Communications Privacy Notice

When we process your personal information, we promise to:

• make sure you know why we need it
• only ask for what we need, and not collect too much or irrelevant information
• make sure it is accurate and up to date
• let you know if we share it with other organisations, unless we have a legal obligation to pass it on without telling you
• protect it and make sure nobody has access to it who shouldn't
• make sure we don't keep it longer than is necessary

If you would like more detail on how Disclosure Scotland processes your personal information for other reasons you can read our full privacy policy.  

Controller's contact details

Disclosure Scotland as an Executive Agency of the Scottish Government falls under the legal entity of the Scottish ministers in relation to processing of your personal information. We are the controller for the personal information we process, unless otherwise stated.

Telephone

You can phone Disclosure Scotland’s helpline on 0300 020 0040

Email

dswebteam@disclosurescotland.gov.scot

Post

Disclosure Scotland

PO Box 250

Glasgow

G51 1YU

Data Protection Officer's contact details

You can contact our Data Protection Officer using our mailbox - dsdpo@disclosurescotland.gov.scot or via our postal address. Please mark the envelope ‘Data Protection Officer’.

Your data protection rights

Data protection law gives you certain rights that you may exercise in respect of your own personal information.

• you have a right to request a copy of personal information we hold about you, by making a Subject Access Request. We have published further information on this
• you have the right to ask us to update our records if you believe that the data we hold is inaccurate or incomplete.
• you have the right to ask us to erase your personal information. There may however be some circumstances in which we cannot comply. Such as, if we have a legal duty to keep data, or we process it in a particular way
• you have the right to ask that we stop or restrict the processing of your information in certain circumstances
• you have the right to object to processing if we are able to process your information because the process forms part of our public tasks
• you have the right to ask that we transfer the information you gave us from one organisation to another or give it to you.

We have one month to respond to you. Please contact us at DS.FOI@disclosurescotland.gov.scot if you wish to make a request.

Your right to complain

If you have concerns about our compliance with data protection legislation, please contact our Data Protection Officer in the first instance at  dsdpo@disclosurescotland.gov.scot. They will look into the concerns you have raised and provide a response.

If you are not satisfied with the DPO’s response you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The ICO are the supervisory authority responsible for data protection in the UK. You can contact the Information Commissioner at:

The Information Commissioner
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Tel: 08456 30 60 60

More information is available at make a complaint on the Information Commissioner's site.  

Lawful basis for processing

We process your personal information because:

• you have given us clear consent for us to process your personal data for a specific purpose
• processing is necessary for a contract we have with you, or because you have asked us to take specific steps before entering into a contract
• processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation that applies to us
• processing is necessary to protect your (or some else’s) life
• processing is necessary for us to perform a task in the public interest or for our official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law

Changes to this privacy notice

We keep our privacy notice under regular review to make sure it is up to date and accurate. If this privacy notice changes in any way, we will update this page. Regularly reviewing this page ensures that you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances we share it with other parties. Any changes to our wider processing will be updated in our our full privacy policy. 

What we do with information we collect from you when you contact us

When you write to us or call us about our public communications, your enquiry will usually be first handled by our Communications Team. They may then send it to a specific team so that your question can be answered. We will only use your personal information for the purpose of handling, investigating and resolving your issue. We will use the contact details you provided or that we hold on record for them to investigate your issue. Any statistical information held in order to develop our service will be anonymised where possible. 

What personal information we collect

We need enough information from you to answer your enquiry. If you call the helpline your call may be recorded and the helpline team may take down details from you. If you contact us via email or post, we’ll need a return address for response. If you contact us via social media, the messages will be held for as long as required to investigate your issue. You can read our full privacy policy for more details.  

Who we share your information with

Your enquiry will often need specialist advice and may be passed to the relevant team or stakeholder for consideration and input.

In some circumstances we will share your information with other organisations, before we do this, we will satisfy ourselves that we have a lawful basis on which to share the information.

What we do with information we collect from you when you visit our website

We use this information to:

• improve the site by monitoring how you use it
• respond to any feedback you send us, if you've asked us to
• send out email alerts to those who have subscribed to our e-newsletter
• record and/or publish your response to a survey or consultation
• publish your comment on a blog or discussion site

What personal information we collect

Analytics

We use a third party service, Google Analytics, to collect information on how you use the site, using cookies and page tagging techniques.

The information we - and Google - collect doesn't identify anyone, and is kept for a maximum of 38 months. If we do want to collect personally identifiable information through the site, we will be upfront about it.

When staff use our site

We use IP addresses to identify Scottish Government staff accessing the site from Scottish Government networks.

We record these users as 'internal' on this site. This helps us produce more accurate data about how members of the public use our content.

All visitors are anonymous. We cannot identify individuals.

Cookies

You can read more about how we use cookies, and how to change your cookies preferences, on our Cookies page.

Additionally, we use Plausible Analytics on this site to collect some anonymous usage data for statistical purposes. This is to track overall trends in our website traffic, not to track individual visitors. All the data is in aggregate only. No personal data is collected to Plausible. Data collected includes referral sources, top pages, visit duration, information from the devices (device type, operating system, country and browser) used during the visit. Read more in the Plausible Analytics data policy.

Subscribing to our e-newsletter

When you sign up for our mailing list you consent to receiving our regular e-bulletin as well as additional information on our events and important developments. Disclosure Scotland evaluate the e-bulletin regularly and consider any additional emails on a case-by-case basis to ensure they are relevant. You can unsubscribe or select your preferences at any time using the links at the bottom of the email or contacting dswebteam@disclosurescotland.gov.scot 

We collect your email address and subscription preferences when you sign up to our mailing list. You can also provide your name but this is optional. We track how our emails are used - for example whether you open them and which links are engaged with in order to measure the information we provide.

Who we share your information with

We use Sendgrid to process our email newsletter subscriptions. Sendgrid’s privacy notice outlines how they collect, use, share and process personal information.

Links to other websites

When we link to other websites, we encourage you to read the privacy policy on those sites.