Parents and Carers Privacy Policy: last updated 21-Jul-03
This privacy policy is aimed at parents and carers of young people who use this
website. It may change from time to time so please read it each time you visit
the site. It explains:
(1) Who we are
· We are a government established team, and part of the local authority
· Our objectives are to prevent and tackle illegal drug use
(2) About the Jonny Longlife website
· It is aimed at young people in South Tyneside and those who are in
the UK but outside the area who may find it of use.
· How we protect the privacy of young people who use the site.
(3) How you can make your views known
· What you can do if you disagree with our approach to young people’s
privacy.
(4) How we collect information from young people and what we
use it for
· When they send us emails - we reply and delete the message.
· When they register for our competitions - so we can award prizes.
· When they complete surveys or quizzes, but only if they choose to leave
us an email address or school address - so we can give the winner a prize.
· When they use our message boards and chat rooms - so we can help with
problems and keep the content clean. We set out safety rules for young people
to observe when using these facilities.
· When they attend the Saturday morning football and related events which
we sponsor– but only if you agree to us taking photographs and reporting
on the match
· Through “cookies” – to make use of the site easier
- but not in a way that identifies individual young people.
· Through “traffic data” – to monitor use of the site
– but again, not usually in a way that identifies individual young people.
(5) How we keep young people’s information secure
· We will always keep the information we receive confidential other than
in exceptional circumstances.
· We comply with the Data Protection Act to keep young people’s
information secure using appropriate technological and organisational methods.
(6) When and how we will share young people’s information
· We share anonymous statistical data with other government and voluntary
organisations. This is usually gathered from our quizzes and surveys.
· We share the general information young people give us with the Matrix
Team and other trained specialist from local agencies, but not in a way that
identifies individual young people.
· We may share personal information about an individual young person
with social services, specialists from relevant local agencies or other authorities
in exceptional circumstances. For example, if we have to by law, or if we reasonably
consider the young person is in serious danger and needs protection.
(7) When we will send further information to young people by
email
· If a young person specifically asks us to, we will email him or her
with information about forthcoming events and changes to our website.
· We encourage young people under 12 to obtain consent from a parent
or carer before agreeing to receive this information from us.
· Young people can ask us at any time to stop sending them this information.
(8) Your young person’s rights
· To see the information we hold.
· To correct errors in that information.
· To stop us sending further emails.
(9) Overseas transfers of information
· We do not transfer any young person’s information outside the
UK, other than photographs and player profiles which appear on our website you’re
your permission.
(10) Further information
· How to find out more
1. Who we are
We are the South Tyneside Drug Action Team. We are a member of one of the 14
groups of Drug Action Teams established across the UK. These teams were originally
set up by the Government’s Home Office in 1995 to prevent and tackle illegal
drug use. We are a team of trained specialists and are funded through South
Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council. You can contact us by clicking
here.
Our objectives are both to prevent and tackle illegal drug use. We work with
a number of other government and voluntary organisations. More information about
our work can be found on our sister website at http://www.stdrugactionteam.com
South Tyneside MBC is a data controller under the Data Protection Act 1998,
and its entry in the register of data controllers can be found at http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk
under register number Z5765988. Our processing of personal
data is included within this register entry.
2. About the Jonny Longlife website
This site at http://www.jonnylonglife.com
is aimed specifically at young people in South Tyneside in the North East of
England.
The site was set up in October 2002. Most young people who use the site are
under 18 years old. The site has proved very popular: in May 2003 we were getting
about 150 hits a day.
The site features various fun activities, such as competitions, a chat room
and a message board.
The site also contains lots of reliable information about health and lifestyle
issues including drug use, which young people can refer to if and when they
need it. The NHS and other reliable sources supply this information. The information
is all publicly available in other places; we have simply pulled it all together
(with permission of course). We also visit some local schools where we give
out this type of educational information and promote the site.
3. Your views
You
may object to this site because …
· We recognise that parents and carers may have differing views on whether
or not young people should have access to information about drugs and lifestyle
issues, and that some of you may not be happy for the young people in your care
to use this site for that purpose.
· We are also aware that young people are vulnerable, and that the Internet
can be a risky environment for them. We are therefore very careful about what
information the young people can give about themselves to others via the website,
and what uses are made of any information they do give.
· Although we encourage young people not to give us other people’s
email addresses or other personal information they sometimes do, particularly
information about parents or carers. We do not always realise at first that
the information is that of someone other than the young person, but when we
do we will stop using it and delete it.
What we do to address these concerns
· We recognise that in some cases a young person may not seek help if
s/he has to obtain consent of a parent or carer first. It is also difficult
for us to verify a young person’s true age or to verify the consent of
a parent or carer without making intrusive checks, such as asking you to confirm
both your identity and the young person’s age, or asking the young person’s
school to confirm his or her age and identity.
