Privacy policy


Updated 12-03-2024

The privacy and security of your personal information is extremely important to us. This policy explains how we protect your data while providing services that we believe will be of interest to you.  

This policy applies whether you are member of the Royal Statistical Society, customer, employee, or a user of any of our services.

In general, the Royal Statistical Society processes personal data as a Data Controller.  We’ll only use your personal data on relevant lawful grounds as permitted by the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). When we refer to ‘the legislation’ elsewhere in this policy, we are referring to those regulations.

We never sell your personal data; where we share information with Data Processors (suppliers that provide services to us, processing your data according to our instructions and under contract) they are responsible to you for their use of your information and compliance with the law. 

Who we are and how to contact us
In this policy, whenever you see the words ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’, or ‘RSS’, it refers to The Royal Statistical Society, charity number 306096, and its wholly owned subsidiary, RSS Services Limited, company number 3982652.

If you have any questions in relation to this privacy policy or how we use your personal data they should be sent to gdpr@rss.org.uk or addressed to the Data Protection Officer, Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street, London EC1Y 8LX.

What personal data do we collect?
Your personal data (that is any information which identifies you, or which can be identified as relating to you personally - for example, name, address, phone number, email address) will be collected and used by us, but we’ll only collect the personal data that we need. 

We collect personal data in connection with specific activities such as membership requests, registration for conference or events, booking a training course, hiring our rooms, campaigning, volunteering, employment etc. 

When you visit on our website and are asked for personal information, you are sharing that information with The Royal Statistical Society alone, unless otherwise stated - for example when you are using our secure online payment pages, you are being connected to Opayo and the information that you give, such as your credit card number and contact information, is provided so that the transaction can take place.

Cyber Security
The RSS is Cyber Essentials certified and has a wide range of processes and technical controls in place to protect your data.

Where is data stored?
The RSS stores data on Microsoft 365 / Azure servers located in the UK and EU.

How we use your personal data
Personal data provided to us will be used for the purpose or purposes outlined and in a transparent manner at the time of collection or registration where appropriate, in accordance with any preferences you express. If asked by the police, or any other regulatory or government authority investigating suspected illegal activities, we may need to provide your personal data.

Your personal data may be collected and used to help us deliver our charitable activities, help us raise funds, or complete your order or request. Below are the main uses of your data which depend on the nature of our relationship with you and how you interact with our website and our various services, and activities. 

Membership
We use the personal data you provide to us as a member for the purpose of servicing your membership.  It is provided as legitimate interest. It includes, but is not limited to: sending you renewal information and administering your membership; sending you Significance magazine; providing information about our Conference, events and training courses; updates on our activities; and providing access to electronic journals. We will normally contact you via email, although we might occasionally need to write to you or phone you. If your membership lapses, we may contact you for up to 12 months after the lapse date to give you an opportunity to re-join unless you have expressly told us that you do not want to be contacted.

The Royal Statistical Society is committed to ensuring that it proactively promotes a culture of equality, diversity and inclusion both within the Society and in the work that we do. The collection of diversity information enables us to identify where we need to focus our resources on strengthening diversity and equal opportunities; to assess the value of particular strategies; to measure our progress; and to address any perceptions of the statistics profession lacking diversity, which can have implications for our outreach work. By completing the diversity sections of the Member Profile, you will help inform our policy in this area. The Royal Statistical Society will not disclose any of your personally identifiable information, except under special circumstances, such as when required by law.

Your personal information may continue to be of value to us for equality and diversity purposes if you cease to be a member. If you would prefer us not to retain it for these purposes and ask us not to, we will delete your information.

The accuracy of your information is important to us. If you change your email address, or if any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, please email us at membership@rss.org.uk, or write to The Membership Department, The Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street, London EC1Y 8LX.

Conference and events 
We use the personal data you provide as a delegate to events for the purpose of managing your attendance. It is provided as legitimate interest. Your data will be used to communicate with you throughout the process, including to confirm we’ve received your registration and payment, to clarify where we might need more detail to fulfil a booking, or to resolve any issues that might arise with your booking. We will retain your data to provide you, by email, with details of our future conferences and events. Should you at any time prefer us not to retain it for this purpose and ask us not to, we will delete your information.  We do not pass, or sell your data to any third party except to partners who help us provide these services.

Training courses 
We use the personal data you provide as a delegate to a training course for the purpose of managing your attendance.  We process your data as legitimate interest. Your data will be used to communicate with you throughout the process, including to confirm we’ve received your registration and payment, to clarify where we might need more detail to fulfil a booking, or to resolve any issues that might arise with your booking. We will retain your data to provide you, by email, with details of other training events. Should you at any time prefer us not to retain it for this purpose and ask us not to, we will delete your information. We do not pass, or sell your data to any third party, except the course tutor.

