Privacy policy.
This is the privacy policy for Effective Altruism UK (“EA UK”, “we”, “our”, “us”). This Policy explains how and why we collect and use personal information, and what we do to ensure it is kept private and secure when we do so.
This policy governs all pages hosted at ealondon.com, effectivealtruism.uk and pages hosted on any sub-domain (our “Websites”). When you visit any of our Websites, we may collect personal information from you, either directly, or passively as you browse. Please read this policy to understand what personal information we collect and how we use it.
CONTENTS
WHO WE ARE
THE PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT
COOKIES
HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
LEGITIMATE INTERESTS
KEEPING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION SAFE
STORAGE AND RETENTION
DISCLOSING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
DISCLOSURES REQUIRED BY LAW
YOUR RIGHTS
UPDATING THIS POLICY
1. WHO WE ARE
We are Effective Altruism UK, a registered charity in England and Wales, (Charity Number 1170614). Our registered office is at Flat 19 Jarman House, Jubilee Street, London, E1 3BL. For the purposes of data protection law, we will be a controller of the personal information we hold about you. This means we make decisions about how and why your information is used, and have a legal duty to make sure that your rights are protected when we do so. See section 6 for more details about how we keep it secure.
If you have any questions about our Privacy Policy, please get in touch with us by writing to us at our registered address given above or contacting us via our contact form.
2. THE PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT
We collect the following types of personal information:
INFORMATION YOU GIVE US
If you apply to attend any of our events, we may ask you for personal information about why you would like to attend and information about your profession. If your application to attend is accepted, we may ask you to pay and submit personal information to the event-management app we use, Eventbrite or Luma. However, we will be able to access the personal information you provide through Eventbrite or Luma. You can find out more about how these external event management platforms use your personal information by having a look at the Eventbrite Privacy Policy and Luma Privacy Policy.
If you attend any of the EA events which are put on by our partners, we will have access to the personal information you provide them in order to keep track of who is attending.
Our application forms may ask for personal information about you relating to the the subject of your application. If you contact us for any reason, we may keep a record of that correspondence.
When you make a donation, the information you have given to us is passed to our payment processing partner to process according to our instructions. We do keep a copy of this. However, we will never store your card details – these are held by our third-party payment provider. If you would like your donation to be gift-aided, we will ask for your UK taxpayer status, as this information is needed to comply with our obligations under UK tax and charity law. It will also be shared with HMRC for tax regulation purposes.
TECHNICAL DATA
When you visit any of our Websites, we may collect technical data about the device you are using, including where available your IP address, operating system and browser type. This is used for system administration and to improve the look and feel of our Websites. See section 3 for more about the technical data we collect through cookies and other web beacons.
SPECIAL CATEGORY DATA (ALSO KNOWN AS SENSITIVE PERSONAL INFORMATION)
Unless you specifically provide it to us as part of your application to attend an event, we do not collect any special categories of personal information about you (this includes details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data). Nor do we collect any information about criminal convictions and offences. If you apply to attend an event and have requested reasonable accommodations in connection with a disability, we may store the information you provide to us about your disability in order to provide those accommodations if we can.
3. COOKIES
A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or device, with your permission.
We use the following types of cookies:
Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our Websites. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our Websites or make a donation. You can refuse to accept all or some cookies by modifying settings within your browser (for guidance on how to do this visit http://www.aboutcookies.org/). However, if you block strictly necessary cookies, you may be unable to access certain parts of our Websites.
Analytical/performance cookies. These cookies allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our Websites. This helps us to improve the way they work, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
We use third-party services such as Google Analytics to help us improve the look and feel of our Websites. Google Analytics places a cookie on your browser which keeps track of certain details about your visit to our Websites. These include what Google search criteria you used to find them in the first place, how long you stay on certain pages, and what website you visit immediately after leaving our own. This data will be aggregated and anonymised to the greatest extent possible.
For more information about Google analytics, please visit Google’s Privacy Policy. If you wish to opt out of being tracked by Google, you can do that by downloading the browser add-on located here.
4. HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal information in the following circumstances:
with your consent or explicit consent;
where we need to perform a contract with you e.g. when you give a donation to one of our charities which we then re-grant on your behalf;
where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests (see the "Legitimate Interests" section below); or
where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.
If you agree, we will send you periodic e-mails about EA UK’s activities, upcoming events, annual retrospectives and other information that we think you might be interested in. You can opt-out of receiving these e-mails at any time by clicking the appropriate link in the e-mail itself, or contacting us.
