Some of the language used in privacy notices can be specialised. The Information Commissioner's website provides a useful introduction to key terms and concepts.
The purpose of the processing
The Scottish Parliament and its committees are working towards hearing from a more diverse range of people who are broadly representative of Scotland’s society. Collecting monitoring information about the characteristics of committee witnesses enables us to measure progress towards ensuring that committees hear from a wide range of voices.
Collecting and holding personal data
The Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB) processes any personal data you send to it under the requirements of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA). Personal data consists of data that relates to an identified or identifiable individual. The SPCB will hold any personal data securely, will use it only for the purposes it was collected for.
Further information about the data protection legislation and your rights
Categories of information
- an individual’s race or ethnic origin
- political or religious views
- sex life or sexual orientation
- trade union membership
- physical or mental health
- genetic or biometric data
Legal basis for data processing
Data protection law states that we must have a legal basis for handling your personal data. The legal basis for collecting and holding your personal data is your consent to our use of your personal data for the purposes of creating a statistical analysis report in terms of Article 6(1)(a) of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).
The survey software programme we use will ask you to indicate your explicit consent and explain how and up to what point you can withdraw your consent.
You are not required to complete the survey, and you can decline to answer any individual question within the survey.
We use the data received from the survey to create statistics which only show anonymised data.
Smart Survey
The data will be collected via Smart Survey which is a third-party online survey system enabling the Scottish Parliament to collect and analyse survey information. Smart Survey is based in the UK and is subject to the requirements of data protection legislation.
Privacy policy for Smart Survey
How your data will be stored and processed
Survey responses will be collected and stored on the Smart Survey server. The survey and survey responses will be protected by a password and only authorised staff of the Scottish Parliament will have access to them. Because the information about the name and date of the committee might, along with other publicly available information, enable an individual to be identified, we will make sure that survey responses are kept securely and that any reports or published information derived from the survey are grouped so that no individual respondent can be identified.
The responses will be downloaded from Smart Survey once a year by an authorised SPCB staff member who will be designated to carry out the analysis. The data, once extracted, will be held securely on Scottish Parliament IT systems.
The SPCB will use these survey results to analyse annual trends. The data will be grouped, for instance by committee, organisation or inquiry type. This grouping of the data will remove any risk of individual identification. The analysis will be published annually by Parliament and made publicly available on the website.
Retention and deletion of data
Data, made up of your survey response, will normally be retained for a period of 12 months on Scottish Parliament IT systems after the end of the reporting year in which you attended the Committee. Thereafter, your response will be deleted.
Children and young people safeguarding and child protection
In line with the principles underlying the National Guidance for Child Protection in Scotland (2014), published by the Scottish Government, our staff may report a concern to the relevant authorities if they come across an issue during their work which causes them to think that a child may be at risk of abuse or harm.
Your rights
Data protection legislation sets out the rights which individuals have in relation to personal data held about them by data controllers. Applicable rights are listed below, although whether you will be able to exercise data subject rights in a particular case may depend on the purpose for which the data controller is processing the data and the legal basis upon which the processing takes place.
For example, the rights allowing for deletion or erasure of personal data, data portability and objecting to the processing of personal data do not apply in cases where personal data is processed for the purpose of complying with a legal obligation – these particular rights will therefore not apply to any personal data processed by us for the purpose of fulfilling our legal obligations under the Lobbying (Scotland) Act 2016.
The following rights apply:
Access to your information
You have the right to request a copy of the personal information about you that we hold. For further information, have a look at our page on Making a Subject Access Request.
Correcting your information
We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate, complete and up to date and you may ask us to correct any personal information about you that you believe does not meet these standards.
Objecting to how we may use your information
You have the right at any time to require us to stop using your personal information for direct marketing purposes. In addition, where we use your personal information to perform tasks carried out in the public interest then, if you ask us to, we will stop using that personal information unless there are overriding legitimate grounds to continue.
- Please note that the right to object to the processing of personal data does not apply where the data subject has consented to the processing, subject to the right to withdraw consent.
- The right to object to the processing of personal data for the purposes of a public interest task is restricted if there are legitimate grounds for the processing which override the interest of the data subject.
- The right of erasure and the right to object to processing of personal data do not apply where personal data is processed for the performance of a legal obligation. This will be considered on a case by case basis and depends on what personal data is involved and the risks further processing of that data could pose to you.
Deletion of your information
You have the right to ask us to delete personal information about you where:
- You consider that we no longer require the information for the purposes for which it was obtained
- We are using that information with your consent and you have withdrawn your consent – see Withdrawing consent to using your information below
- You have validly objected to our use of your personal information – see Objecting to how we may use your information above
- Our use of your personal information is contrary to law or our other legal obligations
- Please note that the right allowing for deletion or erasure of personal data (right to be forgotten) does not apply in cases where personal data is processed for the purposes of the performance of a task carried out in the public interest.
- The right of erasure and the right to object to processing of personal data do not apply where personal data is processed for the performance of a legal obligation. This will be considered on a case by case basis and depends on what personal data is involved and the risks further processing of that data could pose to you.
Restricting how we may use your information
In some cases, you may ask us to restrict how we use your personal information. This right might apply, for example, where we are checking the accuracy of personal information about you that we hold or assessing the validity of any objection you have made to our use of your information. The right might also apply where this is no longer a basis for using your personal information, but you don't want us to delete the data. Where this right is validly exercised, we may only use the relevant personal information with your consent, for legal claims or where there are other public interest grounds to do so.
Withdrawing consent to using your information
Where we use your personal information with your consent, you may withdraw that consent at any time and we will stop using your personal information for the purposes for which consent was given.
Please contact us in any of the ways set out below if you wish to exercise any of these rights.
Changes to our privacy statement
We keep this privacy statement under regular review and will place any updates on this website. Paper copies of the privacy statement may also be obtained using the contact information below.
This privacy statement was last updated on 18 December 2020.
Complaints
We seek to resolve directly all complaints about how we handle personal information but you also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office online at: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.
Or by phone at: 0303 123 1113
Contact information and further advice
If you have any further questions about the way in which we process personal data, or
about how to exercise your rights, please contact the Head of Information Governance
at:
The Scottish Parliament
Edinburgh
EH99 1SP
Telephone: 0131 348 6913
(Calls are welcome through the Text Relay service or in British Sign Language through contactSCOTLAND-BSL.)
Email: dataprotection@parliament.scot
Please contact us if you require information in another language or format