Privacy Policy

Prostate Cancer UK and Prostate Cancer Trading Limited are committed to protecting your personal information and being transparent about what information we hold, whether you are a service user, donor, volunteer, campaigner, customer, or employee. We promise to respect any personal data you share with us, or that we get from other organisations and keep it safe.

Developing a better understanding of our supporters through their personal data is vital. It enables us to raise funds more efficiently and cost-effectively and ultimately will help us achieve our ambitious strategy Ten Years to Tame Prostate Cancer which aims to halve the projected number of men dying from prostate cancer by 2026.

This policy is written in accordance with UK Data Protection Legislation and Prostate Cancer UK is a registered data controller with the Information Commissioner’s Office.

If you have queries about this policy, please contact Prostate Cancer UK at Fourth floor, The Counting House, 53 Tooley Street, London SE1 2QN. Telephone 020 3310 7000. Email [email protected]

Where we collect information about you

Information you give us directly

We will obtain personal information about you when you enquire or sign up for one of our events, make a donation, fundraise on our behalf, order products or services from us, seek assistance from us, engage with our social media or message boards, communicate with us, tell us your story, or otherwise give us personal information.

We may also obtain personal information about you from an organisation working for us (e.g. for fundraising purposes). This information could include name, address, telephone number, email address and date of birth.

Information collected indirectly

Your information may be shared with us by independent event organisations, for example the London Marathon or a fundraising site like Just Giving or someone on your behalf makes a donation to us in your name.

Information we collect when you use our website

Like most websites, we use ‘cookies’ and web server logs to provide us with information on how our site is used. Web server logs note the date and time of visits, the pages viewed, time spent on each page and on the site in total and the website visited before and after our own site. We use cookies to store limited information on your computer to provide this information to us. We use this information to enhance the functionality of our site and to give you the best experience we can. This is vital to ensure that our site can be found easily by people needing to access our prostate information or wishing to donate to help stop prostate cancer being a killer.

You can manage your cookie preferences by changing the settings in our privacy preference centre (shield icon on bottom left hand side of our website).

Wherever possible we use aggregated or anonymous information which does not identify individual visitors to our website.

More information is available in our cookie policy.

When we rely on other organisations to provide information

We may combine the information you provide us with information available from external sources if it enhances our understanding of our supporters. The only aims here are either to improve our marketing and fundraising efficiency or to help us develop new products or services that our supporters may be interested in and will help us to raise vital funds.

The information we get from other organisations may depend on how you have engaged with them in the past. This information may come from the following sources:

Third party organisations

You may have provided permission for a company or other organisation to share your data with third parties, including charities. This could be when you buy a product or a service, register for an online competition or register on a website.

Information available publicly

This may include information found in places such as Companies House and other public records as well as information that has been published in articles/newspapers/online.

Social media

Depending on your settings or the privacy policies for social media and messaging services like Facebook, WhatsApp or Twitter, you might give us permission to access information from those accounts or services.

What information do we collect?

Personal information is any information that can be used to identify you either directly or indirectly. The type and quantity of information we collect depends very much on why you are providing it. In general, if you support Prostate Cancer UK via donating, volunteering, registering to fundraise, signing up for an event or buying one of our products then we will usually collect:

• Your name
• Your contact details
• Your date of birth
• Your bank and credit card details

Credit/debit card details are only collected to process your financial transaction and are not stored on the Charity's electronic systems, in compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS).

If an order is placed with Prostate Cancer Trading Limited, we will process personal information including your name, email address, phone numbers, home address, shipping and credit/debit card billing address(es) so that we can process and fulfil your order. Saved card details will never be shared with third parties and will only be used to process your order, using our Payment Service Provider's systems. We may also obtain personal information because of authentication or identity checks. We ask for your telephone number. This number may be given to our courier for delivery services. These details allow us to process your order.

Personal information that you provide to Prostate Cancer Trading Limited (unless you checkout as a guest) will also be shared with its parent company Prostate Cancer UK. Where there is a legal obligation to do so, we may disclose your information to any relevant authority (for example for fraud prevention) including regulators. Marketing communications will only be sent by Prostate Cancer Trading Limited and Prostate Cancer UK.

Data Protection law recognises that certain categories of personal information are more sensitive such as health information, race, religious beliefs and political opinions. We will not collect ‘sensitive personal data’ about our supporters unless there is a clear reason for doing so, for example a challenging fundraising event where we may need specific information to ensure we provide the appropriate facilities or support to enable you to participate.

How do we use your information?

We will mainly use your data to:

• To further our charitable aims
• Provide you with the services, products or information you have requested from us
• Develop and improve the services, products or information we provide
• Ask you to participate in research or supporter event satisfaction surveys (this is voluntary)
• Administer your donation
• Claim Gift Aid on your donations
• Support your fundraising efforts
• Keep a record of your relationship with us
• Ensure we know how you would like to be contacted by us

Targeting Communications and Profiling

We will use profiling and screening techniques, including the use of Artificial Intelligence to analyse geographic, demographic and other information relating to you (such as life events, for example, whether you have graduated, bought a property or retired) to better understand your interests and preferences in order to contact you with the most relevant communications. We augment the data you provide us with other data obtained from third party sources, such as Experian. Personal details collected this way will only be used to provide you with information you would reasonably expect or have agreed to.

