Privacy & Cookie Policy

At Citizens Advice East Berkshire, we collect and use your personal information to help solve your problems, improve our services and tackle wider issues in society that affect people’s lives. 

This privacy policy explains how we use your information and what your rights are. We handle and store your personal information in line with data protection law and our confidentiality policy. The following tells you how we use your information in more detail. 


Our network 

Citizens Advice is a membership organisation made up of the national Citizens Advice charity and many local offices across England and Wales, including Citizens Advice East Berkshire. Citizens Advice East Berkshire is an independent charity and a member of the national Citizens Advice charity. 

All members of the Citizens Advice network are responsible for keeping your personal information safe and making sure data protection law is followed.  

Members of the network also run some jointly designed services and use some of the same systems to process your personal data. In these instances, we are joint data controllers for these activities. 


Jointly controlled data 

All offices in the Citizens Advice network use some joint systems to carry out our activities. These include joint case management systems, telephony platforms and more.  

Staff from a different local Citizens Advice can only access your personal information in a joint system if they have a good reason. For example, when: 

  • you go to a different office to seek advice 
  • more than one office is working together in partnership 
  • they need to investigate a complaint or incident 

We have rules and controls in place to stop people accessing or using your information when they shouldn’t. 

Tell an adviser if you’re worried about your details being on a national system. We’ll work with you to take extra steps to protect your information – for example by recording your problem without using your name. 

National Citizens Advice has a privacy notice available on their website that covers general advice and nationally managed systems, including our case management systems. This policy covers the processing we carry out in our office. 


How we use your data for advice 

This section covers how we use your data to provide you with advice. 

For general advice and nationally funded advice programmes please see the national Citizens Advice privacy notice. 


How we collect your information 

We collect your data in the following ways: 

  1. by completion of our client data collection form that you complete when you access our service face to face, or we ask you to provide if you access our service either by telephone or via our email service 
  2. from our third-party referrers who may refer you into our service for advice 


What information we collect 

We will collect general data including name/address and contact details.  In addition, we collect special category data relevant to your advice issue.   


What we use your information for 

We use your data to provide you with advice and information through both our generalist advice service and through the projects that we work on.  

In addition, we may use your data to enable us to comply with our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion responsibilities and to assist with our policy research.  Data will be anonymised unless you consent to us disclosing your personal information.  For further information on this please see the national Citizens Advice privacy notice. Citizens Advice privacy policy – Citizens Advice 


Our confidentiality policy 

At Citizens Advice we have a confidentiality policy which states that anything you tell us as part of advice will not be shared outside of the Citizens Advice network unless you provide your permission for us to do so. 

There are some exceptions to this such as needing to share: 

  • to prevent an immediate risk of harm to an individual 
  • In select circumstances if it is in the best interests of the client 
  • where we are compelled to do so by law (e.g. a court order or meeting statutory disclosures) 
  • where there is an overriding public interest such as to prevent harm against someone or to investigate a crime 
  • to defend against a complaint or legal claim 
  • to protect our name and reputation for example to provide our side of a story reported in the press 


Who we share your information with 

We may share your data with our team at National Citizens Advice.  In addition, we may share your data with our referral partners who refer clients into our service.  Any third parties including referral partners that we look to share data with, we will obtain your consent before doing so. 


Our lawful basis for using your information 

For personal data we rely upon Article 6(1)(f) – Legitimate interests and  

Article 6(1)(e) – Public task 

 

 For special category data we rely upon Article 9(2)(f) – establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims 

In addition, we rely upon Article 9(2)(g) – substantial public interest (statutory) 

and 

Article 9(2)(g) – substantial public interest (confidential counselling, advice or support) 

Where our advice, information or guidance relates to confidential wellbeing support. For example if supporting a client with issues relating to loneliness. The specific substantial public interest condition we rely on is in Data Protection Act 2018, Schedule 1, (17) ‘Counselling etc’. This condition also applies to special category data and criminal offence data. 


How we use your data for research, feedback and statistics 

This section covers how we use your data to carry out our research, feedback and statistical work. 

National Citizens Advice covers their use of data for this purpose in their privacy notice. 


How we collect your information 

We will collect your data through the completion of feedback forms. 


What information we collect 

We collect your personal data by way of name/address and contact details as part of the feedback process. 


What we use your information for 

We use the information to help us with understanding the competencies of our advice service and further training needs. 


Who we share your information with 

We may share your information with our third-party partners by way of case studies but in all cases, this information is anonymised. 


