Our Privacy Policy

We are committed to protecting your privacy and full details on how we do this is outlined in this privacy notice. This is regularly reviewed and we may amend it from time to time. We will notify you of any changes to the policy by updating this webpage.

Background

SWB Connections understands that your privacy is important and that you care about how your personal data is used and shared. We respect the privacy of everyone who visits our website and uses our online services. 

We are committed to respecting, securing, and protecting your privacy and private data. We are also committed to being transparent about what we collect from you and how we use it.

Your rights

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and The Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) you have a number of rights with regard to your personal data; which this policy and our use of your data has been designed to uphold:

• Right to be informed – you have the right to be informed about our collection and use of your personal data.
• Right of access – you have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you. You can do this by contacting us using the above details.
• Right of rectification – you have a right to correct data that we hold about you that is inaccurate or incomplete.
• Right to be forgotten – in certain circumstances you can ask for the data we hold about you to be erased from our records.
• Right to restriction of processing – where certain conditions apply, you have a right to restrict our processing.
• Right of portability – you have the right to have the data we hold about you transferred to another organisation.
• Right to object – you have the right to object to certain types of processing (such as direct marketing).

If you have cause for complaint about our use of your data, or you would like to exercise any of your rights, then please contact us using the details provided in Section 1 and we will do our best to solve the problem for you.

If we are unable to help, or you aren’t satisfied with our response, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with the UK’s supervisory authority – The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The ICO can be contacted:

• By post – The Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, SK9 5AF
• By telephone – 0303 123 1113
• Via its website – www.ico.org.uk

What data do we collect from you?

We collect some data automatically from you when you user our website. That information is:

Your IP address, login information, browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types, geo-location information about where you might be, operating system and version.

Your URL clickstreams (the path you take through our site), products/services viewed, page response times, download errors, how long you stay on our pages, what you do on those pages, how often, and other actions.

We also collect data that you give us if you’re a member:

Contact Details – Your name, address, phone number, email address.

Financial Information – Your bank and payment details when you become a member.

Your Membership Usage – We’ll collect information on how you’ve used your membership, your business profile, and news information.

How we use your data?

Data protection law means that we can only use your data for certain reasons and where we have a legal basis to do so. Here are the reasons for which we process your data:

• Keeping Our Website Running: providing and managing your access to our website and services, personalising and tailoring your experience on our website and services. Our legal basis for this is legitimate interest (see below).
• Improving Our Website: Testing features, interacting with feedback platforms and questionnaires, managing landing pages, heat mapping our site, traffic optimization and data analysis and research, including profiling and the use of machine learning and other techniques over your data and in some cases using third parties to do this. Our legal basis for this is legitimate interest (see below).
• Marketing Purposes: We may send you emails and messages about new features, meetings and networking opportunities. You will always be able to unsubscribe from these. Our legal basis for doing that is either consent or legitimate interest (see below).
• Promoting Our Events: We may use photographs and your attendance at our events to promote them to potential customers. Our legal basis for this is legitimate interest, and you do have the right to object. Please note that each booking confirmation email that you receive prior to attending a Networking meeting includes the statement: "If you'd prefer not to be photographed/videoed, please inform the SWBC team when you arrive at the meeting."
• Answering Your Queries & Customer Support: We will use your email and contact details to answer your contact requests and queries. Our legal basis for doing so is contractual obligation.

LEGAL BASIS

We have identified a legal basis for each of the purposes for which we use your data. This is what they mean:

Legitimate Interest

Processing your data is necessary for our legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party, provided those interests are not outweighed by your rights and interests. These legitimate interests are:

• gaining insights from your behaviour on our website.
• delivering, developing and improving our service.
• enabling us to enhance, customise or modify our services and comms
• enhancing data security.
• promoting our meetings, network and business opportunities to members and potential new members.
• responding to customer enquiries, contact requests and promoting our services.

In each case, these legitimate interests are only valid if they are not outweighed by your rights and interests. You can always object to our processing of your data based on legitimate interest. If you do so and we have no other legal basis for processing your data we will stop. If we do have another legal basis we will continue to do so, subject to your legal rights.

Consent

You have given clear consent for you to process your personal data for a specific purpose. You can always withdraw your consent. You can do this by clicking on unsubscribe in any marketing email we send, or by getting in touch via the contact details listed above. If you withdraw your consent and we have no other legal basis for processing your data we will stop. If we do have another legal basis we will continue to do so, subject to your legal rights.

Storing and sharing your data

Data security is very important to us and we take appropriate security measures to safeguard and secure your data which is collected via our website and services.

We endeavour to keep all of your personal information in the European Economic Area (EEA). The EEA includes all EU Member States plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

In limited, and necessary, circumstances your information may be transferred outside of the EEA; this will only happen where it can’t be avoided. Where this does happen, we will put special protections in place. We will only move data to countries or organisations:

Where the EU Commission has deemed their data protection measures to be adequate;

Or under a contract which enforces the EU Commission approved “standard data protection clauses” which can be viewed at http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/international-transfers/transfer/index_en.htm.

We will never sell your personal data.

We will make your contact data available to other SWBC members via our website. You can control what data is available publicly in order to promote your business.

We will sometimes transfer or disclose your personal to third parties to allow us to provide our services to you (for example providing details to venues to book meetings). We only do this where we really have to.

We may sometimes contract with trusted service providers to provide goods and services on our behalf. These may include payment processing, delivery of goods, search engine facilities, advertising, marketing and IT systems. This will sometimes necessitate the transfer of your personal data to those trusted service providers.

Where we transfer your data to our trusted service providers we will have confirmed that they will apply data protection and security measures to the same standard we would. We will always impose contractual terms on all of our providers to ensure your data remains secure.

In certain limited circumstances we may be legally required to share your personal data – for example where we are involved in legal proceedings, or where we are complying with a court order, regulatory requirement, or government department with appropriate legal authority to compel us to do so.

How long we keep your data

We do not keep your personal data for any longer than it is necessary in the light of the reason(s) for which it was first collected and for our obligation under other laws.

We may need to keep your information to establish, bring or defend legal claims. We’ll therefore always keep your personal data for 7 years after the date from which it is no longer necessary for us to hold it.

At the end of that period your data will be either deleted completely or anonymised.

Exceptions to the above will be:

Where you have exercised your right to have the information removed where it applies.

Where the law requires us to keep your data for longer or delete it sooner.

Where a legal claim is in progress – we’ll keep your data until that claim is concluded.

The information we collect

Membership

When you sign up to our website we collect your name and email. Your details are stored in a secure database on our site. They are used to enable you to sign in and update these details. We also use these details to send you our newsletter (if you choose this option). We record our membership numbers anonymously to report to our stakeholders. We never share, use or process your details in any other way.

Browsing

If you simply wish to browse our website, no personal data is directly collected by us. A single cookie is used to check if you have accepted our cookie and privacy policies.

With all cookies on this site personal information is not contained in the cookies, however, it may be possible to use the information in combination with other data to build a personal profile. This is why we secure our site to prevent malicious access.

Social Sharing

If you use the social sharing buttons on our blog, some information will be collected by the social platform and their cookies will remain on our website. We use encryption on our website to help prevent access to these cookies.

In order to share, you will need to have an account with the social platform you use, and therefore will have already agreed to their terms for privacy and the use of cookies. Privacy and cookie information for the sites we connect to is here: