Vale Domestic Abuse Services is committed to safeguarding your privacy online. Please read the following privacy policy to understand how your personal information will be treated.

Privacy Policy

This privacy policy applies to Vale Domestic Abuse Services and ValeDAS.org (“us” “our” “we”) whether you want information, support, counselling or training from us, use our services, donate to us, work or campaign for us.

Vale Domestic Abuse Services are committed to keeping your personal information safe and being clear about how we collect your data, how we store it and what we do with it.

Vale Domestic Abuse Services is registered under the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 as a data controller with the number Z5337426. Full details of this listing can be seen on the Information Commissioner’s Office website. Vale Domestic Abuse Services’s registered charity number is 1034188 and our company number is 02794241 (registered in England and Wales).

This privacy and cookies notice, along with our Service Information and website terms and conditions lets you know how we collect, use and keep your personal information safe.

If you have any queries about our Privacy Notice, please get in touch with our data team:

• By email: [email protected]
• By post: Data Protection Officer, Vale Domestic Abuse Services, 198 Holton Road, Barry, Vale Of Glamorgan CF63 4HN

What information do we collect about you?

Information you give to us directly

We will collect and store information that you give us when you do the following things on our website (or when you give permission to a relevant agency to submit information on your behalf):

• Submit a request or referral for services that we offer
• Register for an event
• Register for a webinar, workshop, course or training
• Make an enquiry
• Complete a survey
• Sign up to support a campaign
• Support our work through a donation
• Fundraise on our behalf
• Tell us your story (for example, as a media case study)
• Give us feedback or make a complaint
• Apply for a job or work with us
• Register as a volunteer
• Enter into a contract with us
• Are photographed or filmed (for example, at an Atal y Fro event)

We may also collect information from any agency that has referred you to us.

If you are employed by an agency and are completing the referral form for someone else, we will also collect and store information that you give us about yourself. This information will be limited to your name, email address and telephone number together with the referring agency name and address.

Information you give to us indirectly

• We store data about your visits to our website, for example, your location data or IP address.
• We store information about how you navigate our website, although this cannot be used to personally identify you.
• We may also collect and store your personal information if you interact with us on our social media channels: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This will depend on your own privacy settings on these individual channels, so make sure you check these first.

Depending on what you do on our website, we may collect and store the following types of personal information: name, email address, date of birth, mobile or telephone number, relationship status, gender, sexual orientation, financial details, credit/debit card information, details about your education and career.

Certain types of personal information are recognised by data protection law as being more ‘sensitive’. Things like sexual orientation, racial or ethnic origin, religious or political opinion, data concerning your health (mental or physical) or your sex life fall into this category. Horizon will only collect sensitive information like this where it informs the provision of the service to you. Whenever we do this, we will state clearly at the time, why this information is required. We may also gather sensitive personal information if you choose to share your experiences with us for a case study, but we will only do this with your explicit consent.

If you’re a young person aged 14 or under

You must get the permission of your parent/guardian before providing Atal y Fro with any personal information.

How do we use your personal information?

We will use your personal information to do the following:

• Allow you to access our services.
• Provide you with information, products or services you’ve requested or that we feel might be of interest to you.
• Process one-off or regular donations and to claim Gift Aid.
• Make our marketing campaigns more targeted and relevant to potential clients and donors; we will only send you marketing information if you have given us specific consent to do.
• Respond to direct requests where you contact us with a query – we will use your personal information to respond.
• Carry out general administrative tasks like dealing with complaints and feedback, essential record-keeping.
• Transact: we will use your personal information to take payments from you when processing orders and payments for goods and services.
• Keep you safe: in the event that we reasonably think you (or someone else) is at risk of serious harm or abuse.
• Conduct polls, surveys and market research: we may invite you to take part so that we can improve our website, services and/or strategic development.
• Monitoring and evaluation: we use your personal information to inform and develop our service delivery.
• Improve your experience of our website, so that we may offer you a more user-friendly navigation of our website.
• Process applications to work at Atal y Fro: for example, if you fill in an application form or send us your CV or send us information speculatively in respect of possible contract opportunities.
• Supporter profiling and analysis: we will use your personal information to help us better target communications, so that you are more likely to receive communications relevant to your interests.

