Community Action for Water Privacy Policy

Version 1.0 - effective from 24th August 2021.

This Privacy Policy describes what to expect when Community Action for Water collects personal data and how we handle it.

  1. Legal Basis for Processing Your Data

Unless stated otherwise, our legal basis for collecting and using your personal information is ‘consent’. We will only collect, store and use your personal information when we have your consent to do so. You have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we conducted prior to your withdrawal. We do not currently engage in any automated decision making. 

2. Information we collect

We collect personal data by asking for your consent when you:

(a) Visit our website

Information about how you use the site, such as what you have searched for and viewed on the site. Community Action for Water may use first and third-party Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies to manage our site and our services and collect analytics about how you use them. The information provided throughout this Privacy Policy about cookies also applies to these other tracking technologies. Please refer to our Cookie Policy for more details regarding our use of cookies.

We automatically collect information about the devices you use to interact with our website, via a third-party service, Google Analytics. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of our site. This information is anonymised and used for statistical purposes only. We do not make, and do not allow Google to make, any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website. The information we automatically collect includes:

  • Information about your computer and about your visits to and use of this website (including your IP address, device identifier, geographical location, browser, length of visit, page views and website navigation paths),

  • Browsing information collected through cookies, web beacons, pixels, clear gifs, and other similar technologies (collectively "Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies")

(b) Register for newsletters and email updates

When people subscribe to our e-newsletter we collect their email address (required), and optional information of name, company/university/institution, and country. The email address is used to deliver the service requested, and the optional information is used to allow us to send targeted news and events (e.g., invitation to our occasional knowledge sharing meetings, workshops and seminars). We use a third-party tool, MailChimp, to deliver our monthly e-newsletters. We gather statistics around email opening and clicks using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve our e-newsletter. For more information, please see MailChimp’s privacy notice. MailChimp is based in the USA, and Community Action for Water has signed a data protection agreement with MailChimp that recognises our mutual obligations under the GDPR.

(c) Follow us and/or contact us via our website and/or social media

If you send us a private message via our website, we will ask for your name and email address so that we can reply and address your comment/question. All personal details will be deleted after three months, and they will not be shared with other organisations unless you have given your permission to do so and it is necessary to address your comment/question. We may store anonymised information from your message to help improve the delivery of future services. For example, if you send a message with feedback regarding one of our events, we may keep an anonymised copy of this feedback to inform planning of future conferences.

If you send us a private message or direct message via social media, the message (and your personal information) will be deleted from the inbox after three months. It will not be shared with any other organisations. We may store anonymised information from your message to help improve the delivery of future services. For example, if you send a message with feedback regarding one of our events, we may keep an anonymised copy of this feedback to inform planning of future conferences.

(d) Sign up for events, and/or participate in public user posting areas (such as bulletin boards, discussion forums and surveys)

Your personal data may include: your e-mail address, name, company/university/institution address and telephone number when you register on our website or when you subscribe to our e-mail notifications and/or newsletters.

3. Use of personal data

The personal data we collect is used after we have your specific consent to do so. Or we collect personal data to provide certain facilities, services, or products, in which case the legal ground is an agreement between you and us.

We may keep your personal data gathered by consent on file for three months after the period of consent has ended. You can always opt out and/or unsubscribe to our usage of your personal data.

In case of an agreement, we keep your personal data as long as legally necessary. For example, we are required by law to keep your data for seven years for accounting purposes. We will only keep the personal data required by law and not for longer than legally necessary.

For requests for access, corrections, or deletion, please refer to the "Your Rights" section of this Privacy Policy.

4. Disclosure of Personal Information

Unless legally obliged (e.g., to the police), we will not disclose personal data and information without consent. 

5. Security

We have implemented generally accepted standards of technology and operational security to protect personal data from loss, misuse, alteration, or destruction. Only authorised personnel and third-party service providers are provided access to personal data. These employees and service providers are required to treat this information as confidential. Despite these precautions however, we cannot guarantee that unauthorised persons will not obtain access to your personal data.

6. Children

We strongly believe in protecting the privacy of children. We do not knowingly collect or maintain personal information from persons under 13 years of age, and no part of our website, blog or social media are specifically directed towards persons under 13 years of age. We will take appropriate steps to delete any personal information of persons less than 13 years of age.

7. Your rights

To make a request to Community Action for Water for any personal information we may hold, please contact us using the information at the end of this page. We will provide this information within one month of your request. If you agree, we will try to deal with your request informally, for example by providing you with the specific information you need over the telephone. 

If we do hold that information about you, you can ask us to correct any mistakes. You can also ask us to remove any information you no longer wish us to have. We will correct or remove any information within one month  of you informing us of the correction/removal. If you object to data accuracy or a processing purpose, we will immediately halt the processing of your data until your concerns are resolved. 

Individuals can request their data in a suitable digital format, sent either directly to them or to a third party. We will do this within one month of your request. 

8. Complaints or queries 

Community Action for Water tries to meet the highest standards when collecting and using personal information. For this reason, we take any complaints we received about this very seriously. We encourage people to bring it to our attention if they think that our collection or use of the information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate. We would also welcome any suggestions for improving our procedures. 

To object to the processing of your data, please contact us using the information at the end of this page. We will respond to your message and concerns within one month.

9. Changes to Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to make changes to this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will alert you to any such changes by updating this Privacy Policy. If we make material changes to this Privacy Policy that increase our rights to use personal data that we have previously collected about you, we will obtain your consent either through an email to your registered email address or by prominently posting information about the changes on our sites.

Contact us

If you have any questions about our Privacy Policy, please contact us at: Community Action for Water, Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Sciences (ICOSS),  219 Portobello, Broomhall, Sheffield S1 4DP. Email: cafw@sheffield.ac.uk.