Venue hire 
If you wish to hire a room from us, we will collect and process your data on the basis of contact, to communicate with you throughout the process, including to confirm we’ve received your booking and payment, to clarify where we might need more detail to fulfil a booking, or to resolve any issues that might arise with your booking. Your privacy is important to us, so we never sell or pass your information on to a third party. We will retain your data for marketing purposes regarding venue hire.

Competitions and awards
We may share your entry form with the judges of the competition or award. If the competition or award is sponsored, then some of the judges may be external. If so, we will redact as much personal information as possible before sharing your entry details and ensure that they have data protection policies in place.

Newsletter 
If you wish to receive the emailed Royal Statistical Society newsletter, we will collect and process your data on the basis of consent. To provide the newsletter service, we do need to share your contact details with the IT service provider (see "Third parties" below). Should you at any time prefer us not to retain it for this purpose and ask us not to, we will delete your information. Your privacy is important to us, so we never sell your information to a third party.

Recruitment and employment 
To comply with our contractual, statutory, and management obligations and responsibilities as an employer, we process personal data, including special category data, from job applicants and employees.  The legislation defines ‘sensitive personal data’ as information about racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs or other similar beliefs, trade union membership, physical or mental health, sexual life, and genetic and biometric information.

To carry out our contractual and management responsibilities, we may, from time to time, need to share an employee’s personal data with one or more third party. To meet the employment contract, we are required to transfer an employee’s personal data to third parties, for example, to pension providers and HM Revenue & Customs. Similarly, to fulfil our statutory responsibilities, we’re required to give some of an employee’s personal data to government departments or agencies e.g. provision of salary and tax data to HM Revenue & Customs.

In certain limited circumstances, we may legally collect and process sensitive personal data without requiring the explicit consent of an employee.

Further information on what data is collected and why it’s processed is given below.

Contractual responsibilities: Our contractual responsibilities include those arising from the contract of employment. The data processed to meet contractual responsibilities includes, but is not limited to, data relating to: payroll, bank account, postal address, sick pay; leave, maternity pay, pension and emergency contacts.

Statutory responsibilities: Our statutory responsibilities are those imposed through law on the organisation as an employer. The data processed to meet statutory responsibilities includes, but is not limited to, data relating to: tax, national insurance, statutory sick pay, statutory maternity pay, family leave, work permits, equal opportunities monitoring.

Management responsibilities: Our management responsibilities are those necessary for the organisational functioning of the organisation. The data processed to meet management responsibilities includes, but is not limited to, data relating to: recruitment and employment, training and development, absence, disciplinary matters, email address and telephone number.

Management of volunteers 
If you’re a volunteer then we will need to use your personal data to manage your volunteering, from the moment you enquire to the time you decide to stop volunteering with us. This could include: contacting you about a role you’ve applied for or we think you might be interested in, and expense claims you’ve made. It could also include information from sections and groups about things happening where you volunteer and about your volunteering, including asking for your opinions on your volunteering experience. 

We may collect and retain extra information about you (eg: references, details of emergency contacts, medical conditions, etc) for legal or contractual reasons.

Your data protection rights 
Where the Royal Statistical Society is using your personal data on the basis of consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time.

Right of access
You are entitled to request a copy of the data we hold on you; this is known as a Subject Access Request (SAR).

You will need you to provide information that will help us confirm your identity. If we hold personal information about you, we will give you a copy of the information in an understandable format together with an explanation of why we hold and use it.

Once we have all the information necessary to respond to your request, we’ll provide your information to you within one month in either electronic or physical format . This timeframe may be extended by up to two months if your request is particularly complex. 

If you would like further information on your rights or wish to exercise them, please write to the Data Protection Officer, Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street, London EC1Y 8LX, or contact us at gdpr@rss.org.uk

What to do if you’re not happy
In the first instance, please talk to us directly so we can resolve any problem or query. You also have the right to contact the Information Commissions Office (ICO) if you have any questions about Data Protection. You can contact them using their help line 0303 123 113 or at ico.org.uk.

Third parties
We never sell your information to a third party. We work with trusted partners who function as Data Processors to provide services to our members:

Online payments are processed by Opayo (formerly SagePay) which is a service owned by Evalon that is fully PCI DSS compliant.

Direct Debits are processed by Access PaySuite (formerly SmartDebit) and are fully PCI DSS compliant.

Our Content Management System (CMS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database are provided by Smart Impact and use technologies from Kentico and Microsoft. This enables us to provides online services in MyRSS and our wide range of newsletters. Data is stored in Microsoft Azure. Our Significance website is hosted by Hostwinds.

Online and hybrid events use Microsoft Teams and may be uploaded to YouTube.

Some meetings may be automatically transcribed using Otter.ai. Our meeting policy states that attendees must be given an opportunity at the beginning of the meeting to object to automated transcribing, in which case minutes will be taken manually. Any automatic transcriptions are reviewed for accuracy and will be permanently deleted within 60 days.