For how long will we keep your personal information?

At Vale Domestic Abuse Services, we are committed to retaining your personal information for no longer than necessary in relation to the purpose for which it was first collected. This is in line with guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office. Vale Domestic Abuse Services may hold some types of data for up to seven years.

For example, in the case of financial transactions like donations and purchases, we will keep your personal information for as long as legally required in respect of tax or accounting purposes, which could be anything up to six years after a transaction has taken place.

Do you share my information with anyone else?

We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which it was obtained in the first place. We won’t share it with any third parties and you won’t receive any communications from other organisations.

We will not:

• Sell or rent your data to third parties
• Share your data with third parties for marketing purposes

However, there are two very explicit ways in which your data might be shared:

• In the event that we use third party suppliers to help deliver our services, fundraising activities and campaigns. For example when you are making a donation using an external website you are going through to a partner company and the information you give such as your credit card number and contact information is provided so that the transaction can take place.
• Where we are legally bound to disclose your personal information, for example, to further criminal investigation or to keep you safe if we believe you (or someone else) is at risk of serious harm or abuse.

Keeping your personal information safe

We have both digital and operational safeguards to make sure your data is secure at Vale Domestic Abuse Services. Access to information is reviewed on a regular basis and limited to those people who actually need to access it, and are assigned the permission to do so.

All Vale Domestic Abuse Services online webforms are protected by secure end-to-end encryption. Where we pass highly sensitive data over the internet such as personal information or payment card details, Vale Domestic Abuse Services uses TLS to encrypt data between the client and our partners.

There are, however, inherent risks to passing information over public networks and Vale Domestic Abuse Services cannot 100% guarantee the security of data handled in this way.

Vale Domestic Abuse Services’s web servers are located in England.

Your rights and managing your own data

You have the right to request access to the personal information that Vale Domestic Abuse Services stores and processes about you. You can ask for corrections to be made to the information we hold or for your personal information to be deleted. You can also ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information or to object to the processing of it altogether.

We will not charge you for either considering or complying with a request unless it is deemed to be excessive in nature. We will ask you for proof of identity and upon this being successfully verified, you are entitled to obtain the following information about your personal information:

• The purposes of the collection, processing, use and storage of your personal data.
• The source(s) of the personal information, if it was not obtained from you.
• The categories of personal data stored about you.
• The recipients (or categories of recipients) to whom your personal data has been or may be transmitted, along with the location of those recipients.
• The envisaged period of storage for your personal data or the rationale for determining the storage period.
• The use of any automated decision-making and/or profiling.

If you would like to make a request relating to any of the rights above, please send a request by emailing [email protected]. Or if you prefer, you can make the request in writing to: Data Protection Officer, Vale Domestic Abuse Services, 198 Holton Road, Barry, Vale of Glamorgan CF63 4HN.

How to make a complaint

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or the way in which Vale Domestic Abuse Services handles your personal information, or if you wish to make a complaint, please send a request by emailing [email protected]. Or if you prefer, you can make the request in writing to:Data Protection Officer, Vale Domestic Abuse Services, 198 Holton Road, Barry, Vale of Glamorgan CF63 4HN.

If you’re unhappy with our response, you may then raise your concern directly with the Information Commissioner’s Office: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF

Alternatively you can visit the ICO website.

Atal y Fro is registered under the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 as a data controller with the number Z5337426.

Changes to our privacy policy

Our Privacy Notice may change from time to time, so please check this page occasionally to see if we have included any updates or changes, and that you are happy with them.

(Last updated: 28 April 2023)

Cookies

Cookies are little text files downloaded by and stored on your device (phone, laptop, tablet, etc.) when you visit a website. Cookies are used to help the website owner (in this case, Vale Domestic Abuse Services) to provide you with a smooth experience while you browse.

Vale Domestic Abuse Services uses cookies to:

• Make our website work. This cookie is used for load balancing purposes to decide which server to send the visitor.
• Collect anonymous data to gain insight into how visitors use our website
• Help us show advertisements about our services to those people who might be interested in them
• Allow you to share content with social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Vale Domestic Abuse Services does not use cookies to collect any information that could personally identify you. Neither do we use cookies to pass on any personally identifiable information to third parties.