This Policy contains important information about your personal rights to privacy. Please read it carefully to understand how we use your personal data. We may update this Policy from time to time without notice to you, so please check it regularly.

The provision of your personal data to us is voluntary. However, without providing us with your personal data, you will be unable to keep up to date with the HOWCH project. The purpose of this policy is to outline how HOWCH has established measures to protect your privacy and information rights.

HOWCH understands and respects the importance of your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains what personal information we may collect from you, how we will look after that information, and how we may use your data. The following Policy tells you about your privacy rights, and how the law protects you. For the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998 and the General Data Protection Regulation 2018, HOWCH is the Data Controller of your personal information under European Union and UK data protection law. Please note that all personal data captured will be used and held in accordance with the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998.

What information will HOWCH collect from you?
The information we will typically collect will consist of:

Your name & email address Details of your visits to our site including, but not limited to, traffic data, location data, weblogs and other communication data, whether this is required for our own billing purposes or otherwise and the resources that you access

We explicitly outline that by consenting to receive marketing communications, you are consenting for your personal information to be processed. This is outlined at the point you provide your data and marketing contact consent. If you do not want us to contact you in the future you can request we stop this activity by emailing info@howch.org

When will HOWCH collect information from you?
We will collect personal information from you when you sign up to our newsletter or when you call or email us enquiring about the project.

How will HOWCH use your personal information?
We use information held about you in the following ways:

To provide you with information that is relevant to you, and also to deal with your requests and enquiries. To provide you with information and updates related to the HOWCH project.

We will only contact you by email. You can change or update your contact preferences, or withdraw consent at any time, simply by emailing info@howch.org

We will never share or sell your personal information with third-parties. All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers.

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 data transmitted to our site and any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

We will retain your personal data for a period of approximately 7 years.

IP Addresses & Cookies
We may collect information about your computer, including where available your IP address, operating system and browser type, for system administration and to report aggregate information to our advertisers. This is statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns, and does not identify any individual.

For the same reason, we may obtain information about your general internet usage by using a cookie file which is stored on the hard drive of your computer. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive. They help us to improve our site and to deliver a better and more personalised service. They enable us:

i. To estimate our audience size and usage pattern
ii. To store information about your preferences, and so allow us to customise our site according to your individual interests.

iii. To speed up your searches.
iv. To recognise you when you return to our site. You may refuse to accept cookies by activating the setting on your browser which allows you to refuse the setting of cookies. However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our site. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system may issue cookies when you log on to our site.

On our site we currently use cookies to enable CMS logins, the ‘Share this’ widget, comments on posts, and the use of forms on the site. We also use the Google Analytics cookie and so we can understand from analytics how users visit and interact with the site.
How is your information disclosed?

We may disclose your personal information to any member of our team or to relevant third parties who will supply the travel arrangements or other services you request, to Government bodies and other authorities to whom we are legally obliged to pass your data (e.g. border agencies of countries you intend to visit) and to relevant third parties for the purpose of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.

How can you access the personal data we hold about you?
You have the right to see what personal data we hold about you. The Data Protection Act 1998 and the General Data Protection Regulation 2018, give you the right to check that your personal data is being processed lawfully (“subject access right”). Your subject access right can be exercised in accordance with the Act. To obtain a copy of the personal information we hold about you, please email info@howch.org who is the Data Controller. This may be subject to a fee of £10 to meet our costs in providing you with details of any personal data we hold about you.

Changes to our privacy policy
We reserve the right to update or alter this privacy policy from time to time without notice to you.

This policy was last updated in November 2020