisation you work for.

  If you are registering your interest in becoming a volunteer, the information you give us may include your name, email address, county of residence, reason for interest in volunteering, skill level, time availability, type of project and the level of physical activity you are interested in.

• Information we collect about you
  When you visit our site, we collect information about you via cookies – small pieces of code that enables us to make sure the web page is displaying correctly. The information we gather through cookies includes things such as your physical location and your computer’s internet protocol (IP) address. We don’t gather any personal or identifying information using cookies.

  None of the cookies we use give us access to your computer or your personal information, beyond the information you choose to share with us. The cookies we use help us to provide you with a better website by monitoring which pages you find useful and which pages you don’t.

Two types of cookies are used on this website:

• Session Cookies. These are temporary cookies, which only exist for the period you access our website (or more strictly, until you close the browser after accessing our website). Session cookies help the website remember what you chose on the previous page, therefore avoiding having to re-enter information.
• Persistent Cookies. These are cookies which remain on your device after you have visited our website. These cookies help us identify you as a unique visitor (by storing a randomly generated number).

The length of time a cookie will remain on your device will depend on the type of cookie.

We use Google Analytics cookies to see which pages are being looked at. This helps us analyse web data and improve our site – we only use this information for statistical analysis.

Disabling cookies

Our site does not use cookies to collect personally-identifiable information about you. During your visits to our site you may notice some cookies which are unrelated to us. We do not control dissemination of these cookies and you should check the relevant third party websites for more information. You can disable cookies set by this or any other website by adjusting the settings on your internet browser. However, if you do so, some parts of our site might not work properly for you. To find out more, visit allaboutcookies.org

Google also provides website visitors Google Analytics opt-outs for the web, which provides a browser add-on for opting out of Google Analytics tracking altogether.

What do we do with information we gather from our site?

If you register on our site as a project leader:

• We will use your personal information:
  •  to provide your email address to individuals who have registered an interest, through our site, in becoming a volunteer so that they may contact you direct to express an interest in a project;
  • to ensure the content of our site is presented in the most effective manner for you and your computer.
• We will retain your personal information for up to one year after the indicated end date of your project
• The lawful basis for our processing your personal information will be for the performance of BU’s core public task i.e. conducting research and/or the legitimate interests of BU and you in making the website available so that your organisation can upload details of projects that volunteers may want to help you with and help you to collect feedback from your volunteers.

If you have registered your interest in becoming a volunteer:

• We will use the personal information you have provided:
  • for the purpose of matching you to volunteer projects posted on our site which may be of interest to you;
  • conducting our research project to identify how good our volunteer and project match algorithm is by comparing matched scores between individuals and projects to reviews of projects by individuals who did volunteer; providing your feedback to the relevant organisation if you do take part in a volunteer project and provide feedback to us;
  • ensuring the content of our site is presented in the most effective manner for you and your computer.
• We will retain your personal information that you have provided for up to one year from your last interaction with our site.
• The lawful basis for our processing your personal information will be for the performance of BU’s core public task i.e. conducting research and/or the legitimate interests of BU or organisations that are looking for volunteers for projects uploaded to our site.
• We will not pass your personal information to any organisations that upload project details to our site. When we provide you with details of projects that may be of interest to you, we will provide you with relevant project leader(s) email address(es) and/or the relevant organisation(s) website address(es) and you can choose whether or not to make contact with such project leader(s).

We will also use the information about you that we gather from our site to:

• Administer our site including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and statistical purposes;
• Improve our site to ensure the content is displayed in the most effective manner for you and your computer; and
• As part of our efforts to keep our site safe and secure.

Your personal information will be anonymised before any data/statistical analysis is carried out by us.

Is my information secure?

We are committed to keeping your personal information secure, and we have physical, electronic and managerial procedures in place to safeguard the personal information we collect from you.

All the personal information you provide to us is stored on a secure server in the UK.

You should be aware of the following, however:

• If you email us, the possibility exists, however remote, that unauthorised people might be able to intercept your message.
• When you provide your personal information to us we direct you to a web connection that uses SSL encryption (similar to that used for online banking). If you are in a secure part of our website, you’ll see a padlock symbol in your address or status bar.
• If messages are not sent over an encrypted connection the possibility exists, however remote, that unauthorised people may be able to intercept this information.
• We aren’t responsible for the privacy of emails except those stored on our own servers.

There are steps you can take to protect your personal information while using our site and applications:

• Never leave your computer while you’re completing an expression of interest in participating in future research studies or sending a message to us
• Be aware that public Wi-Fi (wireless) internet connections and internet cafes could leave your personal information at risk

What about links to other websites?

Our site contains links to other websites. We don’t have any control over the websites we link to, so we can’t be held responsible for the protection and privacy of any information you provide on those websites. The websites we link to aren’t governed by this privacy policy and you should look at their privacy policy to make sure you are happy with how they will handle your data before you submit any personal information. See our website terms and conditions for more information.

Your rights

Under the data protection laws you have rights to ask for information about how we process your data and to see the data being processed. You also have a right to ask for rectification/correction of any inaccurate personal data being processed by a data controller, and in certain circumstances you will have the right to ask for processing of your personal data to be restricted or stopped or for your personal data to be erased.

Most of these rights are subject to some exceptions or exemptions, depending on the purposes for which personal information is being processed.

If you wish to exercise any of these rights, you should contact the BU Data Protection Officer on dpo@bournemouth.ac.uk.

If you have any questions or concerns about the data processing described above, you can contact BU’s Data Protection Officer (DPO) on dpo@bournemouth.ac.uk or +44 (0) 1202 961315 or by post: Data Protection Officer, Bournemouth University, Poole House, 5th Floor, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB, UK. The DPO has overall responsibility for communicating with individuals and the data protection regulator (the Information Commissioner) about data protection within the University.

If you are not satisfied with how we are processing your personal information, you can make a complaint to the Information Commissioner:

Online reporting: https://ico.org.uk/concerns/

Email: casework@ico.org.uk

Tel: 0303 123 1113

Post: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF UK.

You can find out more about your rights under the data protection legislation from the Information Commissioner’s Office website available at: www.ico.org.uk.