· We have provided a separate privacy policy specifically for young people.
We ask them to check with you before using the site, if they are under 12 years
of age, or at any age if they suspect you would object or if they do not understand
the question. We also ask them to check with you specifically before entering
some competitions (see below), before using the chat rooms or message boards
and before asking us to send them more information by email.
What to do if you don’t agree with us
· If you do not agree with our approach, please contact us and we will
gladly discuss the issue, and try to work out a solution with you. If necessary,
we will review and revise our policies. See section 10 below
for more information.
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4.
How we collect information about young people and what we use it for
We collect information about young people in a number of ways.
· Email and other contact details
We provide an email address and other contact details so that anyone who uses
the site can contact us. We find young people tend to contact us by email. Sometimes
young people send us pictures of Jonny Longlife they have designed. Sometimes
they just ask questions. We reply to emails and delete them (and our response)
after doing so.
Parents and carers are welcome to email us as well.
· Competitions
We run competitions to encourage young people to use the site. We collect information
about young people when they register for our competitions. The current competition
is to find “Jonny Longlife” images on the site, and put them in
a sticker book. The winner each month is the young person who has found the
most images. We give a prize to the winner, which may be a t-shirt, mouse-mat,
Metro Radio CD, concert tickets or other prize. We may also give t-shirts to
everyone in the winner’s class at school.
If we give concert tickets or other prize which requires the young person to
attend at a particular venue, we always ask any young person under 16 to check
first with his or her parents or carers that they are happy for the young person
to receive this prize. If the young person does get the prize but you are not
happy, please contact us and we will give your young person an alternative prize.
We may also collect information the winning young person supplies to us after
initial registration, for example the name of his or her class at school, so
that we can leave t-shirts for them at the school reception.
We only collect the minimum information we need to award prizes. So the fields
on the registration form must be completed to allow us to do this and to ensure
that each entry is unique. To register, the young person chooses an ID, and
gives us an email address, but no other details.
We use the email address to send the young person a password to use their sticker
book, and to let the young person know if he or she has won a prize and to arrange
delivery.
We may also use the email address to send out further information if the young
person specifically asks us to (see section 6 below).
· Surveys and Quizzes
We put surveys and quizzes on the site every 6 weeks or so to find out young
people’s views on drug and health-related issues. We give prizes to the
first 25 people who respond to the survey and ask for the chance to win a prize.
Young people may complete a survey or quiz without leaving any personal information.
Information submitted by young people in response to surveys and quizzes is
aggregated and it is not possible to trace back the aggregated results to the
individual young people who submitted it.
The only personal information we may collect during a quiz or survey is the
young person’s email address, if the young person wants to give it to
us. We use that email addresses to contact winners and to ask for a name, class
and school so that we can either drop off the prize at the school’s reception
or post it to the young person if the young person prefers that.
The prizes we give for the winners of surveys and quizzes are the same as we
give to winners of competitions (see the previous section).
· Message boards
We have message boards where young people can ask Jonny Longlife questions about
personal problems and message each other as well. All questions and messages
are visible to anyone using the website.
We encourage young people to choose an alias, or nickname when using the message
board, and also not to post information from which other people could be identified.
Most young people do this anyway. Young people can change their user name if
they want to.
We provide some safety rules with
“do’s and don’ts” for using the message board.
We collect the young person’s email address before he or she uses the
message board, which we may use if we need to get back in touch with him or
her. The young person’s email address is not visible to other users of
the site.
We reply to these questions and sign the answer using the Jonny Longlife icon.
We also look at the young people’s postings regularly, and delete anything
which is in breach of the safety rules. We delete topics once they have been
idle for about 4-5 weeks.
· Chat rooms
The site has a chat room where young people can talk to each other privately,
either on a one-to-one basis or within a group. Young people can personalise
their profiles in the chat-room by choosing their own colours and icons.
We use language barrier software to detect whether a young person uses swear
words in the chat room. If young people do use swear words on a persistent basis
they will be banned from the website temporarily and if they are a continuing
offender they will be banned permanently.
To ban a young person, we use the young person’s IP address. An IP address
is a number assigned to the computer or network the young person is using to
access the website. It is our Internet Service Provider (ISP), who looks after
the site on our behalf, who can trace back the young person from that IP address
and then ban them.
Other than the IP address, we do not collect personal information from young
people in the chat-room.
· Football league and other events
We sponsor football leagues other health-related events. We put up weekly results
from the football, a report of the matches and photographs on the website at
the beginning of each week. We ask a parent(s) or carer(s) to give written permission
before taking photographs from which their young person can be identified or
before including his or her name in a “player profile”.
If you do not give permission, we will not take any photographs of the young
person or use the young person’s name in a player profile.
If there are no parents or carers available, we will only take photographs of
a young person in such a way that the young person cannot be identified from
the photograph, and will not use that young person’s name in a player
profile.
