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Privacy Policy

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Prostate Cancer UK is committed to protecting your personal information and being transparent about what information we hold, whether you use our services, donate, volunteer, campaign or are an 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 people who support us is vital. It enables us to raise funds more cost-effectively and ultimately will help us achieve our ambitious strategy Ten Years to Tame Prostate Cancer.

This policy is written in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016. Prostate Cancer UK is registered as a Data Controller.

If you have queries about this policy, please contact us at Data Protection Officer, Prostate Cancer UK, Fourth floor, The Counting House, 53 Tooley Street, London SE1 2QN or call us on 020 3310 7000.  

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 (for fundraising purposes).

Information collected indirectly

Your information may be shared with us by independent event organisations, for example the London Marathon or fundraising sites like Just Giving or Virgin Money Giving. These independent third parties will only share your information when you have indicated that you wish to support Prostate Cancer UK and with your consent. 

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.

Internet browsers will allow some control over most cookies through their settings and, should you wish, you can identify what cookies are on your device and remove them.

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

Information we rely on other organisations to provide

We may combine the information you provide us with information available from external sources to enhance our understanding of our supporters. By doing this, we are aiming to improve our marketing and fundraising efficiency and/or develop new products or services for our supporters which will help us to raise vital funds. 

The information we get from other organisations may depend on your privacy settings or the responses you have given 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. The type and quantity of information we collect depends very much on why you are providing it.

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

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’ 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:

  • 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

We will sometimes use profiling and screening techniques to analyse geographic, demographic and other information relating to you to better understand your interests and preferences so we can contact you with the most relevant communications. Personal details collected this way will only be used to provide you with information you would reasonably expect or have agreed to. We do this to understand more about the background and interests of the people who support us, allowing us to target our resources effectively. We may use additional information from publicly available sources where it is appropriate, which allows us to make suitable requests to individuals who may be able and wish to support us further.

Profiling and screening 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. 

Marketing

It is important to us that you receive the level of information about Prostate Cancer UK that suits you. In accordance with your wishes, 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, fundraising opportunities so you can continue to help us with our fight, or to ask for a donation or other support.

Email/text marketing

If you have actively provided your consent to us along with your email address and/or mobile phone number, we may contact you via email or text message. By subscribing to Prostate Cancer UK’s emails or opting in to email communications from us, you have granted us the right to use the email for marketing purposes. 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.

Post/telephone marketing

If you have provided us with your postal address or telephone number we may send you direct mail or telephone you about our work and opportunities to support us, unless you have told us that you would prefer not to receive such information.  We actively check telephone numbers against the Telephone Preference Service.  If your telephone number is listed on the TPS, we will only contact you by telephone if you have specifically consented to receive these calls.

Legitimate interest

Before using your data, we have to decide whether we have a ‘legitimate interest’ to do so. This means that communicating with you is the best way of being able to meet our goal of stopping men dying of prostate cancer.

We think really carefully to make sure that your privacy and rights aren’t affected. Processing your data might mean analysing the information you have given us, in order that we are then able to offer you the most appropriate communications based on your preferences, such as direct marketing appeals. We will always want to ensure that we are talking to people who care about taming prostate cancer as much as we do.

Of course our ‘legitimate interests’ aren’t more important than yours; we will only process your data or communicate with you if we think you want to hear from us, and we are sure that analysing what you have told us doesn’t infringe on your privacy. And at any time, we will respect your wishes if you don’t want us to process your data or communicate with you any more. 

How you can manage communications from us

All our information and marketing emails have a clear ‘unsubscribe’ link which 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 contact us on 0800 082 1616 or at supportercare@prostatecanceruk.org.

We will never sell or share your personal details to third parties for the purpose of marketing. However, if we run an event in partnership with another named organisation your details may need to be shared with them. 

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 service and our Online Community.  This data is managed separately from other data provided to us.

The Specialist Nurses collect sensitive personal data about your health when you speak, email or send an instant message to them. They will use this information to answer questions and give information and support. They will not pass personal information on to anyone else without express permission except in exceptional circumstances to comply with the nurses’ code of professional conduct or the law. We may 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 on our Online Community we strongly recommend you avoid sharing any personal information that can be used to identify you (such as name, address, email 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 take appropriate measures to ensure that the information disclosed to us is kept secure, accurate and up to date and kept only for so long as is necessary for the purposes for which it is used, or for as long as we are legally required to keep it. We use a secure server when you make a donation via our website and have other technical controls in place to protect your personal details.

We will never share, sell or swap your details with any third parties for the purposes of their own marketing or commercial purposes.

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.

Some of our suppliers run their operations outside the European Economic Area (EEA). Although they may not be subject to the same data protection laws as companies based in the UK, we will take steps to make sure they provide a level of protection in accordance with GDPR. By submitting your personal information to us you agree with this transfer, storing and processing at a location outside the UK.

When we collect your personal information we use strict procedures and security features 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. 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 the destination 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 about you at any time, including your address and contact details, as well as changing your communication preferences by contacting our Supporter Care team on 0800 082 1616 or by emailing supportercare@prostatecanceruk.org.

Tags and cookies

A cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on your computer by the user's web browser while the user is visiting a website. We use cookies to maintain your session on the site (for example, so you can stay logged into our online community) as well as to understand how people use the site so we can improve it. If you go on a page on our website with embedded content from another site, like YouTube, that other site may set a cookie on your computer as well. You can disable cookies within your browser. See our cookie policy for more information.

A website tag is a bit of code embedded in a webpage that allows your browser to be recognised across different websites.

Tags can let us know if someone who signed up to an event on our website is someone who recently saw an ad on another site. These tags help us spend less on online advertising by telling us which ads are most effective.

Tags can also tell another site or ad platform, like Facebook or Twitter, who has visited specific pages on our site – these tags help us send ads to people who are most likely to be interested in our advertising. For example, if you’ve visited our page about March for Men, you might start seeing more ads for March for Men on Facebook. These tags may identify you to other websites based on your agreement to the terms and conditions of other sites. You can find the privacy policies of sites that use these tags here: Facebook; Twitter; Google/DoubleClick.

Using your data to make ads more relevant

We can use the data you provide to us to make sure the ads we show you on sites like Facebook and Twitter are more relevant to you. For example, we can do this by sending email addresses in a pseudonymised form to Facebook, which matches them against the data they hold on Facebook users who have agreed to this. This creates a ‘custom audience’ within the Facebook ad service that we can use in delivering ads. If you signed up to March for Men last year, you might see ads for March for Men again this year. If you’ve already signed up to March for Men, you might see a different ad to someone who hasn’t. We may also use Facebook’s ‘lookalike audience’ tool or similar tools on other ad services to show ads to people. You can opt out of this use of data in your Facebook settings (to do this, follow this link and set "Ads based on data from partners" to "Not allowed").

Using data to understand how people use our website

We use website analytics tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar to better understand how people use our site so we can make it easier to use. These tools use tags and cookies to collect data on how you use our site. These services may collect your device’s IP address in pseudonymised form, geographic information, device type, browser information, and other data about your session. This doesn’t tell us who you are, and we don’t use this information to identify individual users. If you’ve opted into Google’s data privacy policy, Google may associate your visit with other data held by Google in order to identify you across multiple devices. You can refuse this use of cookies by changing the cookie settings in your browser.

Your rights

Under the GDPR 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
  • restrict the processing of your personal data
  • question a decision made about you by automated means
  • 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 Supporter Care team at:

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. By continuing to use our website you will be deemed to have accepted such changes.

Last updated: May 2018