Privacy Policy
At the Bhopal Medical Appeal we respect the privacy of our supporters and visitors to our website. This policy is concerned with how we collect information, what we do with it and what controls you have.
It is The Bhopal Medical Appeal's stated policy that we will act in accordance with current legislation and aim to meet current best practice with regard to the processing of personal data. The Bhopal Medical Appeal complies with the Data Protection Act of 1998.
Your Privacy
Bhopal Medical Appeal (BMA) is an independent, non-profit organisation and is registered as a company limited by guarantee (Company No 5826888), incorporated on 24 May 2006, and received charitable status on 9 January 2007 (Charity No 1117526). Legal responsibility for the management and stewardship is vested in the Board of Trustees.
Its objects are:
To alleviate the suffering of people who were directly or indirectly affected by chemical disasters anywhere in the world and in particular but not limited to the city of Bhopal, India, in the aftermath of the Union Carbide disaster of December 3rd 1984 and other places in the world in such manner as the trustees think fit.
We take our duty to process your personal data very seriously. This policy explains how we collect, manage, use and protect your personal data.
Please read our supporter promise for more information.
We may change this document from time to time to reflect the latest view of what we do with your information. Please check back frequently; you will be able to see if changes have been made by the date it was last updated.
Refer to the sections below for more details on how and why we use your personal information:
Jump to:
- Who are we?
- What personal data we collect and how we use it
- Legitimate interests
- Sharing your information
- Retaining your information
- Your details on the web
- What are your rights?
- Contact us
1. Who are we?
In this policy references to The Bhopal Medical Appeal, or to ‘we’ or ‘us’ are to The Bhopal Medical Appeal which is a registered charity in England and Wales 1117526. A non-profit making company limited by guarantee. Registered in England No. 5826888 at Community Base, 113 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3XG.
2. What personal data we collect and how we use it
What we need
The Bhopal Medical Appeal is what’s known as the ‘controller’ of the personal data you provide to us. We will usually collect basic personal data about you like your name, postal address, telephone number, email address and your bank details if you are supporting us financially.
Occasionally, we may be required to collect other information about you such as your date of birth or gender (e.g. if you are entering a challenge event). We will be very clear with you why we wished to collect such information, our reason for collecting such information, and we would only do so with your specific consent and permission.
Why we need it
We collect your personal data in connection with specific activities, such as campaign updates, newsletter requests, donations, and with information you provide in public forums, on our sites, and in applications.
The information is either needed to fulfil your request or to enable us to provide you with a more personalised service. You don't have to disclose any of this information to browse our sites. However, if you choose to withhold requested information, we may not be able to provide you with certain services.
Our marketing
Sometimes, with your consent, we will process your personal data to provide you with information about our work or our activities that you have requested or are expecting.
The BMA also processes your data when it is in our legitimate interests to do this and when these interests do not override your rights. Those legitimate interests include providing you with information on our appeals, campaigning, fundraising, newsletter requests and other activities. We will never share your details with third parties. Please see the section on Legitimate Interests below for more information.
How we obtain your details:
We will also hold information about your details so that we can respect your preferences for being contacted by us.
We collect your personal information in a number of ways:
- When you provide it to us directly.
- When we collect it as you use our websites or social media.
- From publicly available sources (where possible) to keep your information up to date (e.g. the Post Office’s National Change of Address database).
We combine the information from these sources with the information you provide to us directly.
Children
If you are under 18 please ensure you obtain your parent/guardian's consent before sending any personal information to any website or the Bhopal Medical Appeal. We do have activities for those under 18 so we may ask your age. Before taking part please ensure you speak to your parent or guardian. Please note that we will not knowingly market to or accept donations from persons aged under 18 years.
As a parent or guardian we encourage you to be aware of the activities in which your children are participating, both offline and online. If your children voluntarily disclose information, this may encourage unsolicited messages. We suggest that you discourage your child from providing any information without your consent.
Anything else?
All the personal data we process is processed by our staff in the UK however for the purposes of IT hosting and maintenance your information may be situated outside of the European Economic Area (EEA). This will be done in accordance with guidance issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office.
If you would like to change the way you hear from us or no longer wish to receive direct marketing communications from then use the contact details in 'Contact Us'.
3. Legitimate interests
We have a number of lawful reasons that mean we can use (or 'process') your personal information. One lawful reason is something called 'legitimate interests'.
Broadly speaking Legitimate Interests means we can process your personal information if:
- We have a genuine and legitimate reason.
and - We are not harming any of your rights and interests.
Please read the 'Legitimate Interests' statement for more information.
4. Sharing your information
We only disclose information to third parties or individuals when obliged to by law, for purposes of national security, taxation and criminal investigations and the following:
- If you have agreed that we may do so.
- When we use other companies to provide services on our behalf, e.g. using a mailing house, handling mail-outs and emails, when using auditors/advisors or processing credit/debit card payments.
- If we receive a complaint about any content you have posted or transmitted to or from one of our sites, to enforce or apply our Terms & Conditions or if we believe that we need to do so to protect and defend the rights, property or personal safety of The Bhopal Medical Appeal, our websites or our visitors and for other lawful purposes.
And, we will never sell or lend your personal information to other organisations.
5. Retaining your information
We hold your information only as long as necessary for each purpose we use it, we will provide examples of some of our retentions in this paragraph soon to give you an idea of how long we hold your information for.
If decide not to support the BMA any more or request that we have no further contact with you, we will keep some basic information in order to avoid sending you unwanted materials in the future and to ensure that we don’t accidentally duplicate information.
6. Your details on the web
Our Cookie Policy
This policy explains what cookies are, how the BMA uses them on our websites and what you can do to manage how they are used.
Cookies and how they benefit you
Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.
Our cookies help us:
- Make our website work as you'd expect.
- Remember your settings during and between visits.
- Improve the speed/security of the site.
- Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook.
- Continuously improve our website for you.
- Make our marketing more efficient.
- Granting us permission to use cookies.
If the settings on your browser that you are using to view this website are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.
How long do cookies last?
When a web server sends a cookie, it asks your browser to keep that particular cookie until a certain date and time. These dates can be:
- Some date in the future – which might be a few minutes or a few hours from now (to track something like your shopping cart in an online store). The cookie might expire many years in the future, to keep track of your browser for a long time.
- When you close your browser – this is called a session cookie, the next time you start your browser these will have vanished.
- Some date in the past – this is how the server asks a browser to remove a previously-stored cookie.
Our own cookies
We use cookies to make our website work including:
- Remembering if you have accepted our terms and conditions.
- Allowing you to add comments to our site.
- Remembering if we have already asked you certain questions.
- There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.
Site improvement cookies
We regularly test new designs or site features on our sites. We may do this by showing slightly different versions of our websites to different people and anonymously monitoring how our site visitors respond to these different versions. Ultimately this helps us to offer you a better website experience.
Anonymous visitor statistics cookies
We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using, how long they spend on the site, what page they look at, etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These analytics programs also tell us, on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before, helping us to develop our services for you.
Our site uses the following analytics program: Google Analytics
Advertising or targeting cookies
The BMA website does not use cookies which track visitors for advertising and marketing purposes.
Third party functions
Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following third part functions which use cookies:
Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.
Social website cookies
The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.
Turning cookies off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so, however, will likely limit the functionality of ours and a large proportion of the world's websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.
7. What are your rights?
A new data protection law, starting in May 2018, gives everyone a number of very important rights. These are:
- Transparency over how we use your personal information (right to be informed).
- Request a copy of the information we hold about you, which will be provided to you within one month (right of access).
- Update or amend the information we hold about you if it is wrong (right of rectification).
- Ask us to stop using your information (right to restrict processing).
- Ask us to remove your personal information from our records (right to be 'forgotten').
- Object to the processing of your information for marketing purposes (right to object).
- Obtain and reuse your personal data for your own purposes (right to data portability).
- Not be subject to a decision when it is based on automated processing (automated decision making and profiling).
If you would like to know more about your rights under the data protection law see the Information Commissioners Office www.ico.org.uk
Remember, you can change the way you hear from us or withdraw your permission for us to processing your personal data at any time by using the contact details in 'Contact Us'.
8. How to contact us
If you wish to talk through anything in our privacy policy, find out more about your rights or obtain a copy of the information we hold about you, please contact our supporter services team (details at the bottom of this page) who will be happy to help. If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact our supporter services team who will investigate the matter. If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are not processing your personal data in accordance with the law you can complain to the Fundraising Regulator or the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Or by emailing: [email protected]
If you wish to talk to us about anything in the policy or the information we hold about you please contact our supporter services team:
- By telephone:01273 603278 or our Freephone answering service 0800 316 5577
- By post: Supporter Services, Bhopal Medical Appeal, Community Base, 113 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3XG
This document was last updated: February 2018