The new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is active from 25 May 2018. This supersedes the UK Data Protection Act (1988). By law we must ask you for your clear, unambiguous consent before we can email you anything outside of your annual membership renewal notices, or use or share your data in any other way.
Who we are
The British Phycological Society (BPS) is a Controller of Data for the purpose of the GDPR. Our charity registration number is 246707 and the registered address is the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD, UK. The BPS website address is https://www.brphycsoc.org.
Legal Basis for Processing your Data
The legal basis for processing your data will be Consent: in becoming a member of the society you have given your consent for us to process your personal data for a specific purpose of informing you of:
- All notices pertaining to the activities of the Society, including activities and events relating to Phycology from other learned societies, publishers and organisations that align with our charitable interests.
- Literature issued by the Society, free or at a reduced rate as the Council may from time to time determine.
- To vote in the election of officers and members of the Council, and to vote in the conduct of the affairs of the Society at any meetings of the Society (see The British Phycological Society Constitution, section 4).
- For notices of renewal of your subscription to the Society.
The BPS may sometimes need to process your data to pursue our legitimate charity interests. Our legitimate interests include fraud prevention, administrative purposes, reporting potential crimes.
The types of personal data we collect and use
- Personal details including name, address, email address
- Membership details including renewal date and type of membership
- Financial information, dependant on the mode of payment of membership dues.
- Further personal choice information including:
- Information on your choice of subscription and delivery method electronic or print copy of society publications
- Members research interests which have been provided voluntarily
- Information on member applications for BPS funding awards,
The Webmaster is the designated Data Protection Officer and the Membership Secretary is our designated Data Processing Officer, who holds the membership records. Your personal data are held in a MySQL database hosted on a webserver supplied by the hosting company Jolt. We use your personal data for the purpose of communicating with you about the activities of the society, by email and through The Phycologist, and share your personal data with the publishers of our journal, currently Taylor and Francis, if you are a subscriber to the European Journal of Phycology or other journals published by the Society.
We will only disclose information about you to additional third parties other than those stated above if we are legally obliged to do so or where we need to comply with our contractual duties to you.
We do not share your information with third parties or for third party commercial reasons.
Details on the BPS privacy policy can be obtained on request from the Secretary of the Society.
Your Rights
Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) you have a number of rights with regard to your personal data. You have the right to request from us access to and rectification or erasure of your personal data (the right to be forgotten), the right to restrict processing, object to processing as well as in certain circumstances the right to data portability.
If you have provided consent for the processing of your data you have the right (in certain circumstances) to withdraw that consent at any time which will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before your consent was withdrawn.
You have the right to lodge a complaint to the Information Commissioners’ Office if you believe that we have not complied with the requirements of the GDPR with regard to your personal data.