We may use personal information held about you in the following ways:
to process donations you make;
to fulfil any orders you make (for example, if we are giving away copies of a book and you request that a copy be sent to you, we will use the mailing address you provide);
to evaluate your application to attend an event or receive grant funding for a project;
to comply with auditing and gift aid requirements;
to ensure that content from our Websites is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your device; or
to respond to queries you send us.
When contacting you for any of the above purposes we may do so by phone or email, unless you tell us otherwise.
Your data will be treated in accordance with applicable data protection law. It will only be shared with third-parties as described in this policy. We will never sell your personal information.
5. LEGITIMATE INTERESTS
We may rely on legitimate interests to process your personal information, provided that your interests do not override our own. UK data protection law requires us to explain what these interests are.
Where we rely on legitimate interests, these interests are:
to keep our records updated and to study how our Websites and other services are used;
to administer and protect the charity and web presence (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting);
to inform our marketing strategies; and
to best serve our charitable aims in the most efficient manner possible.
6. KEEPING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION SAFE
We employ a variety of physical and technical measures to keep your personal information safe and to prevent unauthorised access to, use of or disclosure of it. We control who has access to your data (using both physical and electronic means).
7. STORAGE AND RETENTION
WHERE WE STORE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
We store your personal information electronically. We take steps to protect that information against loss, unauthorised access, use, modification or disclosure and against other misuse. Employees of EA UK will be able to access this information.
HOW LONG WE KEEP IT
We collect and store personal information for purposes connected with our business. As such, we will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary for those purposes.
We regularly audit the personal information we hold and delete that which is not necessary. The below explains how long we keep it.
Personal Information Retention Period
Collected from your applications to, and attendance at, our events - 5 years
Collected when you contact us for other reasons - 5 years
8. DISCLOSING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIPTIONS
If you sign-up to our monthly newsletter, we use MailChimp, Squarespace and/or Substack to manage the process of sending the completed newsletters out. You can opt out at any time by clicking the appropriate link in every newsletter we send you.
OTHER DISCLOSURES
If we choose to sell, transfer, or merge parts of the charity or our assets, we may disclose your personal information to the new owners. Alternatively, we may seek to merge with another charity. If a change like that happens, then the new owners may use your personal information in the same way as set out in this policy.
9. DISCLOSURES REQUIRED BY LAW
We are subject to the law like everyone else. We may be required to give information to legal authorities if they so request or if they have the proper authorisation such as a search warrant or court order.
We also may need to retain and disclose certain personal information about you to regulatory authorities and to appropriate agencies to conduct anti-money laundering and trade sanction checks and to assist with fraud prevention. We will disclose this information as is required by law.
10. YOUR RIGHTS
We want you to remain in control of your personal information. Part of this is making sure you understand your legal rights, which are as follows:
where your personal information is processed on the basis of consent, the right to withdraw that consent;
the right to confirmation as to whether or not we are holding any of your personal information and, if we are, to obtain a copy of it;
from 25 May 2018, the right to have certain data provided to you in a portable electronic format (where technically feasible);
the right to have inaccurate personal information rectified;
the right to object to your personal information being used for marketing or profiling, or on the basis of our or a third party’s legitimate interests;
the right to restrict how your personal information is used; and
the right to be forgotten, which allows you to have your personal information erased in certain circumstances (though this is not an absolute right and may not apply if we need to continue using it for a lawful reason).
If you would like further information about any of your rights or wish to exercise them, please contact us using the details given in section 1. However, please note that these rights do not apply where you have given your explicit consent for us to transfer personal information about you to one of our third-party charities located outside of the EEA. Please see section 8 above for more detail about this.
Please also keep in mind that there are exceptions to the rights above and, though we will always try to respond to your satisfaction, there may be situations where we are unable to do so (for example, because the information no longer exists or there is an exception which applies to your request).
If you feel that your rights have been infringed, you should contact the UK Information Commissioner's Office, which oversees data protection compliance in the UK. Details of how to do this can be found at www.ico.org.uk.
11. UPDATING THIS POLICY
We may update this Policy at any time. When we do, we will revise the updated date at the bottom of this page. We encourage users to frequently check this page for any changes to stay informed about how we are helping to protect the personal information we hold.
This policy was last updated on 17th September 2024.