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

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

Every student at the University of Staffordshire is a member of the Union, under the Education Act 1994, unless they exercise their right to opt out of membership. To meet the legal requirements under the Education Act, the University provides the names, courses, student numbers, contact details, and demographic data of all enrolled students who confirm their intention to be members of the Students' Union.

Additionally, for students who opt in at enrolment to share their data with the Students' Union, we create an account on our membership system, which is populated with their age and contact details, including address, phone number, 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 may include your name, address, course, email address, date of birth, IP address, contact details, and demographic data, as well as information regarding which events, services, emails, or pages you access and when you access them.
If 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 (unless you have asked us not to do so). These may include information about campaigns, appeals, and other fundraising
• activities, promotions of our associated companies' goods and services;
• process a volunteer or job application, or a record of achievement.

We regularly review our retention periods for personal information. We are legally required to hold certain types of information to fulfil our statutory obligations (for example, the names of our members and those eligible to vote). We will retain your personal information on our systems for as long as necessary for the relevant activity or as long as specified 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 necessary to deliver the service. We have a contract in place that requires them to keep your information secure and not 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 preventing fraud or other crime.

When you use our secure online purchase pages, your transaction is processed by a third-party payment processor that specialises in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions. If you have any questions about secure transactions, please don't hesitate to contact us.

You have a choice under the Education Act as to whether, as a student of the University of Staffordshire, 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 enrollment 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 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 any errors on your profile, you can contact us directly to advise us and have them corrected by emailing union@staffs.ac.uk.
If you have a preferred name that differs from the one held by the University, we can update our records to reflect this.

You have the right to request a copy of the information the Union holds about you, which can be obtained 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 against 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 the University of Staffordshire, we use the University's 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 kindly request that you do not share your password with anyone.

We may analyse your personal information to create a profile of your interests and preferences, allowing us to contact you with information relevant to you. We may use additional information about you, when 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.

You can disable cookies by adjusting your browser settings. For more information on how to switch off cookies on your computer. Turning cookies off 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. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on 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 about protecting 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”). For example, this may occur if any of our servers are occasionally located in a country outside the EU. These countries may not have data protection laws that are similar to those in the UK. By submitting your personal data, you’re agreeing to this transfer, storage or processing. If we transfer your information outside the EU in this manner, we will take steps to ensure that appropriate security measures are implemented, with the aim of protecting your privacy rights as outlined in this Policy.

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

Our website may use “user experience” and “analytics” software from time to time. These may record mouse clicks, mouse movements, page scrolling, and progression, as well as 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 the usability of our website and is stored and used for aggregated and statistical reporting purposes.