RSS Journals and Significance magazine are published by Oxford University Press. There is integration between MyRSS and the OUP website to allow members to access their relevant publications.

Mentoring services are provided by Pushfar.  

Competitions and awards may be sponsored and/or judged by third parties.  If so, we will redact as much personal information as possible before sharing your entry details and ensure that they have data protection policies in place.

We may run ad campaigns to help direct users to the most relevant part of our website. Ad services may be supplied by Google, Meta and LinkedIn. 

Fonts used on this site are served by the Google Fonts API. This is to improve accessibility, site loading speeds and font compatibility across devices. Review the Google Fonts Privacy and Data Collection statement.


Research data
Any data shared with the RSS for the purposes of research will be restricted to users that have been agreed with the data provider in advance. RSS operates on the Principle of Least Privilege; accounts and data are subject to user access controls with MFA enforced on all accounts. Where possible, RSS will anonymise all data sets. All data is stored on servers based in the UK and/or EU.

 
Terms & Conditions
Copyright
The content (content being images, text, sound and video files, programs and scripts) of this website is copyright © The Royal Statistical Society. All rights expressly reserved. You agree to abide by all copyright notices and restrictions attached to the content and not to remove or alter any such notice or restriction.

Acceptable use policy
The content of this website can be accessed, printed and downloaded in an unaltered form (altered including being stretched, compressed, coloured or altered in any way so as to distort content from its original proportions or format) with copyright acknowledged, on a temporary basis for personal study that is not for a direct or indirect commercial use and any non-commercial use. Any content printed or downloaded may not be sold, resold, licensed, transferred, copied or reproduced in whole or in part in any manner or in or on any media to any person without the prior written consent of the Royal Statistical Society, including but not limited to:

  • transmission by any method
  • storage in any medium, system or program
  • display in any form
  • performance
  • hire, lease, rental or loan, or any other form of exploitation

Other than expressly permitted by the terms and conditions specific to individual services, you may not without the prior written consent of the Royal Statistical Society:

  • systematically extract and/or re-utilise parts of the contents of the website, including but not limited to the utilisation of any data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools to extract (whether once or many times) for re-utilisation of any substantial parts of this website
  • create and/or publish your own database that features substantial parts of this website, including but not limited to, our prices and product/service listings.
You agree not to:
  • impersonate another person or use a false name or a name you are unauthorised to use or create a false identity or e-mail address or try to mislead others as to the identity or origin of any communications;
  • make available or upload files that contain software or other material, data or information not owned or licensed to you or collect information about others (eg names/addresses) without their prior consent;
  • damage, interfere with or disrupt access to the website or any of the services delivered through such website or do anything which may interrupt or impair their functionality;
  • publish, post, distribute, disseminate or otherwise transmit defamatory, offensive, infringing, obscene, indecent or other unlawful or objectionable material or information;
  • threaten, harass, stalk, abuse, disrupt, cause inconvenience or distress or otherwise violate the rights (including rights of privacy and publicity) of others;
  • use the content or the website for any illegal or improper purpose,
  • make available, upload or distribute by any means any material or files that contain any viruses, bugs, corrupt data, "trojan horses", "worms" or any other harmful software.

The Royal Statistical Society retains the right to prevent you from accessing the website or any of the services provided through the website, without prejudice to any of our accrued rights, where we in our reasonable discretion consider that you are contravening our Acceptable Use Policy or any other term or condition of these.

Terms of Use
Cookie policy
The RSS uses cookies to improve you experience on our website. Please see our Cookie Policy for more details.

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this website should be addressed to us as follows:

Images:
Email: web@rss.org.uk

Text and all other types of material:
Email: web@rss.org.uk

The Royal Statistical Society has made every reasonable effort to locate, contact and acknowledge copyright owners and wishes to be informed by any copyright owners who are not properly identified and acknowledged on this website so that we may make any necessary corrections.

Other individuals and organisations wishing to make the Royal Statistical Society content accessible through their websites are encouraged to create hypertext links to the required content on this website.

The citation protocol for material from this website must adhere to the following format:
Author, Year, Title of Page, Type of Publication, and the Universal Resource Locator (URL) code.

For example: 
The Royal Statistical Society.  2010.  How to Cite Material from this Website.  World Wide Web Publication, www.rss.org.uk

Other websites
The Royal Statistical Society website provides extensive links to other independent sites, but this policy statement applies only to direct use of this website (rss.org.uk). You will need to consult the providers of other websites for information on their policies.

Google Analytics
This website uses Google Analytics 4, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. ("Google"). Google Analytics uses "cookies", which are text files placed on your computer, to help the website analyse how users use the site. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) may be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for website operators and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google's behalf. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.

