Privacy Policy

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EDS adopts the view that you have the right to a malware-free existence. Also, the right to privacy and control over your information. This fundamental belief shapes our Privacy Policy.
 

We will be clear about the data we collect and why. 

 

We do not and will not sell your data to third parties. Our primary purpose in collecting your data is to be able to equip you with effective services to the Deaf community. 

 

Please, if you have any questions or suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact us at admin@empoweringdeafsociety.org.uk

This privacy policy explains and describes how EDs collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in the Collect your information when? Information we collect what? section. And we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the Share Information How?section. We retain this information for the length of time described in our EDS Keep Information, How Long? section.

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In addition, you will understand your data protection rights, regarding the information we collect about:

• People who use our services

• Visitors to our website

• Job applicants and our current and former employees

• People who make a complaint

 

1. Collect your information when?

 

We collect your information when you use our software, website, or otherwise communicate with us.

 

We may collect your information: 

(1) when you licence and use our software (“Software Collection”); 

(2) when you interact with our website, such as our forums, blogs, etc (“Website Collection”); 

(3) when you communicate or interact with us by email, chat, or otherwise (“Dialogue Collection”); and 

(4) when you apply to work for us (“Job Applicant Collection”)
 

2. Information we collect what?  

 

There are two types of information we collect: personal and non-personal.

 

Personal information is information that is either expressly provided by you, such as your name, information to personally identify you, such as your email address, phone number, and user name.
 

We may collect the following personal information from you: 

 

• Contact Information (such as name, email address, mailing address, or phone number); Unique Identifiers (such as username and password used for authenticating your EDS accounts and service) 

• machine identification numbers, 

• Internet protocol (IP) addresses, 

• Information about your business (such as company name, company size, business type) Information related to your usage of our products as described in the next section, below.

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Our service providers may collect billing information (credit card number and billing address) on our behalf to process orders.

Non-personal information is all information that is not personal information (or is information that was initially personal information but which we modify and/or aggregate with other data in order to make it Non-personal information.)

 

As is true of most websites, we gather certain information automatically.

This information may include; 

• browser type, 

• Internet service provider (ISP)

• referring/exit pages, 

• the files viewed on our site (e.g., HTML pages, graphics, etc.),

• operating system, date/time stamp

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3. Software Collection – information collected when using our security software

 

Functional Data

We collect data that is necessary for the functionality of the software or for our performance of providing the software to you. For example, we may need to collect system processes and behaviours in order to perform system rollback and recovery operations.            

 

Why?

So, our products are able to function as intended, including being able to detect and remediate malware and PUPs, and provide rollback and recovery operations.

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4. Information We Collect from Other Sources

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We may also get information about you from other sources. For example:

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• Third Party Login: If you create or log in to your WordPress.com account through another service (like Google) we’ll receive associated login information (e.g. a connection token, your username, your email address)

• Social Sharing Services: If you connect your website or account to a social media service (like Twitter) through our Publicise feature, we’ll receive information from that service (e.g., your username, basic profile information, friends list) via the authorization procedures for that service.

• Google Account Information: When you connect your Google account to your Newspack powered site, we may access certain Google user data such as your Google Ad Manager Configuration (the network code and your ad units) and your Google Analytics data to allow you to access and manage features more seamlessly. For example, you may be able to manage your Google ads and see your Google Analytics data directly within the dashboard of your Newspack powered site.

 

5. We Use Information Why?  

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We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

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To provide our Services. For example, to set up and maintain your EDS event account, backup and restore website, provide customer service, process payments and orders, and verify user information.
 

• To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by providing automatic upgrades and new versions of our Services. Or, for example, by monitoring and analysing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy and that will help them create and manage websites more efficiently or make our Services deaf easier to use.

• To place and manage ads in our advertising program. For example, to place ads on our users’ sites and some of our own sites as part of our advertising program, and understand ad performance.

• To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing. For example, by targeting our marketing messages to groups of our users (like those who have a particular plan with us or have been users for a certain length of time), advertising our Services, analysing the results of our marketing campaigns (like how many people purchased a paid Deaf Event after receiving a marketing message), and understanding and forecasting user retention.

• To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of Automattic and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services.

• To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.

• To customise the user experience. For example, to personalise your experience by serving you relevant notifications and advertisements for our Services, recommending content through our BSL post suggestions.

• To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our products, or keep you up to date on EDS Deaf Events; texting you to verify your payment; or to share offers and promotions that we think will be of interest to you. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt out of marketing communications at any time. (If you opt out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your account and EDS related events.)

• To recruit and hire new staff. For example, by evaluating job applicants (including verifying their identity, experience, and other information submitted) and communicating with them by phone, email, or social media platforms.  As the application progresses, we may also collect interview information and background check information.  This may also include verifying information required to initiate employment, for purposes such as confirming ability to legally work in a specific location, setting up payroll, and complying with statutory reporting requirements.

