Parents and Carers Privacy Policy

Parents and Carers Privacy Policy: last updated December 12, 2006

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
· Information about us
· Our objectives

(2) About the Do U Care website
· Who is this site for?
· 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
· E mail and other contact details
· Competitions
· Surveys and quizzes
· Message boards and Real Life Experiences
· Cookies
· Traffic Data

(5) How we keep young people’s information secure
· Confidentiality
· Data Protection Act and other safeguards

(6) When and how we will share young people’s information
· Statistical data
· General information
· Exceptional circumstances

(7) Your young person’s rights
· To see the information we hold.
· To correct errors in that information.
· To stop us sending further emails.

(8) Overseas transfers of information
· Limitations

(9) Further information
· How to find out more

1. Who we are

We are the South Tyneside Early Intervention and Safeguarding department and are part of South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council. You can contact us by visiting the council website at www.southtyneside.info

The Early Intervention and Safegaurding Department of the Children and Young People's Directorate offers the full range of assessment and care management services, covering initial and ongoing assessment and family support services, foster care, residential care and adoption services for children and their families. The service forms part of a larger network of services for children in South Tyneside, co-ordinated through the Children's Alliance.

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 Do U Care website

The site was set up in Aug 2003. Most young people who will use the site are under 18 years old.

The site features various fun activities, such as competitions, and a real life experiences section and a message board.

The site also contains lots of reliable information about Social Care and Health and information about children’s rights which young people can refer to if and when they need it. The Early Intervention and Safegaurding department 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).

3. Your views

You may object to this site because …

· We are 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 will, particularly information about parents or carers. Once we realise the any information is that of someone other than the young person, we will delete it.

What we do to address these concerns

· We recognise that in some cases a young person may not visit a site like this 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 Real Life experiences 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.

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 expect most young people will contact us by email although they can of course contact us by other methods as well. Sometimes young people may send us pictures they have designed, perhaps of Hillary, Harriett or Henry. Sometimes they may just ask questions. We will 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. 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.

We may give concert tickets or any other prize which requires the young person to attend at a particular venue. We will 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 consider alternatives.

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 may use the email address to send the young person a password to use the Real Life Experiences section 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 will put surveys and quizzes on the site from time to time.

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 and Real Life Experiences

We have message boards where young people can ask questions about personal problems and message each other as well. Young people must register before they can post to the message board. All questions and messages are visible to anyone who is registered and logged in to the site.

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 site icon. We also look at the young people’s postings before they are posted on the site and delete anything which is in breach of the safety rules. We delete topics once they have been idle for about 4-5 weeks.

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 who use the message boards.

The real life experiences section of the site can be read by anyone but only looked after young people can post a new experience or comment on someone else’s experience. We check young people’s proposed postings to the real life experiences section of the site before they are posted, and will not post anything which is in breach of the safety rules.

· 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 this will not be used to identify any individual, other than where it is necessary to ban a young person from a message board (see above).
Our ISP keeps traffic data for 12 months.

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. That includes child-care specialists. 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 police. 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.

We will share the anonymous, aggregated statistical data which we collect through surveys and quizzes. We may share this with other organisations and agencies in South Tyneside, and make it publicly available on our council website at http://www.southtynside.info . 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 other issues by other organisations such as schools or the press.

7. Your young person’s rights

A 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 a 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 we have the consent of someone with parental responsibility. 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.
A young person also has a right to correct any errors in information we hold.

8. 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 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 or identifiable 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).

9. 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.