Privacy policy for Plaid Cymru – the Party of Wales

This is our privacy policy. It is for anyone who comes into contact with us – voters, members, young people, volunteers and donors.

We can provide a copy of the policy in other formats such as large print. If you would like a copy in a different format, please contact our Data Protection Officer.

This privacy policy demonstrates our commitment to protecting your personal information.

We will process your personal information in line with the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Political parties gather information about people’s political opinions. This is entirely proper and in the public interest, as long as appropriate protection is in place. This privacy notice provides information about how we protect your personal information.

Contacting us about your information rights

If you would like more information about how we use your personal information, or to exercise your rights relating to it, you can contact our Data Protection Officer as follows.

By post:          Plaid Cymru
Tŷ Gwynfor
Llys Anson
Glanfa’r Iwerydd
CAERDYDD
CF10 4AL

By email:        [email protected]
By phone:      02920 472272

The information we process

We process the personal information of every person on the electoral register in Wales. We do this to help us encourage people to become involved in politics, as well as to promote our own political aims. We process your political opinions if you provide them to us directly or if they are publicly available. We also process information on the political opinions of our members, donors, supporters and volunteers.

We will not make your information (including information on your political opinions) public, unless we have to do so by law.

We will never sell your personal information to third parties. Sometimes we share your information with companies that help us in our work, but only if we have the legal right to do so. For example, we share people’s names and addresses with companies that send you election leaflets.

The information we collect

The electorate in Wales

We get a copy of the electoral registers from the local authorities in Wales. The electoral register gives us the following information.

• Your name
• Your address
• Your date of birth (if you are )
• Your electoral registration number (which allows us to know where you will vote at elections and referendums)
• Whether or not you have a postal vote
• Whether you voted in an election or referendum (but not how you voted)

If we contact you to ask for your political opinion and you give us that information, we will keep a record of it. We do this so that we can:

• decide whether we should send you our campaigning materials;
• choose what campaigning materials to send you; and
• decide whether we think you are likely to vote, and for which party or cause (in a referendum).

The lawful basis (legal reason) for us processing this information is ‘public task’. This lawful basis allows political parties to process personal information. You can find out more about this from the Information Commissioner.

Members

When you sign up as a member you give us your name and contact information. We use this information to provide our membership services to you. We can also process your bank details if you give us them so you can pay by direct debit.

The lawful basis for us processing this information is ‘contract’. That is because your membership of Plaid Cymru means that we provide services for you as part of a contract. 

Donors

If you make a donation to Plaid Cymru, we will process your personal information to make sure the money gets to our bank account.

We must also process your personal information in the following circumstances.

• If you donate more than £500 we must check that you are registered to vote. We must also keep a record of your name and address.
• If you donate more than £7,500 we must also report your name, and the amount of the donation, to the Electoral Commission. They publish the information in a public register.

We keep a record of smaller donations on our database.

The lawful basis for processing your donations is ‘legitimate interest’. The lawful basis for processing your information if you donate more than £500 is ‘legal obligation’.

Supporters

When you become a supporter of Plaid Cymru online, we will record your support on our database. The lawful basis for processing this information is ‘public task’.

Volunteers

When you volunteer to help us, we will record how you want to help. The lawful basis for processing this information is ‘public task’.

Attending events

If you confirm that you will attend our conferences and events, we will keep your contact information on our database. The lawful basis for processing this information is ‘legitimate interest’.

Website

We will keep your contact details if you provide them through our website. We will use this information to keep you up to date with things you are interested in. The lawful basis for us processing this information is ‘public task’.

CCTV

We use CCTV to make sure that our staff are safe and our office is secure. We keep footage for 28 days and then delete it. We have signs so that staff and visitors know that they are being recorded. The lawful basis for processing this information is ‘legitimate interest’.

Who we share your information with

We will never sell your information. Sometimes we share it with companies that help us in our work, but only if we have the legal right to do so.

We may share information with:

• mailing companies, so that voters and members can be sent information
• email software providers such as NationBuilder
• elected representatives, candidates and local campaigners, and
• regulatory bodies and law-enforcement agencies, when necessary for investigations.

How long we keep your information for

We regularly review the information we hold, how relevant it is and whether we need to keep it. We will only keep your personal information for as long as we need it. Please contact us if you would like a copy.

Cookies

A cookie is a tiny text file that is stored on your computer. We may use cookies to track the ways people move about our website. We also use them to monitor the website’s security. You can usually prevent cookies by using the tools in your browser.

We may store the internet address you used to connect to our computer, the time and date you connected, browser information and the pages you visited.

Log files and statistics

We use a range of technical systems to keep an eye on how our website is working, including:

• IP addresses
• URLs of documents downloaded
• timestamps
• HTTP user-agents, and
• Google Analytics (which itself uses cookies to analyse how visitors use our website).

Transferring your information outside the European Economic Area

Some of our service providers are based outside of the European Economic Area (EEA), so we may sometimes need to share your personal information outside of the EEA. If we do transfer your data outside the EEA we will make sure that it is protected in the same way as if the information was inside the EEA.

We will make sure of this by:

• sending the information to a service provider in a country where the data-protection standards are approved by the EU
• transferring it to an organisation that meets the standards of the EU-US ‘Privacy Shield’, and
• having a contract with the party we are sending the information to, the terms of which specify that they need to keep to the necessary standards.

How we protect your information

The security of your information is very important to us. We protect it with technical and organisational measures. We regularly review our security measures to make sure that your information is safe.

Your rights over your information 

We will act as quickly as possible when you ask to exercise any of your data rights (set out below), which will be within one month unless your request is particularly complex. In this case we will tell you about the delay and our reasons for it.

Your data rights

Right of access – you can ask for a copy of your personal information and details of how we use. This request is commonly known as a subject access request. 

Right of rectification – you can ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete information about you.

Right to be forgotten – you can ask us to delete information we hold about you.

Right to restriction of processing – you can ask us to restrict how we process your information.

Right to object – you can ask us to stop contacting you personally. However, we still have the right to send you an addressed leaflet at election time, and you may still receive unaddressed leaflets.

Right to object to processing political data – you can ask us to stop processing information about your political opinions.

Profiling

If we have information about your voting intentions and your voting history, we will assess how likely it is that you will vote for Plaid Cymru. This is called profiling, and we don’t think that this has a significant effect on you.

Making a complaint 

If you are unhappy with how we have processed or handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The ICO is the supervisory body authorised by the Data Protection Act 2018 to regulate how personal information is collected, used and stored in the United Kingdom. The contact details for the Information Commissioner’s Office are as follows.

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
SK9 5AF

Phone: 0303 123 1113
Website: www.ico.org.uk/concerns/

This version of the privacy policy was published on 18 December 2019.