For more information on how we work with Experian please visit their information portal below.

https://www.experian.co.uk/privacy/consumer-information-portal/

On this portal you can view what personal data Experian process about you and how you can opt out of Experian passing your personal data on to third parties.

We do this because it allows us to understand more about the background and interests of the people who support us, allowing us to target our resources effectively; a key priority for our supporters. In doing this, we may use additional information from publicly available sources where it is appropriate and this specific activity allows us to make suitable requests to individuals who may have the means and want to give more. 

By carrying out profiling and screening activities it means that you receive information that is appropriate, relevant and timely and which we hope will enhance your experience as a supporter. It means that we can raise more funds, sooner and more cost-effectively than we would have otherwise, essential in our fight against prostate cancer.

We may also share limited personal data (address and gift history) with trusted third parties. They use this information to build profiles which help us identify similar people who may also wish to support us.

You can object to any profiling and screening activities by contacting our Data Protection Team at [email protected].

Marketing

It is important to us that you receive the level of information about Prostate Cancer UK that suits you. We will contact you to let you know about the progress we are making against our Ten Years to Tame Prostate Cancer strategy, the latest research developments and advice, fundraising opportunities so you can continue to help us with our fight, or to ask for a donation or other support.

Email/text/telephone marketing

We will only contact you about our work and opportunities to support us via email, text or telephone where you have given us your consent. You can withdraw your consent at any time.

When we email you, we may place a tag (also known as ‘tracking pixel’) on the email we send out. This allows us to monitor the performance of our email marketing activity.

Postal marketing

If you have provided us with your postal address, we will send you direct mail about our work and opportunities to support us, unless you have told us that you would prefer not to receive such information. 

We occasionally source data from third party organisations who you may have interacted with before for the purposes of sending you postal marketing. We will inform you of where we have obtained this data when we contact you by post.

Digital Marketing   

We advertise on various social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. We also advertise on other websites.  

There are various ways that you may see our online advertising:  

1. Advertising on types of websites - for example newspapers and magazines' websites. This is 'contextual advertising' - we buy space on these websites and our adverts are shown based on other content displayed on the page: it is not targeted to specific individuals. 
2. Advertising to people signed up with an online platform (such as Facebook) based on what the platform knows about them, e.g., we may ask Facebook to show a particular advert to people interested in cycling events living around Edinburgh, or men aged over 60 living in the Southwest of England in lower income brackets. We use this method to promote awareness of Prostate Cancer UK, fundraising opportunities and to provide information about the support we can offer. 
3. We keep track of how many people click through to our webpages (anonymously), so we understand whether our advertising is effective. 'Look-alike' / 'Similar' audiences: We send a list of email address hashes to an online platform such as Facebook (hashing is a security measure whereby the information is irreversibly scrambled). The online platform matches these email address hashes to existing platform users, and then creates a group of people with similar characteristics and presents our advertising to them. We use this method for our fundraising and brand campaigns. We undertake this activity to promote awareness of prostate cancer, our activities and how the public can support us. 
4. We also use 'Saved' audiences to remember which supporters on Facebook are most likely to respond to our fundraising, campaigning and marketing requests. A saved audience is one built through Facebook using their data, e.g. men 45+ who have an interest in football. We may note that the audience has performed well in a post-campaign evaluation and use it again.  

5. We will use the information you provide us to target our digital and social media advertising effectively. This could include securely providing contact details such as your name and email address to digital advertising networks or social media companies such as Facebook (this is known as ‘Custom Audiences’). For example, we may use your information to enable us to display adverts to you. 

   Where you have asked us not to use your information for targeted digital advertising, you may still see adverts related to us. This is because the social media site or advertising network may select you based on information they hold, such as your age and location, or websites you have visited, without using information that has been provided by us. 

   We rely on legitimate interests for this processing as we believe that we have a legitimate interest in identifying the most appropriate target audience for our advertising content, as this helps us to fundraise and to raise awareness of prostate cancer related issues and available support more effectively and efficiently.

We track interactions with our adverts so that we know what type of audience has clicked on an advert. For example, we may learn that 30% of clicks on a Prostate Cancer UK RideLondon advert were from men aged 25-44. This allows us to measure the effectiveness of our campaigns.  

We do not target individuals using any special category personal data (e.g. health data) - instead we would target a segment of the population (men 45+) that may benefit from an increased awareness of available support or screening programmes (for example) 

The data that we share with Facebook is deleted after a short period of time and not used for any other purpose. For more information, please review their privacy policy https://en-gb.facebook.com/policy.php   

How you can manage communications from us

If you do not wish for us to use your personal information in these ways then you can opt out at any time. Details on how to do this are included on all our communications.

