The Seabird Group is a registered Charity in England and Wales (260907) and in Scotland (SC0 038820).

This privacy policy sets out how the Seabird Group and its associated journal ‘Seabird’ complies with its data protection legal requirements as a Data Controller. You can always access this statement from the bottom of every page on our website or by requesting it directly. This document was last updated on 19/07/2020.

The Seabird Group is committed to protecting your privacy and security. This policy explains how and why we use your personal data, to ensure you remain informed and in control of your information. Any privacy policy changes will be published on the Privacy Policy page of our website www.seabirdgroup.org.uk .

You can decide not to receive communications or change how we contact you at any time. If you wish to do so, please contact us via membership@seabirdgroup.org.uk.

The information we collect about you

You can visit the Seabird Group website (www.seabirdgroup.org.uk/) without identifying yourself or revealing any personal information. However, when you purchase your annual membership, register for conferences, apply for a grant or simply change membership details, you will share personal information with us. Once you choose to provide us with any information by which you can be identified, then you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy policy. Please read our privacy policy carefully to get a clear understanding of how we collect, use, protect or otherwise handle your personal information.

Our website contains links to other websites. Our privacy policy applies only to our website, so if you click on a link to another website, you should read their privacy policy.

What type of personal information do we collect and when does this happen?

When you order a membership subscription, register for conferences, or purchase back copies of the journal or other merchandise, as appropriate you will be asked to enter your name, email address and mailing address.

If you opt to pay for either through our site, you will be asked to provide debit/credit card information through Paypal.

Memberships are maintained via a third party application MemberMojo with the privacy policy https://membermojo.co.uk/mm/help/privacy.

Successful grant applicants will be asked to provide bank details to process payment.

How do we use your information?

• • • To send our Newsletters and journal, Seabird, to all our members.
    • To be able to process your transactions.
    • To produce anonymised/aggregated statistics about our membership for internal use only.
    • When you submit an article to our Newsletter or our journal Seabird.
    • To send periodic emails regarding your membership status, response to grant applications, subscription to our journal Seabird, or regarding the Seabird Group’s news and our conferences.

We need also need to collect your basic personal data in order to assess your grant applications, award grants effectively, pay grants promptly and monitor grant progress. We ask for your contact details so that we can be sure the application is genuine and to provide us with a point of contact. Such information is required to ensure the legitimacy of your interest in relation to our grant programmes and ‘to form the basis of an agreement following the award of the grant. The Seabird Group has to meet statutory requirements in providing information to financial auditors and being able to provide evidence of who the grants have been awarded to and for how much.

How do we store and protect visitor and personal information

Our website hosted by WebFusion is updated automatically by the service provider with every new release and regularly checked for any plugin updates. This will prevent security holes and known vulnerabilities in order to make your visit to our site as safe as possible.

Your personal information is stored on a password-protected cloud server which is secured by the web host and on a back-up encrypted hard drive. Your personal information is only accessible by the Membership Secretary, Secretary, and Newsletter Editor (for current information of who holds each position, see www.seabirdgroup.org.uk/about-us/contacts). Those who have special access rights to our systems are required to keep the information confidential and not to store information on personal computers. If you submit a manuscript to our journal Seabird, the personal information you provide during submission will also be accessed by our journal Editor.

All financial transactions except payment of grants are processed securely through Paypal and are not stored or processed on our servers. Successful grant applicants will be asked to provide bank details to process payment, which will be only seen by the treasurer. This will be stored securely and deleted after the payment is processed. Transactions are made through a business account with the Royal Bank of Scotland.

We will only store your personal information for as long as it is required for the purposes it was collected for. How long information will be stored for depends on the nature of the information collected and what it is being used for. We will undertake regular reviews of the personal information that we hold and will delete personal information that is no longer required to be held (whilst maintaining a record of any preferences expressed by you not to be contacted).

Personal information of delegates of our Conferences are held by the home institution of the main conference organisers (e.g. their university). They may share with us a list of delegates, which we will delete in the calendar year after the conference year. For historical purposes we archive depersonalized data, e.g. the number of delegates per country.

We store the personal information of active members, and remove names and personal information of lapsed members after five calendar years. For historical purposes, we archive depersonalized data only. We store the names of grant applicants for historical purposes but will delete any other personal information they have shared five calendar years after their application. We store the names of authors who submit manuscripts to our journal Seabird for historical purposes, but will delete any other personal information they have shared five calendar years after the year of submission (except the information printed alongside their article on the digital and hard copies of the journal).

Do we use cookies?

We use cookies in the conventional way to authenticate users on the site, but we do not track people or use them in any other way other than for authentication. A cookie is a small file that can be stored by your browser on your computer’s hard disk or on a website server. Our cookies do not in themselves recognise the individual user but will recognise the computer you are using so that we know when you are returning to the Seabird Group website. Such cookies do not retrieve information about you stored on your hard drive and do not corrupt or damage your computer or computer files. You are not obliged to accept a cookie that we send you, and you can in fact modify your browser’s setup so that it will not accept cookies.

If you disable the use of cookies in your browser, we cannot guarantee that all parts of our website will work.

Third Party Disclosure

The Seabird Group will never sell, trade or otherwise transfer your personal data to outside parties.

Third party links

We do not include or offer third party products or services on our website

Your rights

Users can visit our site anonymously.

Whilst we collect and process personal information in order to undertake our work, the Seabird Group wish to protect your rights and here we set out a brief description of them.

You have the right to confirmation as to whether or not we have your personal information and, if we do, the right to obtain a copy of the personal information we hold (this is known as a Subject Access Request).

You have the right to request that we correct any personal information you believe is inaccurate, and that we complete the information you believe is incomplete.

You have the right to specify some of the purposes for which we may contact you; and/or to specify some of the channels by which we may contact you.

You have the right to request that we remove some or all of your personal information.

Under certain conditions (see details on www.ico.org.uk), you have the right to request that we restrict the processing of your personal data, to object to us processing of your personal data, and to request that we transfer the data that we have collected to another organization, or directly to you.

Should you wish to make such requests, please contact dataprotection@seabirdgroup.org.uk

How to contact the appropriate authority

Should you wish to report a complaint or if you feel that the Seabird Group has not addressed your concern in a satisfactory manner, you may contact the Information Commissioner’s Office which regulates and enforces data protection law in the UK. Details of how to do this can be found at www.ico.org.uk .