Our lawful basis for using your information 

For personal data, we rely upon Article 6(1)(f) – Legitimate interests 

We have a legitimate interest to carry out statistical analysis and research using our client data.  

 For special category data we rely upon Article 9(2)(j) Archiving, research and statistics 

As per the A6 condition. 

 

 How we use your data for fundraising and donations 

This section covers how we use your data to carry out our fundraising activities. 

National Citizens Advice covers their use of data for fundraising in their privacy notice 

 

How we use your data when using our website 

What information we collect
When you use our website we may collect information about you. This can include information: 

  • that you provide directly to us in forms 
  • about how you use our website 
  • about your geographical location 

 

How we collect your information
As well as data that you give us directly through a form or webchat, we use technology called cookies to gather information about how you’re using our website – for example, what pages you click on and what device you’re using. This helps us improve your experience of our website. 


What we use your information for
We use information about how you use our website to improve our services and inform our campaigns. 

We use the information you give to us on a web form to provide you with advice, guidance and information, as per your enquiry.  

If you sign up to our newsletter, we will use your information to send you the communications you have signed up for. 


Who we share your information with 

We don’t share any website user information with any external organisation apart from our third-party processors, such as Mailchimp who only use the data on our behalf. Third party processors don’t use data for their own purposes.


Our lawful basis for using your information 

Activity  Our lawful basis for collecting personal data 
Website use monitoring  Legitimate interests 
Sending newsletters and press releases  Legitimate interests 
Preventing malicious users of webchat  Legitimate interests 


How we use cookies on our website 

We use cookies* on this website to: 

  • track aspects of user visits, including the length of a user’s visit, their browser, geographic location and the use of the search facility on this website 
  • remember users selected contrast and/or text resizing style preferences for this website 
  • record a user’s video preferences for our YouTube videos viewed on this website. 


Cookie name, purpose and expiry details 

Cookie name 

Purpose 

Expires 
__utma  Used to determine unique visitors to this site and it is updated with each page view. Additionally, this cookie is provided with a unique ID that Google Analytics uses to ensure both the validity and accessibility of the cookie as an extra security measure.†  2 years from set/update 
__utmb  Used to establish and continue a user session with this site.†  30 minutes from set/update 
__utmc  Used to determine whether or not to establish a new session for the user.†  At end of session 
__utmz  Stores the type of referral used by a visitor to reach this site, whether via a direct method, a referring link, a website search, or a campaign such as an ad or an email link. It is used to calculate search engine traffic, ad campaigns and page navigation within this site. The cookie is updated with each page view to this site.†  6 months from set/update 
citaContrast  Stores user’s colour scheme preference.  1 year 
citaStyleJS  Stores user’s text size preference.  1 year 
eprivacy  Stops the banner message about cookies showing on every page. It is only shown on the first three pages visited, or until it is closed.  1 year 
NID  Google cookie typically written to the browser upon the loading of Google Plus One social media buttons.  At end of session 
PREF  Google cookie typically written to the browser upon the loading of Google Plus One social media buttons.  At end of session 
testSessionCookie  Stores user’s login session  1 year 
_ga_*     Google Analytics sets this cookie to store and count page views.    1 year 1 month 4 days 
_ga    The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site’s analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognize unique visitors.  1 year 1 month 4 days 

 

*cookie – a bit of information kept on a user’s computer. 

† For more information:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/concepts/gaConceptsCookies.html 

For more on how cookies work and can be managed: www.allaboutcookies.org 


How long we keep your data for 

National Citizens Advice is responsible for managing any data in joint client case records. For more information please see their privacy notice. 


Your data protection rights 

You have rights in relation to your personal data that we hold. Your rights include being able to request: 

  • Access to copies of your data 
  • Corrections are made to inaccurate data 
  • Deletion of your personal data 
  • Object to how we use your personal data 

These rights are not absolute and may not apply in every circumstance. For more information about your rights you can visit the ICO website. 

To make a data protection rights request you can do so by emailing admin@caeb.org.uk 


Raising a concern about how we use your information 

If you are concerned about how we have handled your personal information please contact us at admin@caeb.org.uk 

You can also contact the national charity if you are unhappy with how we have used your personal data or wish to raise a concern about how a local office has handled your personal data. To do so you can email us at DPO@citizensadvice.org.uk 


Contacting the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) 

You can also raise your concern with the Information Commissioner’s Office which regulates data protection law in the UK. if you are unhappy with how we have used your personal information. They will normally expect you to have made a complaint to us directly in the first instance. 

  • Address: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF 
  • Helpline number: 0303 123 1113