INTRODUCTION
At The Hong Kong Scots, it is important to us that you understand why and how we collect and use your personal information, if we work with you. This Privacy Notice sets out our policies on the collection and use of your data, and your rights under data protection legislation in the United Kingdom.
About The Hong Kong Scots
The Hong Kong Scots is a not-for-profit diaspora organisation staffed by an experienced group of activists from Hong Kong. We are a Scottish Community Interest Company (SC728635) and we provide signposting service and information through online platform and in activities, hosting by us or our partners for assisting Hongkongers in Scotland or planned to live in Scotland.
Your Personal Information
Why do we collect personal information?
We believe in collaborative in human rights and everyone owe their rights to live and develop their way to live with dinity, and create projects in which Hongkongers with non-Hongkongers to meet gaps in access to cultural compedent and to reduce inequality for marginalised and disadvantaged groups .
We contribute our different expertise through:
• Providing intital enquiry and signposting service
• Supporting surgeries and other outreach for Hong Kongers in Scotland
• Delivering training and cultural education
• Contributing to research, advocacy and policy
In order to fulfil our aims, and support our projects, we may need to collect personal information from individuals seeking advice, or participating in our training and outreach events.
What might we request?
We may request personal information from you, such as your name and contact details, in order to provide you with legal advice, either directly or through our services or helplines. We might also request sensitive personal information, such as your racial or ethnic origin, details of your health, or of harm you may have suffered, if this is relevant to the advice we require to give you.
If you attend a training, cultural education or other outreach event, we might request personal information, such as your name and contact details, and payment details, so that we can process your order and record your attendance at this event.
How will we request this information?
We will always seek your active consent (specific permission) in order to provide this information (either in writing or orally). You have the right to withhold certain information, if you wish. We may still be able to provide you with a service, even if you choose to withhold information, but this will depend on the service you are accessing at the time.
If you wish to withhold information, please tell us as soon as possible, and we will explain what this means in terms of whether we can continue to work with you.
What will we do with this information, and who will we share it with?
We will use the personal information you have given us to provide you with the legal service we have offered to you. We will explain to you specifically what purposes we will use your information for, and who it will be shared with, at the time we take your consent. These specific terms will apply in place of any, more general, terms contained in this Privacy Notice.
Generally, however, we use the information to provide you with accurate service and signposting about your situation. We may also use some of this information for research or to write reports, but would only do so anonymously, so that you cannot be identified. If we are working in collaboration with another partner organisation, we may share some of this information, as needed, in order to support the collaboration.
We will not use your personal information for any purpose other than the purposes we told you about at the time you agreed to share it with us, unless we are required to do so by law. If we wish to use your personal information for any other purpose, we will contact you to explain this purpose, and ask for your explicit permission.
How will we store this information?
We use secure online cloud-based servers, and this is where we store all information relating to our legal casework, including our email communications, as well as our other training, research and policy work. The data is securely stored and access is restricted to only members of our staff, our IT services providers, and our case management system provider, who require this information to do our work.
We also store some personal information in paper files held in locked filing cabinets. We have an Information Governance and Data Protection Policy to ensure that our staff are aware of their obligation to handle data securely, including if they require to work remotely, and setting out our procedures in the event there is a data breach.
We use a range of online and communication tools in order to offer remote services, including legal advice, training and legal education, as well as to accept payments and donations. These include (but are not limited to) Microsoft 365, Zoom, Eventbrite, Paypal, JustGiving and MailChimp. The data you provide through those tools are securely stored there, and access is restricted to only members of our staff and those service providers who require this information to do our work.
How long will we store this information?
We will only store your information for as long as necessary, or as long as we are required to do so by law. This will usually be set out in the specific information we give you when we take your consent.
You have the right to withdraw your consent and ask us to delete all information we hold about you, at any time, as explained further below.
EMBEDDED CONTENT
Pages on this site may include embedded content, like YouTube videos, for example. Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if you visited the other website. These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged-in to that website. Below you can find a list of the services we use:
The Facebook page plugin is used to display our Facebook timeline on our site. Facebook has its own cookie and privacy policies over which we have no control. There is no installation of cookies from Facebook and your IP is not sent to a Facebook server until you consent to it. See their privacy policy here: Facebook Privacy Policy .
