SPARCollective Privacy Notice

SPARCollective (otherwise known as SPARC, or “Scottish Prisoner Advocacy and Research Collective”) take your privacy seriously. We will only use your personal information when necessary and only with your permission. We do this to help inform our policy and advocacy work.

We only ask for the information we need. We always let you decide what you’re comfortable telling us, treat it as confidential and let you decide how you are willing to let us use it. We might use the following:

● your name and contact details (such as email or twitter handle) – so we can keep in
touch with you
● details about issues that may be causing you problems, which may include details such
as the names of particular prisons that you refer to
● information such as your gender or ethnicity

If you don’t want to give us certain information, you don’t have to. For example, if you want to stay anonymous in your interactions with us, we will not record some or any personal information, however not providing your details can affect our ability to communicate with you.

When we record and use your personal information we:

● only access it when we have a good reason
● only share what is necessary and relevant
● never sell it to anyone

We handle and store your personal information in line with the law.

Legal Basis for Handling Personal Data
The legal basis for us to process your personal data is: Consent (the individual has given clear consent for you to process their personal data for a specific purpose).

The main reason we hold and handle your personal data is to allow us to communicate with you, and to use the information that you provide us with – anonymously and with your permission – to inform our policy and advocacy work.

We only access your information for other reasons if we really need to – for example:

● to get feedback from you about our services
● to help us improve our services

All SPARCollective directors and staff accessing data have all read and agreed to the data protection policy, so that they are aware of the need to handle your data sensitively and securely.

When we share your information with other organisations
We do not share your personal data with other organisations. We may share information about the problems that you face as part of our advocacy and policy work. We will do this anonymously.

If we’re concerned about yours or someone else’s safety
SPARC does not provide frontline support and we would normally not expect to be dealing with people in crisis. However, if something you’ve told us makes us think you or someone you know might be at serious risk of harm, we may have to tell someone else – for example if we think you might hurt yourself or someone else. We would discuss this with you and not make any decision about this without consulting you and telling you what we are going to do.

Storing your information: If you contact us by phone, email or social media (Facebook or Twitter)
Emails are stored on our gmail account. Similarly, contacts made by social media will be stored on those accounts. These accounts are password protected.
Anonymised information you share with us will be held in a password protected document in our dropbox account, and on some occasions on the computers of SPARCollective directors or staff. These computers and this dropbox account are also password protected.

We will keep the emails and messages that you send us for 6 months from the date that you email us, unless we ask for your permission to store these for longer.

Contact us about your data
You can contact us at any time and ask us:

● what information we’ve stored about you
● to change or update your details
● to delete your details from our records

Please email us at [email protected]

Policy History
Drafted July-August 2020; reviewed and revised August 2020; discussed and provisionally approved 27 August 2020; proofed, finalised and published 28/8/2020.