St Mary’s Church, Whitkirk may collect several different kinds of data about you in several different ways. This policy explains the different ways we might collect data, what we do with it and your rights to ask us to see, change or remove your data.
If you have any questions, you can always email our Data Protection Officer at [email protected].
How we collect data
At various times, especially when organising events such as baptisms, weddings and funerals, the Church may ask to collect various details from you. These are all necessary and relevant, and you can always ask whoever is collecting the data to explain why we need it.
As part of collecting this data, we may ask you if you want to receive regular messages from the Church. We do our best to keep these messages relevant, and you are always free to say no or to opt-out at any time.
In addition to collecting data during the day-to-day running of the Church, we also operate a CCTV scheme around St Mary’s Church Whitkirk Community Centre.
We collect anonymous information (such as the type of browser you are using and which pages you visit) as you use our website. This information can help us understand our visitors and help us improve our website. If you wish to opt-out from this, then you can enable Do Not Track in your browser.
Finally, if you get in touch with us (either in person, online, by phone or by post), we will store as much information as necessary to deal with your message.
What we use it for
We will use your details only for the reasons for which you provided them. We do lots of things, but some examples are:
- Contacting you about a specific event
- Maintaining the Parish’s Electoral Roll
- Claiming Gift Aid
- Delivering the Parish Magazine
- Keeping in touch with regular messages
- Sharing information if you volunteer to help in the Parish
- As part of receiving Holy Communion at home
- As part of booking the Church or Community Centre for an event.
Sometimes we may hold details from you for several things at once.
Whenever you allow us to keep in touch, you can always choose what you’re interested in hearing about and how you’re happy to be contacted. You can also change this permission and opt-out at any time.
We may use some anonymous information about you to help give us a better picture of people in the Parish. For example, we might look at the age range of people attending services. We might share these anonymised details with other organisations as part of the running of the Church and its projects.
CCTV footage is collected for the purposes of crime prevention and safety.
Who can see your data
We will never give or sell any information about you to any other organisation which isn’t using it on our behalf.
Within the Church, we take care to make sure that the only people who can see your data are those with a need to. We do this with regular reviews of our data policy and regular audits of who has access to any information.
We may choose to work with other companies or organisations to help us achieve our goals. Part of this work may involve sharing your data so that they may process it on our behalf. We will always ensure that they strictly use your data on our behalf and do not use it for other reasons. We do this by regularly reviewing all of the companies and organisations we work with to make sure they treat your data in line with this policy.
We may share CCTV footage with the police or other appropriate bodies where we believe there is a justifiable reason.
Viewing, changing and removing your data
You have the right to see any information we hold about you, ask us to change the information, and ask us to remove the information at any time.
To do any of these things, please email us at [email protected].
Updating this policy
We may change this policy at any time, but we can never change your right to say what we can do with your data. For example, we might add details of a new way we collect data, but we cannot start sending you a monthly email without you opting in.
Any questions?
If you have any questions about this policy or anything to do with how we handle your data, you can always email our Data Protection Officer at [email protected].
Policy last updated 21 January 2020 — Clarified our usage of CCTV to include reasons of crime prevention and public safety, and that we may share this data with other appropriate bodies.