Privacy Policy

The Park Privacy Notice

The Park is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy when you use our services.

The Privacy Notice below explains how we use information about you and how we protect your privacy.

Why we collect your personal information

Do you know what personal information is?

Personal information can be anything that identifies and relates to a living person. This can include information that when put together with other information can then identify a person.

Information we may collect about you may include (but is not limited to):

Name
Address
Telephone numbers
Email addresses
Data of birth
Nationality
Student Number
Identification Documents
Next of kin details
Health data
Criminal data
CCTV images
Computer IP address

Did you know that some of your personal information might be classified as ‘special’?

Some information is ‘special’ and needs more protection due to its sensitivity. It’s often information you would not want widely known and is very personal to you. This is likely to include anything that can reveal information relating to your:

Sexuality and sexual health
Religious or philosophical beliefs
Ethnicity
Physical or mental health

We will only collect this type of information if it is necessary to your contract so that we can provide the right services to you.

We may at times need to share this information we will only do this if we have your consent or if there are legal requirements for us to do so. We may receive information about you from other data controllers, such as the police who might tell us about a crime they are investigating where this impacts on your contract with us or those who live in the same community. If you give us this information about yourself when communicating with us, you do so because you consider it forms part of a legitimate interest for us to hold this information on our records.
If we ask for any sensitive personal data about you, we will always tell you why we need it and ask for your consent to hold it.

Why do we need your personal information?

We may need to use some information about you to:

• deliver services and support to you;
• manage those services we provide to you;
• service improvement
• prevention/detection of crime/fraud
• help investigate any complaints you have about your services;
• check the quality of services;
• to help with research and planning of new services.

How the law allows us to use your personal information

There are a number of legal reasons why we need to collect and use your personal information.

Generally we collect and use personal information for the purposes of where:

• you are entering or have entered into a contract with us
• you, or your legal representative, have given consent
• it is necessary to protect someone in an emergency
• it is required by law
• you have made your information publicly available
• it is necessary for legal cases
• it is necessary for archiving, research, or statistical purposes
• to improve our site to ensure that content is presented in the most effective manner for you
• as part of our efforts to keep our site safe and secure
• to measure and understand the effectiveness of advertising we serve to you and others and to deliver the relevant advertising to you

Consent and Your Preferences

We may contact you or send communications to tell you about a service enhancement such as improvements to our online services or to keep you informed on how we are performing. We won’t need your consent to communicate with you this way because we have assessed that it forms part of our agreement with you and it is of mutual interest for us to keep you informed and is relevant to your contract with us.

We would like to occasionally send you information on other products and services we offer, and which we think will be of interest to you. We will ask for your consent to communicate this type of information to you, you can remove your consent and ask us to stop.

How we collect your information

We will collect your information in the following ways:

• from you when you communicate with us by telephone, email, in person or via social media, for example in order to make enquiries or raise concerns;
• from third party sources in relation to your accommodation application, contract and/or subsequent residence in accommodation;
• from third party sources in relation to your funding, such as your sponsor/guarantor.

Where we have said that we obtain personal data about you from third party sources, we will look to ensure that the third party has lawful authority to provide us with this information.

We only use what we need

Where we can, we’ll only collect and use personal information if we need it to deliver a service or meet a requirement.

If we don’t need personal information we’ll either keep you anonymous if we already have it for something else or we won’t ask you for it. For example in a survey we may not need your contact details so we’ll only collect your survey responses.

If we use your personal information for research and analysis, we’ll keep you anonymous or use a different name unless you’ve agreed that your personal information can be used for that research.

We won’t sell your personal information to anyone else.

We may share your information with other companies within our group, we will always ask for your consent to do this and you can ask us to stop at any time.

We will always provide an option for updating your marketing preferences on our communications with you.

Visiting our website

When you visit our website, we collect standard internet log information for statistical purposes.

• We use cookies to collect information in an anonymous way, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited.
• We do not make any attempt to identify visitors to our websites. We do not associate information gathered from our sites with personally identifying information from any source.
• When we collect personal information, for example via an online form, we will explain what we intend to do with it.

Our websites contain links to various third party websites. We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of any external websites that are linked from our sites.

Keeping your information secure

We store personal information both electronically and in paper form.

We implement security policies, processes and technical security solutions to protect the personal information we hold from:

• Unauthorised access
• Improper use or disclosure
• Unauthorised modification
• Unlawful destruction or accidental loss

We’ll do what we can to make sure we hold records about you (on paper and electronically) in a secure way, and we’ll only make them available to those who have a right to see them. Examples of our security include:

• Encryption, meaning that information is hidden so that it cannot be read without special knowledge (such as a password). This is done with a secret code or what’s called a ‘cypher’. The hidden information is said to then be ‘encrypted’
• Pseudonymisation, meaning that we’ll use a different name so we can hide parts of your personal information from view. This means that someone outside of the Places for People Group could work on your information for us without ever knowing it was yours
• Controlling access to systems and networks allows us to stop people who are not allowed to view your personal information from getting access to it
• Training for our staff allows us to make them aware of how to handle information and how and when to report when something goes wrong
• Regular testing of our technology and ways of working including keeping up to date on the latest security updates (commonly called patches)

When you contact us, we may ask you to provide us with some information so that we can confirm your identity. If other people (e.g. family members, support workers, solicitors) act on your behalf we will take steps to ensure that you have agreed for them to do so. This may include asking them to provide us with supporting information to indicate your consent. We do this to protect you and to make sure that other people cannot find things out about you that they are not entitled to know.

Employees and third parties who have access to, or are associated with the processing of, your personal information are obliged to make reasonable efforts to safeguard it.

Where in the world is your information?

The majority of personal information is stored on systems in the UK. But there may be some occasions as our technology services progress where your information may leave the UK either in order to get to another organisation or if it’s stored in a system outside of the EU.

We will always have additional protections on your information if it leaves the UK ranging from secure ways of transferring data to ensuring we have a robust contract in place with that third party.

We’ll take all practical steps to make your personal information is not sent to a country that is not seen as ‘safe’ either by the UK or EU Governments.

How long do we keep your personal information?

There’s often a legal or a contractual reason for keeping your personal information for a set period of time. We will keep your information for the duration of providing a service or product to you under the terms of a contract, such as your tenancy agreement. When your contract has ended we will keep your personal data for a set time for auditing and reporting purposes and for legitimate interest purposes, after that time we will either anonymise or destroy your information.

Your Rights

The law gives you a number of rights to control what personal information is used by us and how it is used by us.

You can ask for access to the information we hold on you

You have the right to ask for the information we have about you. When we receive a request from you in writing, we must give you access to what personal information we’ve recorded about you.

However, we can’t let you see any parts of a record which contain:

• Confidential information about other people; or
• May be held in preparation to defend legal claims

This applies to personal information that is in both paper and electronic records. If you ask us, we’ll also let others see your record (except if one of the points above applies).

A request for personal information can be made via email or in writing. This is known as a subject access request (SAR). In order to make an SAR you will need to provide the following information:

• your name
• your address
• proof of identity and signature
• enough information to identify your records

What types of documents could I submit as proof of ID?

• Copy passport with signature (please remove your passport number)
• Copy driving license picture with signature (please remove driver number)
• Copy of signed tenancy or contract with us

You can write to us at the following address:

Horspath Driftway, Headington, Oxford OX3 7FJ,
United Kingdom

• +44 (0) 333 344 2829
• student@theparkoxford.com