We may use your information to:

- to carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into by you and us;
- seek your views or comments on the services we provide;
- notify you of changes to our services;
- send you communications which you have requested and that may be of interest to you.

We review our retention periods for personal information on a regular basis.  We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity, or as long as is set out in any relevant contract you hold with us or as long as our legal obligation for retention of records. 

We will not sell or rent your information to third parties.
We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.  

We may pass your information to our third party service providers, agents subcontractors and other associated organisations for the purposes of completing tasks and providing services to you on our behalf. However, when we use third party service providers, we disclose only the personal information that is necessary to deliver the service and we have a contract in place that requires them to keep your information secure and not to use it for their own direct marketing purposes.  

We may transfer your personal information to a third party as part of a sale of some or all of our business and assets to any third party or as part of any business restructuring or reorganisation, or if we’re under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation or to enforce or apply our terms of use or to protect the rights, property or safety of our supporters and customers. However, we will take steps with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected.

You have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive information from us.

We will not contact you for marketing purposes by email, phone or text message unless you have given your prior consent. We will not contact you for marketing purposes by post if you have indicated that you do not wish to be contacted. You can change your marketing preferences at any time by contacting us by email: studio@thelightingasylum.com

Under data protection laws you have rights in relation to your personal data that include the right to request access, correction, erasure, restriction, transfer, to object to processing, to portability of data and (where the lawful ground of processing is consent) to withdraw consent.

You can see more about these rights at: 

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please email us at studio@thelightingasylum.com

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive or refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you.

If you are not happy with any aspect of how we collect and use your data, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We should be grateful if you would contact us first if you do have a complaint so that we can try to resolve it for you.

The accuracy of your information is important to us. If you change email address, or any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, please email us at: studio@thelightingasylum.com

When you give us personal information, we take steps to ensure that it’s treated securely.  Our website uses an SSL certificate and you should see the url in your web browser begin with https: and an indication in most web browsers that our site is secure.

We also make a number of regular security precautions and audits to ensure we are taking reasonable steps to protect your data.  These include the use of firewalls, regular malware scans of our site and hardware.

Like most other websites, our website uses cookies. ‘Cookies’ are small pieces of information sent by an organisation to your computer and stored on your hard drive to allow that website to recognise you when you visit. They collect statistical data about your browsing actions and patterns and do not identify you as an individual.  This helps us to improve our website and deliver a better easy to use service.

It is possible to switch off cookies by setting your browser preferences. For more information on how to switch off cookies on your computer, visit our full cookies policy. Turning cookies of may result in a loss of functionality when using our website.

As part of the services offered to you through this website, the information which you provide to us may be transferred to countries outside the European Union (“EU”). By way of example, this may happen if any of our servers are from time to time located in a country outside of the EU. These countries may not have similar data protection laws to the UK. By submitting your personal data, you’re agreeing to this transfer, storing or processing. If we transfer your information outside of the EU in this way, we will take steps to ensure that appropriate security measures are taken with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected as outlined in this Policy.

If you use our services while you are outside the EU, your information may be transferred outside the EU in order to provide you with those services.

Our website, emails and social media channels may occasionally contain links to other websites run by other organisations. This privacy policy applies only to our website‚ so we encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other sites even if you access them using links from our website.

In addition, if you linked to our website from a third party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners and operators of that third party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third party site.

We currently use a number of third party services here is an explanation of what we use and links (if relevant) to their privacy policies.  Depending on your use of our site and services not all of these may apply to you.

Google Analytics – we use this service to track statistical data so we can better understand how people use our website.  https://policies.google.com/privacy

Mailchimp - we use the mailchimp service to send emails to you and manage our mailing lists. You can see their privacy policy here. https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/

Our website runs on the Squarespace platform.  You can view their privacy policy here: https://www.squarespace.com/privacy/

We keep this Policy under review. This Policy was last updated on 31st July 2020.