Privacy Policy

• Background/Introduction
• Commitment
• Scope
• Responsibilities
• What and how information is collected
• Contact
• Information sharing
• Information retention
• Can I find out what personal information A4e holds about me?
• Cookies and IP Addresses
• Monitoring and Review of this Policy

If you would like any of our policies in any other format such as another language, Braille or large print, please contact a member of our policy team who will be happy to assist.

Background/Introduction

A4e is committed to protecting your personal information when you are using our services. This Privacy Policy relates to our use of any personal information you provide to us online, via phone or text, by email, in letters or other correspondence.

In order to provide you with the full range of our services, we sometimes need to collect information about you.

A4e’s website may contain links to other websites owned and operated by third parties. These third party websites have their own privacy policies, including cookies, and we urge you to review them. We cannot guarantee that the privacy policies of these websites meet our standards, and do not accept any responsibility or liability for the privacy practices of third party websites and your use of such websites is at your own risk.

Commitment

A4e is committed to safeguarding your personal information. We are legally obliged to use your information in line with all laws concerning the protection of personal information, including the Data Protection Act 1998 and our Data Protection Policy.

Scope

This policy applies to anyone whose personal information is collected by A4e; this includes both past and present staff, customers and suppliers and anybody else who may supply data.

Responsibilities

The Management Board takes full and final responsibility for:

• Adopting the Privacy Policy.
• Ensuring that all our staff are fully aware of this policy.
• Ensuring that we meet all our legal responsibilities.

The Group Information Security Officer will be responsible for:

• Integrating the Privacy policy into our advice to all our clients.
• Ensuring that any sub-contractors that we employ take account of the privacy policy in their activity.
• Ensuring that all our staff are fully aware of this policy.
• Ensuring that we meet all our legal responsibilities with regard to this policy.
• Ensuring that we are continuously updating our practices with the most recent information and guidance.

A4e Managers and staff are responsible for ensuring:

• All staff are fully aware of this policy
• Customers, employees and third parties have the right to be informed that processing is being undertaken.
• Customers, employees and third parties have the right of access to their personal information.
• Customers, employees and third parties have the right to prevent processing in certain circumstances.

What and how information is collected

When you participate in, access or sign up to any of A4e’s services, activities or online content, such as newsletters, competitions, live chats, message boards, telephone or text, we may receive personal information about you. This can consist of personal identifying information such as your name, email address, postal address, telephone/fax number, date of birth or place of work etc depending on the activity.

By submitting your details, you enable A4e (and where applicable its contractors) to provide you with the services, activities or online content you receive.

Please note that sometimes we will require you to provide additional personal information, and sometimes sensitive personal information (e.g. medical information) in order to provide a service, activity, or online content that meets your needs. When we do this we will provide further information as to why we are collecting your information and how we will use it.

A4e also uses cookies and collects IP addresses from visitors to A4e’s website.

A4e will use your personal information for a number of purposes including the following:

• to provide our services, activities or online content and to deal with your requests and enquiries;
• for “service administration purposes”, which means that A4e may contact you for reasons related to the service, activity or online content you have signed up for, (e.g. to provide you with password reminders or to notify you that a particular service, activity or online content has been suspended for maintenance);
• to provide you with information about our services, activities or online content; and
• to analyse and improve the services offered by A4e.

Where we intend to use your personal information for any other purposes, we will notify you first. You may withhold or withdraw your consent for the use of your personal information for purposes other than those listed above by making a request to the Information Security team.

Contact

A4e may contact you:

• in relation to any service or activity you have signed up for in order to ensure that we can deliver the services to you;
• where you have opted to receive further correspondence;
• in relation to any contribution on ‘Our Community’ forum on the mya4e.com website
• to invite you to participate in surveys about A4e’s services (participation is always voluntary); and
• for marketing purposes (A4e won’t contact you for marketing purposes, or to promote new services, activities or online content unless you specifically agree to be contacted for these purposes).

Information sharing

A4e will only release confidential information when required to do so by law or as described in the Information Sharing section of the A4e Data Protection Policy. Generally, your information will only be used within A4e, however, sometimes we use third parties to process your information. A4e requires these third parties to comply strictly with this policy or to have one of an equal standard of their own; they will not use your personal information for their own business purposes, unless you have explicitly consented to the use of your personal information in this way.

Information retention

We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity, or as long as is set out in the contract of any service for which you are registered and in accordance with A4e’s Data Retention, Classification and Destruction Policy.

Can I find out what personal information A4e holds about me?

Under the Data Protection Act, it is possible for an individual to request any personal data A4e holds about them (Subject Access Request) providing that proof of identity is supplied and upon payment of a £10 administration fee.

Any such requests must be made in writing to the Information Security Officer or using the form which is available from informationsecurity@a4e.co.uk (A4e can assist with this if support is needed to complete a form). We will respond to requests within forty days of receipt.

Information Security Officer – A4e Ltd
Queens House
105 Queen Street
Sheffield
S1 1GN

Cookies and IP Addresses

Cookies may be used by us to provide you with customised information from our web site. A cookie is a small amount of data, which often includes a unique identifier that is sent to your computer or mobile phone browser when you visit a website and is stored on the device’s hard drive.

Cookies allow us to see which pages have been viewed and how frequently they have been visited. Cookies also help us to make our website more user friendly.

Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, however, you may set up your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie which will give you the opportunity not to accept it. If you disable cookies then you may not be able to access certain features of our website.

When visitors leave comments on our website, they too get cookies stored on their computer so that they won’t need to re-type all their information again when they want to leave another comment.

Our cookies include:

• the user ID
• preferred time format (e.g. d/m/y)
• preferred template number (e.g. 1 for A4e design, 2 for FSI design)
• user’s role (e.g. Advisor)
• user’s full name (e.g. Joe Bloggs)
• redirect url (e.g. after login, you will be redirected to the home page)
• confirmation message (removed once displayed to the user)

An IP address is a number that can uniquely identify a specific computer or other network device on the internet and enables us to see where in the world people are accessing our site.

We use an analytical tool on our myA4e.com website to track visitors’ journeys through the sites for reporting reasons. The analytical tool uses cookies and IP addresses in order to provide meaningful reports about the visitors to our site, however, its cookies do not collect personal data about our website visitors and where IP addresses are tracked, they are not reported to A4e.

Monitoring and Review of this Policy

This policy will be reviewed annually or more often if business needs dictate, by the Information Security team.

Last updated: March 2011