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6. We Share Information How?  

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We share information about you in  many circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy.

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These include the following: 

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Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.

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Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. 

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This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you for example :-

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• Communication Support Workers and Qualified BSL interpreters, 

• payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, 

• payment providers you use for your own ecommerce operations, 

• fraud prevention services that allow us to analyse fraudulent payment transactions, 

• cloud storage services, 

• postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, 

• customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you, 

• registrars, registries, data escrow services that allow us to provide domain registration services, and your hosting provider if your site is not hosted by EDS); 

• those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g., by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns, and by placing ads to market our services); 

• those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers); 

• those that make tools to help us run our operations (like programs that help us with task management, scheduling, word processing, email and other communications, and collaboration among our teams); 

• other third-party tools that help us manage operations; 

• companies that make products available on our websites, who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.

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Legal and regulatory requirements:  Legal requirement such as in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request. \

We may disclose information about you in the following circumstances:

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To protect rights, property, and others: When we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of EDS, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.

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Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that EDS goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.

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With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties when you authorise us to do so, like when you connected your site to a social media service through our Publicise feature.

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Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services, or share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customised ad campaigns on other platforms.

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Site owners: If you have a WordPress.com/Event Brite account and interact with another site using our Services, your information may be shared with the administrators of the site.  For example, if you leave a comment on a site created on WordPress.com or running Jetpack, your IP address and the email address associated with your WordPress.com account may be shared with the administrator(s) of the site where you left the comment. Or if you make a payment (like via the Payments feature) to a site, your public display name, user name, and email address may be shared with the administrator(s) of the site. Or if you follow/subscribe to another WordPress.com site we will share your email address with the site owner.

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Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

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7. EDS Keep Information, How Long?

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We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it. We are not legally required to keep it.

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For example, we keep web server logs that record information about a visitor to EDS website, like the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyse traffic to EDS’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on  our websites.

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As another example, when you delete a post, page, or comment from your WordPress.com site, it stays in your Trash folder for thirty days in case you change your mind and would like to restore that content, because starting from scratch is no fun. After the thirty days are up, the deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged.

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If you are a job applicant, we will keep your personal data during the application process, and for a certain period thereafter. To determine that period, we take into account a number of factors, like our legal and regulatory obligations (such as equal opportunity obligations) and whether we may need to retain personal data for internal business purposes like analysing our applicant pool.

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8. Security

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No online service is 100% secure.

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We work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorised access, use, alteration or destruction and take reasonable measures to do so. We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

 

To enhance the security of your account, we encourage you to enable our advanced security settings, like Two Step Authentication.

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9. My choices what?

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You have several limited choices available when it comes to information about you:

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1. Limit the information that you provide:
   
   If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information.
    
   Consequence of this decision - Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services — for example, premium themes that carry an additional charge — may not be accessible. If you are a job applicant, and you choose not to provide certain data elements to us, we may not be able to proceed with the recruitment process.
    

2. Limit access to information on your mobile device:
   
   Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the option to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile apps.
   
   Consequence of this decision  - If you choose to limit this, you may not be able to use certain features, like geotagging for photographs. 
    

3. Opt out of marketing communications: 
   
   You may opt out of receiving promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know.
   
   If you opt out of promotional communications, we may still send you other communications, like those about your account and legal notices.
    

4. Set your browser to reject cookies:
   
   At this time, EDS ICT does not respond to “do not track” signals using our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using EDS’s website,
   
   Consequence of this decision - certain features of EDS’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
    

5. Opt out of our internal analytics program: 
   
   You can do this through your user settings. 
   
   Consequence of this decision -By opting out, you will stop sharing information with our analytics
   tool about events or actions that happen after the opt-out, while you’re logged in to your WordPress.com account.
    

6. Close your account, or online dealings with EDS:
   
   While we’d be very sad to see you go, you can close your account if you no longer want to use our Services. 
   
   Consequence of this decision -  Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above — for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.

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10. Your Rights

UK legal system falls under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

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European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

 

The GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

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• Request access to your personal data;

• Request correction or deletion of your personal data;

• Object to our use and processing of your personal data;

• Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and

• Request portability of your personal data.

You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

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11. Policy Policy Definitions

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Privacy policy- ​

The phrase “privacy policy” also referred to as “privacy notices” or “privacy statements.”

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This does not mean that EDS has a policy of protecting your privacy. It means that EDS are legally required to tell you what we are doing with your information. 

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12. Periodic Review: 

 

The policy will be reviewed to ensure its effectiveness and relevance, with updates made as needed.

 

It is essential to stay abreast of evolving regulations, trends, and best practices in order to guarantee the most beneficial onboarding, offboarding, and training experiences for personnel. Therefore, EDS will frequently revise the training protocol in order to guarantee that our staff is apprised of current data.
 

Updated - October 2024

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