Staffordshire University Students Union (the Union) is the representative body of the students of Staffordshire University. We are a registered charity (no 117330) and operate a wholly owned trading subsidiary, Staffordshire Students Union Enterprises ltd (company number 09849741). The registered address for both organisations is Staffordshire University Students Union, College Road Stoke on Trent, ST4 2DE.

Both organisations are registered with the Information Commissioners Office (The Union) (Enterprises Ltd), the independent body established to uphold information rights. 

Every student at Staffordshire University is a member of the Union, under the Education Act 1994, unless they exercise their right to opt out of membership. In order to satisfy the legal requirements under the education act, the University provide the names, courses, student numbers, contact details and demographic data of all enrolled students who confirm that they wish to be a member of their Students Union.

In addition, for students who opt in at enrolment to sharing their data with the Student Union, we create an account on our membership system, that is populated with age and contact details such as address, phone number and email and University ID card number.

We obtain information about you when you use our website or services, for example, when you purchase tickets, attend events join clubs or societies or participate in elections.

The personal information we collect might include your name, address, course, email address, date of birth, IP address, contact details and demographic data and information regarding what events, services, emails or pages are accessed and when.
f you make a payment online or purchase a product from us, your card information is not held by us, it is collected by our third-party payment processors, who specialise in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions, as explained below.

We may use your information to:

• process orders that you have submitted;
• to carry out our obligations arising from any service agreements entered into by you and us;
• enable you to participate in elections and democracy
• dealing with entries into a competition;
• seek your views or comments on the services we provide;
• notify you of changes to our services;
• send you communications that may be of interest to you (and you haven’t asked us not to send). These may include information about campaigns, appeals, other fundraising
• activities, promotions of our associated companies goods and services;
• process a volunteer or job application, or a record of achievement.

We review our retention periods for personal information on a regular basis. We are legally required to hold some types of information to fulfil our statutory obligations (for example who our membership is and who is eligible to vote). 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.

We will not sell or rent your information to third parties.

We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.

Third Party Service Providers working on our behalf: 

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 (for example to process transactions and manage our mailings). 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. Please be reassured that we will not release your information to third parties beyond the Union for them to use for their own purposes, unless you have requested us to do so, or we are required to do so by law, for example, by a court order or for the purposes of prevention of fraud or other crime.

When you are using our secure online purchase pages, your transaction is processed by a third party payment processor, who specialises in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions. If you have any questions regarding secure transactions, please contact us.

You have a choice under the education act as to whether, as a student of Staffordshire University, you want to be a member of the Students Union.
Although, under the Education Act 1994 you are required to have the ability to opt-out, at Staffsunion we explicitly ask you at enrolement whether you want to opt-in.
If you ever change your mind you can opt-out or back in through the settings on your Evision portal.

You also have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive information from us, and how you would like to receive it.
If you do not want to receive direct marketing communications from us about the work we do for students, the groups you have joined or our services, then you can manage your choices by ticking/unticking the relevant boxes situated on your personal profile page on your Union website (www.staffsunion.com/contactoptions).

The accuracy of your information is important to us. We receive a daily update of the enrolment data held by the University, so if you have made any changes with the University we should receive them.
However, if you find there are any errors on your profile, then you can contact us directly to advise us and have it corrected,by emailing union@staffs.ac.uk.
If you have a preferred name that is different from that held by the University we can change our records to reflect this.

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information the Union about you and can do so by emailing Union@staffs.ac.uk.

As a separate legal entity and registered charity the Students Union is not a “public authority” in the sense of the Freedom of Information Act, therefore records that the Union holds are not subject to the Act. It is also unlikely that the Union would be considered to be covered by the Environmental Information Regulations.

Security precautions are  in place to protect the loss, misuse or alteration of your information. When you give us personal information, we take steps to ensure that it’s treated securely.
Any sensitive information (such as credit or debit card details) is encrypted and protected with 128 Bit encryption on SSL. When you are on a secure page, a lock icon will appear in the web browser.

Once we receive your information, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems. For current students at Staffordshire University we use the Universities Single Sign on system to authenticate your access to the website.
Where we have given (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our websites, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential.
We ask you not to share your password with anyone.

We may analyse your personal information to create a profile of your interests and preferences so that we can contact you with information relevant to you. We may make use of additional information about you when it is available from external sources to help us do this effectively. We may also use your personal information to detect and reduce fraud and credit risk.

We may also analyse member data to track trends and develop insight to shape our service or to measure impact. Where we do this, we will “pseudonomise” the data, which means we separate transactions or behaviour from the data that would identify an individual person.

Like many other websites, the Union 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. For example, we use cookies to store your country preference. This helps us to improve our website and deliver a better more personalised 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. Turning cookies of may result in a loss of functionality when using our website.

When you make purchases on the Union website you have the option to store your preferred payment method in order to speed up future transactions. When you do this a secure payment “token” is created that is stored against your account, rather than the card details.

Our website may 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 are concerned to protect the privacy of children aged 16 or under. If you are aged 16 or under‚ please get your parent/guardian's permission beforehand whenever you provide us with personal information.

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 whilst you are outside the EU, your information may be transferred outside the EU in order to provide you with those services.

Our web site may use “user experience” and “analytics” software from time to time. These may record mouse clicks, mouse movements, page scrolling and progression and any text keyed into website forms.

The information does not include bank details or any sensitive personal data. Data collected in this way is for the Union’s internal use only. The information collected is used to improve our website usability and is stored and used for aggregated and statistical reporting.