All our information and marketing emails have a clear ‘unsubscribe’ link which when clicked will remove you from future email communications. If you don’t want to hear from us, just let us know either when you provide your data, receive communications from us or at any time you can contact us on 0800 082 1616 or email our Data Protection Team at [email protected].

We never sell or share your personal details to third parties for the purpose of third party marketing.

Support for individuals affected by prostate cancer

We run services to provide support to individuals and their families affected by prostate cancer, and collect personal data in order to provide those services. This includes our Specialist Nurses and our Online Community and is managed separately from other data provided to the charity. We record telephone calls when you speak to our Specialist Nurses.

The Specialist Nurses collect data about your health when you speak, email or send an instant message to them. They will use this information to answer questions and provide support and information. They will not pass the personal information on to anyone else outside the charity without express permission except in exceptional circumstances to comply with the nurses’ code of professional conduct or the law. We will use some of the information provided for training, quality monitoring or evaluating the services we provide.

Our Online Community asks you to provide your email address when you register and we may contact you about administrative issues and changes to the forum. With your consent, we may also use your email address to send you information about our work. Our Online Community is moderated and we do not display the full names of individuals nor addresses.

When you post personal information on a discussion board on our Online Community your information is publicly accessible. Such information can be viewed online and collected by third parties. We are not responsible for the use of information by such third parties.

When contributing to a discussion we strongly recommend you avoid sharing any personal information that can be used to identify you (such as name, age, address, name of employer etc.). We are not responsible for the privacy of any identifiable information that you post in our Online Community or other public pages of our website.

How we keep your data safe and who has access to it?

We have appropriate technical and organisational measures in place in order to process your data securely.

We will not sell your details to any third parties, but we share your information with our trusted service providers who are authorised to act on our behalf or with whom we work in partnership to deliver and improve services for people affected by cancer. This includes organisations that fundraise on our behalf. We do comprehensive checks on these companies before we work with them. Our contracts set out our expectations and requirements including how they process personal data they have access to.

Financial or technical considerations may occasionally lead us to use the services of a supplier based outside the European Economic Area (EEA), which in turn might lead to your personal information being transferred, processed and stored outside of the EEA. Where necessary, we take steps to provide suitable safeguards to protect your personal information, so that these transfers are compliant with data protection laws. 

WE WILL NEVER SHARE, SELL OR SWAP YOUR DETAILS WITH ANY THIRD PARTIES FOR THE PURPOSES OF THEIR OWN MARKETING OR MONETISING YOUR DATA.

In addition, from time to time we may exchange your personal information with other organisations for the purposes of fraud and credit risk reduction. We may also share information with our financial and legal advisors for the purposes of obtaining advice and protecting our legal rights.

When we collect your personal information we use strict procedures and security measures to prevent unauthorised access. However, no data transmission over the internet is 100% secure, including email. For this reason, we request that you do not send private information to us by email, in particular any financial information. If you do so it is at your own risk and Prostate Cancer UK will not be held liable for any breach in security.

The Prostate Cancer UK website contains links to other websites belonging to third parties and we sometimes choose to participate in social networking sites including but not limited to Facebook and You Tube. We use YouTube API services for certain video services on our site. By using these links, users are agreeing to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service. Please also refer to the Google privacy policy at http://www.google.com/policies/privacy. We may also include content from sites such as these on our website however, we do not have any control over the privacy practices of these websites. You should make sure that when you leave our site that you have read and understood that site’s privacy policy in addition to our own.

Keeping your information up to date

The accuracy of your personal information is important to us. You can edit the personal information we hold on you at any time, including your address and contact details, as well as changing your communication preferences with us by contacting our Supporter Care Team on 0800 082 1616 or by emailing [email protected].

If for any reason you are concerned that the personal information held by Prostate Cancer Trading Limited is not correct, please visit the website and after logging into the site using the "Sign In" menu on the home page, your personal information will be made available for review and change in the "My Account" section. Only you or, upon your request, the Shop Team, may access your personal data from the website using your password and User ID. Information may be changed online within Account Details, Address Book, and My Email Preferences. You may contact us by email at [email protected].

Your rights

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation you have the right to:

• Request a copy of the information we hold on you
• Update or amend the information we hold about you if it is wrong
• Change your communication preferences at any time
• Ask us to remove your personal information from our records
• Object to the processing of your information for marketing purposes.
• Question a decision made about you by automated means Or
• Raise a concern or complaint about the way in which your information is used

If you wish to find out more about these rights, or obtain a copy of the information we hold about you, please contact our Data Protection Team at:

Prostate Cancer UK, Fourth floor, The Counting House, 53 Tooley Street, London SE1 2QN.

Tel: 0800 082 1616
Email:  [email protected]

The Right to complain to a supervisory authority

If we cannot deal with your complaint to your satisfaction you also have the right to complain to a relevant supervisory authority: The Information Commissioners Office: Wycliffe House, Water Lane, SK9 5AF, or call: 0303 123 1113 or online at: https://ico.org.uk/concerns/

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to amend this privacy policy at any time, so please do check it from time to time. We will notify you of any significant changes in the way we treat personal information in a prominent position on our website.

Last updated: February 2025