If we take photos of people who are 18 or over, we ask them to sign the form
themselves.
· Cookies
Cookies are small files which are transferred from this website and stored on
the young person’s hard drive. Cookies can contain personal information,
such as names and telephone numbers. Our cookies do not – they just contain
a random series of numbers. We cannot use the cookie to identify any particular
young person.
This website uses a cookie on each occasion the young person uses the Internet.
That cookie is stored on the hard disk of the computer that the young person
is using. The website accesses that information to identify that session. The
cookies are deleted once the young person has finished using the site and the
browser is closed.
Most browsers are automatically set to accept cookies and young people should
be able to configure their browser to refuse cookies if you or they prefer.
This may, however, affect the young person’s ability to use all the features
on this website.
We do not use “spyware”, such as web bugs, which track use of the
site without the user’s knowledge.
· Traffic data
Our ISP keeps a record of traffic data which is logged automatically by our
server, such as the young person’s IP address, the URL the young person
visited before ours, the URL the young person visits after leaving our site
and which pages the young person visits, but not in a way that identifies any
individual young person, other than where it is necessary to ban a young person
from a chat-room (see above).
Our ISP keeps traffic data for 12 months.
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5.
How we keep young people’s information secure
We store information that young people send us on our web server and temporarily
on our workstations.
We will keep any information we receive in confidence, confidential, except
in the exceptional circumstances in section 6.
We will keep young people’s information secure by taking appropriate technical
and organisational measures against its unauthorised or unlawful processing
and against its accidental loss, destruction or damage.
We only keep young people’s information for as long as we need it. So
for example, if it is an email enquiry, we will normally delete the message
after replying. If the young person has asked to receive further information
from us, we will keep the email address until the young person asks us not to
send any more information.
6. When and how we will share young people’s information
The only people who will have access to young people’s information are
our staff who need it to do their jobs.
We will share the anonymous, aggregated statistical data which we collect through
surveys and quizzes. We share this with other organisations and agencies in
South Tyneside, and make it publicly available on our sister website at http://www.stdrugactionteam.com.
You can also find out more about the other organisations and agencies on that
website. We may also use the statistics when we are asked to provide statistics
on drug related issues by other organisations such as schools or the press.
In exceptional circumstances, we will share personal information about a young
person with the appropriate authority. We would do this if, for example, we
reasonably consider he or she is in serious danger, and we were obliged to do
this. That authority might be the local authority’s social services department
or the Matrix team. We will also share information about young people if we
are required to by law, for example because we have to under a court order or
legislation.
7. When we send further information to young people
by email
We will, if the young person specifically asks us at the time, use the email
address the young person gives us to send information about forthcoming events
we are holding, or changes to the Jonny Longlife site. The young person can
unsubscribe from receiving any more mailings at any time by emailing Lee Hogan on lee.hogan@stdrugactionteam.org.
We offer the young person the option of unsubscribing each time we email him
or her.
Other than in the exceptional circumstances set out in section
6, we will never share a young person’s email address with any third
party.
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8.
Your young person’s rights
Your young person has a statutory right to see a copy of the information we
hold about him or her (if any) on payment of a fee, which is currently £10.
If your young person is 12 years of age or over, the request should be made
by the young person him or herself, rather than by the parent(s) or carer(s).
If the young person is under 12 years of age, we can only release a copy of
this information if you give your consent. Please note that we have to act in
the young person’s interests, and we will not release any information
if we reasonably suspect the request is not in the young person’s interests
or our advisers or the Information Commission tell us not to.
Your young person also has a right to correct any errors in information we hold.
Your young person has a right to ask us not to send him or her any further emails
about our work. See section 7 for more details.
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9.
Overseas transfers
Data protection legislation prohibits transfer outside the European Economic
Area (the EU member states, plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein), as there
is generally less protection for individuals’ personal information there.
That prohibition is subject to certain conditions and exceptions.
We will not normally transfer your young person’s personal information
outside the EEA. The only exceptions to this are if we put an identifiable photograph
of the young person or his or her name in a player profile on our site. If personal
information is put on a website, it becomes accessible from anywhere in the
world. So we will only do this with your written consent if your young person
is under 12 years old or otherwise the young person’s written consent.
It is possible that a young person may put personal information on a message
board on the website. We encourage young people not to do this (see our safety
rules) but if they do, we will delete the information as soon as we discover
it (see section 4 – message boards).
10. Further information
· If you want to know more about what information we have about your
young person, or the way we use that information, you can contact us by telephone,
post or email. Click here for details.
· For independent advice about data protection, privacy and data-sharing
issues, you can contact the Information Commissioner at Wycliffe House, Water
Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF, tel: 01625 545745 fax: 01625 524510 e-mail:
mail@dataprotection.gov.uk website:
www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk.
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