PLEASE READ THIS NOTICE CAREFULLY.
It explains what data we collect, how we use your personal information and your legal rights relating to your personal information.
Who are we?
We are The Improvement Service, a company limited by guarantee and registered in Scotland (Company No. SC287978) and operating from West Lothian Civic Centre, Howden South Road, Livingston EH54 6FF. We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.
This notice (along with any Terms and Conditions where appropriate, together our Terms of Use) applies to your use of our website and the services we offer.
Please note that any reference to Data Protection Law we make in this document includes the Data Protection Act 1998 and all associated legislation including the General Data Protection Regulation (“Data Protection Law”).
We are required by law to treat your personal information legally and fairly. We must also give you the means to correct it if it is wrong, allow you to object to our processing it and, in some instances, delete it from our systems if you ask us to do so.
WE ARE YOUR DATA CONTROLLER
For the purposes of Data Protection Law, we are the Data Controller in relation to the processing of your personal data.
What information do we collect about you?
We collect and process data about you in different ways, depending on the service you are using. We collect data through the following services:
- Contacting us via our website or dedicated email address
- Surveys that we run
- Our website
Please refer to the relevant section below.
Contacting us
Personal data you may give us when you contact us:
- Name
- Email address
- Phone number
If you want to contact us you can email us directly at scots.support@improvementservice.org.uk. To allow us to contact you and keep you up to date with your request you must give us a valid email address.
We will store your personal information securely and use it to follow up on any requests or to contact you for more information.
Our legal basis for processing your information is that we have a legitimate interest to communicate effectively with our partners and customers to ensure that we meet our business objectives and project commitments.
Surveys
Personal data you give us when you complete one of our surveys:
- Name
- Email address
- IP address
Our legal basis for processing your personal data is that you consent to provide us with the information so that we can process survey responses and analyse the results.
Website
We use Google Analytics to collect standard internet log information and information about how you use the site. The information we collect is:
- Your IP address and hostname
- Which web browser you are using
- The pages on our website that you visit
- The address of the website that you reached us from, including any search term used
Our legal basis for processing your personal data in this way is that we have a legitimate interest to understand how people are using our website so that we can improve the content and services we offer.
How do we use the data we collect?
We use personal data held about you in the following ways:
- To canvass your views and opinions on a range of services that we or others might offer;
- To help you with any queries you may have in relation to the SCOTS website and the services we offer
- To develop and improve the website and the services we offer;
- To fulfil our legal obligations.
Disclosure of your personal data
We will not sell your information or disclose it for direct marketing purposes.
We will disclose the personal data we process about you to the following third parties for the purposes indicated in the table below:
| Personal Data | Recipient | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Name, email address, IP address | The SmartSurvey service | To allow you to participate in our surveys |
| IP address | Google Analytics | To analyse our website visitors, where they have come from and what content they find most useful |
Disclosure to other parties
In addition, we may disclose your personal data to third parties:
- If we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal or regulatory obligation or request;
- In order to:
- enforce or apply any Terms of Use or other agreements you have agreed to with us or to investigate potential breaches; or
- protect the rights, property or safety of our users or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection.
Where we store your personal data
Personal data you provide to us is stored on computer equipment in the UK with the following exceptions:
We use the Google Analytics service. This means that some of your data is transferred to servers outside the European Union/EEA. More information about these services is included below.
How long we will keep your data for
The following table shows what personal information we hold and how long it is held for.
| Personal Data | How long we hold it |
|---|---|
| Contact data | Retained for the period it takes us to respond to your query satisfactorily or after one calendar year |
| Survey | 1 year |
| Website analytics logs | 26 months |
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your personal data in transit; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your personal data, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access to your personal data.
Your rights
You have the following rights:
- You can seek to restrict our processing of your personal data or object to us processing your personal data at any time by contacting us at scots.support@improvementservice.org.uk or by writing to us at our main office address listed above.
- You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) if you think that we have infringed your rights. You can find more information about reporting a matter to the ICO at the following link: https://ico.org.uk/
- You have the right to access personal data held by us about you. If you wish to view, correct or update any information we hold about you please get in touch by email to scots.support@improvementservice.org.uk or by writing to us at our main office address listed above.
- In certain circumstances you have the right to ask us to delete all the information we hold about you. If you wish to do so, please get in touch by email to scots.support@improvementservice.org.uk or by writing to us at our main office address listed above. Please note that we may be obliged to retain some information about you to allow us to fulfil our legal obligations.
Please be aware that we are legally obliged to verify your identity using reasonable means before you can exercise your rights.
Our website
Our website may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of third parties. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites and any services that may be accessible through them have their own privacy notices and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these notices or for any personal data that may be collected through these websites or services, such as contact and location data. Please check these notices before you submit any personal data to these websites or use these services.
Social media plugins
Our website may use Social Media plugins (plugins) for Twitter, Youtube and others. If you call up one of our website pages which has a plugin of this kind, your browser sets up a direct link to the social media provider servers. The content of the plugin is passed by the provider directly to your browser and integrated by it into the website. This means that we have no influence over the data that they obtain with the help of this plugin.
We therefore inform you that through the plugin, the provider obtains information about you, even if you do not own a profile with the provider or are not logged in at the time. This information, including your IP address, will be passed from your browser directly to the provider and stored on its servers. The server location may be outside the European Union/EEA.
Google Analytics
Our website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google Inc. ("Google"). Google Analytics also uses cookies. The information generated by the cookie about your use of this website is usually transmitted to and stored by Google on servers outside the European Union/EEA. Google will use this information to evaluate your use of our website, to compile reports on website activity and to provide other services related to website activity and internet usage to us. The IP address provided as part of Google Analytics will not be merged with other Google data.
You can prevent the storage of cookies by disabling them in your browser. You can find out how to do this by visiting http://www.allaboutcookies.org
Please note that if you disable cookies, some of the functionality on our website may not be available to you or may not work as expected.
In addition, you may prevent the collection of analytics data by Google by downloading an add-on for your browser by visiting https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en-GB
Once you install the add-on, an opt-out cookie will be set which prevents the future collection of your data when visiting our website.
For more information about Google’s Terms of Use and Privacy, please visit https://www.google.com/analytics/learn/privacy.html
Cookies
We uses cookies (small text files that we place on your device) to help provide our services to you. For more information, please read our Cookie Policy.
Changes to privacy notice
Any changes we may make to our privacy notice in the future will be posted on our website and, where appropriate, notified to you when you next visit. The new terms may be displayed on-screen and you may be required to read and accept them to continue your use of our services.
Contact
Questions, comments and requests regarding this privacy notice are welcomed and should be addressed by email to scots.support@improvementservice.org.uk or in writing to our main office address above.
Last Updated: 7 February 2024