Maidstone Borough Council is committed to maintaining the privacy, security, trust and confidence of all our partners, clients and customers when you use our services.

The Privacy Notice below explains how we use information about you and how we protect your privacy.

To the left of this webpage you’ll see a list of services we provide. Under each service is more information about who we may share your information with and why.

We have a Data Protection Officer who makes sure we respect your rights and follow the law. If you have any concerns or questions about how we look after your personal information, please contact the Data Protection Officer, Angela Woodhouse, at dataprotectionofficer@maidstone.gov.uk or by calling 01622 602000 and asking to speak to the Data Protection Officer.

What is personal information?

Personal data is any information that can identify a living person. This includes information that, when put together with other information, can then identify a person e.g. a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or one or more factors relating to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.

What is special category or sensitive personal information?

Some information is considered to be ‘Special Category’ information and needs more protection because of its sensitivity.  This includes information relating to:-

• Racial or ethnic origin
• Political opinions
• Religious or philosophical beliefs
• Trade union membership
• Genetic data
• Biometric data
• Health
• Sex life or sexual orientation

Why we will need and use your personal information

The Council may use your personal data to:

• To provide services to our residents and visitors
• To maintain our accounts and records
• To manage our property and housing
• To provide leisure and cultural services
• To carry out surveys
• To collect taxes and pay benefits
• Licensing and other regulatory activities
• Protecting public money by taking part in local, regional and national fraud initiatives
• Crime prevention including the use of CCTV
• To support and manage our employees
• To manage archived records for historical and research purposes

Detailed information can be found in the service privacy notices will be available for individual services

What is the lawful basis for processing your personal data?

The lawful basis for processing explains why the Council is allowed to process your personal data. Each service privacy notice explains which legal reason is being used.   The Council is allowed to process your personal data for a number of reasons such as:

• it is necessary to perform our statutory duties
• you have entered into a contract with us
• it is required by law
• it is necessary for employment purposes
• it is necessary for legal cases
• it is to the benefit of society as a whole
• it is necessary to protect public health
• you, or your legal representative, have given consent
• it is necessary to protect someone in an emergency

When do you have to give consent?

In situations where we have no other legal basis to process your personal data you will have provided us with consent to use your personal information.  In these circumstances you have the right to amend or withdraw your consent at any time.

If you wish to exercise this right, please contact dataprotectionofficer@maidstone.gov.uk and tell us which service you’re using so we can deal with your request.

Where do we get your personal data from?

A majority of the information the Council collects is provided by you as the data subject, however we may receive information about you from third parties, or collect it via CCTV. If information is provided by a third party, we are obliged to inform you within one month, with a privacy notice.

The Council only collects and uses personal information where it is needed to deliver a service or to meet a legal obligation and may only be shared for the same reasons.

How long will the Council keep your information?

Personal information is only kept for as long as is necessary for those identified purposes.  These legal obligations are covered in more detail in the individual service privacy notices available further down this page.

The Council undertakes regular reviews of your personal data, assessing the purpose for holding it and deleting when information is no longer needed.

Wherever information is needed solely for general or statistical purposes, or is kept for a longer period, we will ensure that all personal identifiers are removed so that it becomes anonymous and therefore no longer ‘personal information’.

Who we may share your information with?

Your information will only be shared when we have a legal reason for doing so. We may share your information with organisations such as; Central Government, the police, registered housing providers, third party contractors, and other Public Authorities.

Where other organisations process your information on our behalf, this is carried out under contract.

Where it is necessary for us to share your information this will be done in a secure way which has been subjected to a privacy impact assessment (PIA).

Your Rights

• The right to be informed – you have the right to know what information the council is processing about you
• The right to rectification – you have the right to correct or rectify any inaccuracies in your records
• The right to erasure or right to be forgotten – you have the right to ask for your details to be removed from the systems that we use to process your personal data
• The right to restrict processing – you have the right to restrict the processing of your personal data in certain ways
• The right to data portability – you have the right to ask for the transfer of your personal data to other controllers
• Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling. If you believe we have made an automated decision about you have the right to ask us to review that decision.

To exercise your rights please contact us by email, telephone or from the Council’s Website. The council will respond;

• Free of charge
• Within a month

These rights are not absolute but are assessed on a case by case basis, applying relevant exemptions.

Requests must be made by the person to whom the information relates or their authorised representative.

You may be asked to provide information so that we can validate who you are and that someone isn’t trying to impersonate you.  If you wish to authorise someone to act on your behalf – this could be another individual or an organisation, such as your legal representative or Citizens Advice, it is important that you make your wishes clear and provide a form of authority to them so that we know they are acting under your instruction.

Emailing:

dataprotectionofficer@maidstone.gov.uk

Writing to:

Telephoning:

01622 602000

How to make a complaint about how your information is being used

If you need to make a complaint about how your personal information is being used by the Council, please contact us and provide as much information as possible so that we can conduct an investigation.

If you wish to appoint someone to act on your behalf – this could be another individual or an organisation, such as your legal representative or Citizens Advice, it is important that you make your wishes clear and provide a form of authority to them so that we know they are acting under your instruction.

To make a request or complaint you can contact the Council in the following ways:

Emailing:

dataprotectionofficer@maidstone.gov.uk

Writing to:

Telephoning:

01622 602000

If you are unhappy with how we have treated your complaint or to request a review of the Council’s response to your information rights requests, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office at:

Tel: 0303 123 1113
Fax: 01625 524 510

Email: casework@ico.org.uk

Cookies

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the web, it sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your computer, smart phone or tablet. These include cookies. They can't be used to identify you personally.

They're used to improve our services for you by:

• Allowing them to recognise your device, so you only give us the information once
• Recognising usernames and password you've already given to us
• Measuring how many people use them, so we can make them better

You can find out more about these small files on the GOV.UK website.

Cookies for improving service

Our website uses cookies to collect non-personal user information. It doesn't collect any information about you that it doesn't need to.

Cookies are pieces of data created when you visit a site, and contain a unique, anonymous number. They are stored in the cookie directory of your hard drive, and don't expire at the end of your session. They don't contain any personal information about you and can't be used to identify an individual user. If you choose not to accept the cookie, it won't affect your access to the majority of the services available on our website.

Your browser may be set to allow the creation of cookies automatically. However you can tell it to prompt you before a site puts a cookie on your hard disk, so you can choose to allow or refuse each one. Or you tell your computer not to accept any cookies

Cookies on our website from other companies and social networking sites

During your visit you may notice some cookies that aren't related to our website. This happens when you visit pages with content embedded from a third party, for example YouTube videos, links to social networking sites, etc. These websites may place cookies on your computer.

We don't control how third parties use their cookies. If you have concerns about how they use them, you should check their websites’ privacy policies.

Service level privacy notices

We have produced a number of service level privacy notices that cover Maidstone Borough Council services to comply with GDPR. You can find out more information and a list of services here.