We use the Twitter API to display our tweets timeline on our site. Twitter has its own cookie and privacy policies over which we have no control. Your IP is not sent to a Twitter server until you consent to it. See their privacy policy here: Twitter Privacy Policy .
YOUTUBE
We use YouTube videos embedded on our site. YouTube has its own cookie and privacy policies over which we have no control. There is no installation of cookies from YouTube and your IP is not sent to a YouTube server until you consent to it. See their privacy policy here: YouTube Privacy Policy.
COOKIES
This site uses cookies – small text files that are placed on your machine to help the site provide a better user experience. In general, cookies are used to retain user preferences, store information for things like shopping carts, and provide anonymized tracking data to third party applications like Google Analytics. Cookies generally exist to make your browsing experience better. However, you may prefer to disable cookies on this site and on others. The most effective way to do this is to disable cookies in your browser. We suggest consulting the help section of your browser.
NECESSARY COOKIES (ALL SITE VISITORS)
- cfduid: Is used for our CDN CloudFlare to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. See more information on privacy here: CloudFlare Privacy Policy.
- PHPSESSID: To identify your unique session on the website.
NECESSARY COOKIES (ADDITIONAL FOR LOGGED IN CUSTOMERS)
- wp-auth: Used by WordPress to authenticate logged-in visitors, password authentication and user verification.
- wordpress_logged_in_{hash}: Used by WordPress to authenticate logged-in visitors, password authentication and user verification.
- wordpress_test_cookie Used by WordPress to ensure cookies are working correctly.
- wp-settings-[UID]: WordPress sets a few wp-settings-[UID] cookies. The number on the end is your individual user ID from the users database table. This is used to customize your view of admin interface, and possibly also the main site interface.
- wp-settings-[UID]:WordPress also sets a few wp-settings-{time}-[UID] cookies. The number on the end is your individual user ID from the users database table. This is used to customize your view of admin interface, and possibly also the main site interface.
THIRD PARTY ACCESS TO YOUR DATA
We don’t share your data with third-parties in a way as to reveal any of your personal information like email, name, etc. The only exceptions to that rule are for partners we have to share limited data with in order to provide the services you expect from us. Please see below:
ENVATO PTY LTD
For the purpose of validating and getting your purchase information regarding licenses for our theme, we send your provided tokens and purchase keys to Envato Pty Ltd and use the response from their API to register your validated support data. See the Envato privacy policy here: Envato Privacy Policy.
TICKSY
Ticksy provides the support ticketing platform we use to handle support requests. The data they receive is limited to the data you explicitly provide and consent to being set when you create a support ticket. Ticksy adheres to the EU/US “Privacy Shield” and you can see their privacy policy here: Ticksy Privacy Policy.
SECURITY MEASURES
We use the SSL/HTTPS protocol throughout our site. This encrypts our user communications with the servers so that personal identifiable information is not captured/hijacked by third parties without authorization. In case of a data breach, system administrators will immediately take all needed steps to ensure system integrity, will contact affected users and will attempt to reset passwords if needed.
Your Rights in Relation to Your Personal Data
You have a number of important rights in relation to the data we hold about you, which you can exercise at any time:
• To ask to see a record of all the personal information we hold
• To ask that we amend any incorrect or incomplete data that we hold
• To withdraw consent and request that we permanently delete any data we hold
• To complain about how we have taken or processed your data
For more information or to exercise any of these rights, please contact our Director, Michael Mo, at [email protected].
If you are not happy with how we have taken or processed your data, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office on 0303 123 1113 or at www.ico.org.uk/concerns.
Thank you for taking the time to read our Privacy Notice. We hope you have found it helpful, welcome any comments you may have and look forward to working with you.
AMENDMENTS
We may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we amend this Privacy Policy, we will update this page accordingly and require you to accept the amendments in order to be permitted to continue using our services.
Last Updated Aug 2023