Essex Book Festival Respects Your Privacy

Essex Book Festival (EBF) understands that your personal information and privacy is important to you, and therefore makes every effort to ensure that the information you share with us is recorded accurately, retained securely, used only according to your wishes and only held for as long as it is needed. This Privacy Statement outlines how we collect your data and what we do with it.

We protect your personal information and adhere to all current data protection act legislation with respect to protecting privacy and processing data. EBF does not give out, sell or trade any personal data with external organisations, or share your personal data with any third parties including project partners without your consent.

Our mailing list

When you sign up to our e-mailing list EBF will only ask for your email address, as that is all we need to be able to contact you by email and keep you up to date with our activities. Once you have opted in, we will send you regular email updates about our programme and the festival, any special news bulletins we think may be of interest to you, opportunities to participate in projects, and event invitations.

To deliver our newsletter we use a third party provider Mailchimp, who hold your email address at a secure location. We use Mailchimp software to gather statistics on opening rates and clicks on links, which help us monitor and improve our communications. Individuals can unsubscribe at any time from newsletters by clicking the unsubscribe link on each e-newsletter.

You can view Mailchimp’s privacy and security notice at mailchimp.com/legal/privacy.

Google Analytics

When someone visits essexbookfestival.org.uk, we use Google Analytics to collect statistical data and details of visitor patterns which tell us which parts of our website visitors use most often. None of this information uses, or requires the use, of personal information and is processed in a way that does not identify individuals. We do not make any attempts to find out the identities of individuals visiting our website.

Security and Storage

The transmission of information via the Internet or email is not completely secure. However, once we have received your personal data, we will take all reasonable steps to prevent unauthorised access. We will process, disclose or share your personal data only if required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with legal requirements or legal process served on us or the website.

EBF uses Dropbox and Google Drive for file sharing, which is a secure place for our files. However, any sensitive data related to personal information about our audiences and those we work with will be kept in a secure password protected office archive for extra security.

More information about Dropbox’s privacy can be found at dropbox.com/privacy

Google’s Terms of Service is at google.com/drive/terms-of-service, and their privacy policy can be found at policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-GB&gl=uk

Your Rights and Information Requests

You have several rights, which we will endeavour to adhere to, and we will aim to respond to information requests within one month. Please note that we will need to ask for valid proof of identification before proceeding with any requests. Your rights are detailed below:

Right to be Informed – Individuals should be informed of how their data is collected, stored and processed in a clear, accessible way (the purpose of this Privacy Statement)

Right to Access – Individuals can request access to a copy of their data in electronic form and details of how it is processed

Right to Rectification – Individuals are entitled to have their data corrected if it is inaccurate or incomplete

Right to Erasure – Also known as ‘the right to be forgotten’, this permits individuals to request the deletion of their data

Right to Restrict Processing – Individuals can request a halt on processing if they object to accuracy or purpose but you can still hold the data until resolved (this would be an immediate action by us)

Right to Data Portability – Individuals can request their data in a suitable digital format, sent either directly to them or to a third party

Right to Object – Individuals can object to the processing of their data

Who to contact

We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate and up-to-date, and you may ask us to correct or remove information at any time. If you wish to exercise any of your rights in relation to the data we hold about you, as listed above, then please do not hesitate to get in touch. Contact EBF Manager  [email protected] who is acting as the data controller for the organisation.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) if you believe your data has been processed in a way that does not comply with data protection. You can do so by calling the ICO helpline on 0303 123 1113 or via their website at ico.org.uk