You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser, however please note that if you do this you may not be able to use the full functionality of this website. By using this website, you consent to the processing of data about you by Google in the manner and for the purposes set out above.

Legal disclaimer
The Royal Statistical Society has prepared the content of this website responsibly and carefully, but disclaims all warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy of the information contained in any of the materials on this website or on other linked websites or on any subsequent links. This includes, but is not by way of limitation:

  • any implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose
  • any liability for damage to your computer hardware, data, information, materials and business resulting from the information or the lack of information available
  • any errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in the information
  • any decision made or action taken or not taken in reliance upon the information

The Royal Statistical Society makes no warranty as to the content, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of the information or that the information may be relied upon for any reason and bears no responsibility for the accuracy, content or legality of any linked site or for that of any subsequent links. The Royal Statistical Society makes no warranty that the website service will be uninterrupted or error-free or that any defects can be corrected.

The Royal Statistical Society shall not be liable for any losses or damages (including without limitation consequential loss or damage) whatsoever from the use of, or reliance on, the information in its website, or from the use of the Internet generally. Any links to other websites do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by the Royal Statistical Society of any products, services, policies or opinions of the organisation or individual.

These disclaimers and exclusions shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales under the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales. Those who choose to access this site from outside the United Kingdom are responsible for compliance with local laws if and to the extent local laws are applicable.

Links
What websites do we link to?
The Royal Statistical Society's experts recommend external web links on the basis of their suitability and usefulness for our users. Selection and addition of links to our website is entirely a matter for the Royal Statistical Society and for the Royal Statistical Society alone.

It is not our policy to enter into agreements for reciprocal links.
The inclusion of a link to an organisation's or individual's website does not constitute an endorsement or an approval by the Royal Statistical Society of any product, service, policy or opinion of the organisation or individual. The Royal Statistical Society is not responsible for the content of external websites.

What websites will we not link to?
We will not link to websites that contain racist, sexual or misleading content; that promote violence; that are in breach of any UK law; which are otherwise offensive to individuals or to groups of people.

The decision of the Royal Statistical Society is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

If you wish to report a concern, please email web@rss.org.uk

Notice and Takedown policy
If you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material on our website, for which you have not given permission, or is not covered by a limitation or exception in national law, please contact us in writing stating the following:

  1. Your contact details.
  2. The full bibliographic details of the material.
  3. The exact and full url where you found the material.
  4. Proof that you are the rights holder and a statement that, under penalty of perjury, you are the rights holder or are an authorised representative.

Contact Details:
Notice and Takedown,
Licensing,
12 Errol Street,
London EC1Y 8LX
web@rss.org.uk

Upon receipt of notification the 'Notice and Takedown' procedure is then invoked as follows:

  1. The Royal Statistical Society will acknowledge receipt of your complaint by email or letter and will make an initial assessment of the validity and plausibility of the complaint.
  2. Upon receipt of a valid complaint the material will be temporarily removed from the Royal Statistical Society website pending an agreed solution.
  3. The Royal Statistical Society will contact the contributor who deposited the material, if relevant. The contributor will be notified that the material is subject to a complaint, under what allegations, and will be encouraged to assuage the complaints concerned.
  4. The complainant and the contributor will be encouraged to resolve the issue swiftly and amicably and to the satisfaction of both parties, with the following possible outcomes:
    • The material is replaced on the Royal Statistical Society website unchanged.
    • The material is replaced on the Royal Statistical Society website with changes.
    • The material is permanently removed from the website.
  5. If the contributor and the complainant are unable to agree a solution, the material will remain unavailable through the Royal Statistical Society until a time when a resolution has been reached.
Fair Processing Notice
Royal Statistical Society collects information directly from you or from our business partners when you express an interest in or sign up to one of our services.  We or our appointed agents as well as carefully selected business partners may use this information to:
  • Provide you with information and updates on the topics you have expressed an interest in.
  • Contact you by email about products, events, your service or related services we and our partners are offering. Where you provide email contact information, you consent to us using these to communicate with you.  You may stop communications or change your interests with us at any time by logging onto your user account with us and updating your profile.
  • Help run, and contact you about improving the way we run, our services.
  • Promote our business, recognising excellence, advancing the science of statistics and promoting use and awareness for public benefit. 
  • Create statistics and member profiles, test computer systems and analyse user preferences.
  • Help prevent and detect crime and loss.
  • Help train our staff.

We may also monitor and record any communications we have with you, including emails, to make sure we are providing a good service and meeting our responsibilities.

We may also share your information with individuals or user groups associated with the topics you have expressed an interest in for those organisations and individuals to better understand its audience or for any purpose mentioned above.

Updates to this policy
If we make substantial changes, we will bring these to your attention where reasonably possible. Otherwise, you can always  access the latest version of this policy on our website.