PRIME Initiative

Privacy Policy [placeholder text - needs review]

This page explains how PRIME uses any information visitors give to us on the PRIME Initiative web site, and the ways in which we protect visitors’ privacy. There is a separate privacy statement on our community site, PRIME Business Club.

Some statistical information about visitors is gathered to monitor usage of the site, but visitors are not identified as individuals. We don’t generally need information about personally identifiable individuals to run this web site, so we don’t collect it. Where we do - to write things such as case studies, we will always get your explicit permission.

We are not currently collecting or publishing personal data from this web site, and should we ever do so it will be in an obvious and above-board way, befitting our status as a registered charity linked to Age Concern and the Prince’s Charities group.

For example we might have a clearly labeled form that invites you to apply to attend a particular event. The information requested and its purpose and use would be plain.

We will amend this privacy statement if we start using forms in this more personal way.

The Data Protection Act
Under the Data Protection Act, we have a legal duty to protect any personal information we collect from you. We use appropriate technologies to safeguard your data, and keep strict security standards to prevent any unauthorised access to it. We do not pass on your personal details to third parties unless you give us permission to do so.

What personal information do we collect?
Currently we don’t collect any personal identifying information from this web site. You have to email or telephone us if you want us to do anything for you, such as sending you information by post or booking you on an event.

A likely development in the future is that we may add ‘contact us’ forms so people can request such information or book themselves onto events directly from this web site. When we do we will need to collect the necessary personal information to fulfill the service query.

Another possible situation where might request personal identifying information is online research surveys or campaign forms. Here we might ask visitors for contact information (such as their email address or post code), demographic information (such as age, gender or current employment status), and their opinions or experiences. If we do this we will always make it obvious, state the use and purpose of the information we asking for, and attach a clear privacy notice to the survey or form.

What other information is collected?

This web site may use “session cookies” to store some of the visitor’s preferences and visit history while they move around the site. Cookies are pieces of data created on your machine by your browser when you visit a web site. The browser can make these available to the web site so it knows things such as which pages you have already visited on the site, or whether you want the pages displayed in a particular style. You can set your computer not to accept cookies using the preference setting in your browser.

All the cookies we set are deleted automatically when visitors leave our site. We do not use cookies that contain any personal information about site visitors.

In addition to cookies, ALL web sites automatically log certain other information about their visitors. We too collect log file information from our visitors, and we use it for both research and to make changes to the layout of the site based on the way visitors move around it. The log files tell us, for example, what pages are popular and the order in which visitors traverse the site.

The log files don’t contain any personal information about you, but it is possible to glean various other information from them - for example about the sort of computer you are using, the search terms you used to find the site and where geographically you are connected to the Internet.

You can see the type of information contained in the logs by clicking on the view site statistics button. This doesn’t show the log files themselves - which are voluminous, virtually unreadable in raw form and typically discarded after a few weeks. Instead it shows a summary in human-readable form.

The geographical information is contained in your IP Address, which is something ALL web sites have access to (or they couldn’t work). Fortunately the geographic information is only approximate - for example the computers in PRIME’s office in south London show up as being in Birmingham. For most people with an ordinary consumer connection to the Internet the geographic accuracy is somewhat better than this but worse than for a UK post code.

We use IP addresses to control spam posting in the discussion forums - we can ban spammers by their individual IP addresses, or ban participation from entire geographic regions (outside the UK) if these are causing spam problems. This is draconian but effective, and necessary to keep the forums usable by genuine participants.

What happens when visitors link to another site?
PRIME’s web site contains links to other web sites. This privacy policy applies only to our site, so visitors should always be aware when they are moving to another site and read the privacy statement of any site which collects personal information. We do not pass on any personal information about our visitors to any other site.

Access to your information
What personal information PRIME holds (from whatever source) is as accurate and up-to-date as we can make it. You can check the information that we hold about you by emailing us. If you find any inaccuracies we will delete or correct it promptly.

Changes to this privacy policy

If this privacy policy changes in any way, we will place an updated version on this page, and also flag up that the privacy statement has changed on the home page. Regularly reviewing this page ensures visitors are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances, if any, we will share it with other parties.

The PRIME Initiative

Astral House, 1268 London Road, London SW16 4ER

email: prime@ace.org.uk
Freephone: 0800 783 1904

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