Effective Date: 3 April 2023
Thank you for visiting CACUK (Class Action Covid UK). CACUK (“we”, “us” or “our”) respects your privacy. When it comes to your personal information, we believe in transparency. That’s why we’ve set out here what personal information we collect, what we do with it and your choices and rights.
This Privacy Policy describes what we do with personal information that we collect and use (i.e., where we are a Data Controller).
By using our website, you consent to our Privacy Policy and agree to its terms.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Under GDPR, we are a Data Controller of your information.
Our legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described in this Privacy Policy depends on the personal information we collect and the specific context in which we collect the information, for instance:
- You have consented to the use of your personal information in a particular way (when you consent, you can change your mind at any time).
- Processing your personal information is in our legitimate interests.
- We need to comply with the law.
If you contact us by email to be considered as a vaccine injury test case, we will hold the information you provide only for the purposes of identifying a suitable case. By requesting to be considered, you consent to us holding your information for this purpose but you can ask us to delete it (including your email correspondence) any time and we will do so promptly.
If we speak to you by phone about your case, we may take further information from you, with your consent, which may be presented to legal counsel for expert advice on your case. If we proceed with your case as a test case, we will hold your information only for the purposes of running the case. Your information will not be shared except as necessary for legal action to proceed.
How long we retain your data
We will retain your personal information only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy. We will retain and use your information to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our policies.
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users who register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
Your rights and choices
If you are a resident of the European Economic Area (EEA), you have certain data protection rights. But we will uphold those rights and choices regardless of where you live.
If you wish to be informed what personal information we hold about you or if you want it to be removed from our systems, please contact us.
In certain circumstances, you have the following data protection rights:
- The right to access, update or to delete the information we have on you.
- The right of rectification.
- The right to object.
- The right of restriction.
- The right to data portability.
- The right to withdraw consent.
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
You can access, update, change or delete personal information we hold about you by contacting us at cacuk@pm.me to request the required changes.
Log Files
Our website follows a standard procedure of using log files. These files log visitors when they visit websites. All hosting companies do this and it is a part of hosting services’ analytics. The information collected by log files include internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date and time stamp, referring/exit pages, and possibly the number of clicks. These are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable. The purpose of the information is for analysing trends, administering the site, tracking users’ movement on the website, and gathering demographic information.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Our website uses cookies and similar technologies, like any other website. Cookies are small files or pieces of text that download to a device when a visitor accesses a website or app. They are used to store information including visitors’ preferences, and the pages on the website that the visitor accessed or visited. The information is used to optimize the users’ experience by customizing our web page content based on visitors’ browser type and/or other information.
For more general information on cookies, see “What Are Cookies”.
Analytics
Our website collects personal data to power our site analytics, including:
- Information about your browser, network, and device
- Your IP address
This information may also include details about your use of this website, including:
- Clicks
- Internal links
- Pages visited
- Scrolling
- Searches
- Timestamps
We share this information with our website analytics provider to learn about site traffic and activity.
Personal information we collect
We collect various personal information regarding you or your device. This includes the following:
- Information you provide to subscribe to our newsletter, specifically your name and email address.
- If you make a donation, we receive a portion of your payment information from our payment processor (such as the last four digits of the payment card).
- Your marketing preferences (whether you wish to receive emails).
- The emails and other communications that you send us.
How we collect personal information
We obtain personal information from various sources. We do this in three main ways:
- You provide some of it directly (such as by signing up to our newsletter).
- We record some of it automatically when you use our Services (e.g., with technologies like cookies).
- We receive some of it from third parties (like when you make a donation to us using our payment processor).
We’ve described this in more detail below.
How we use your personal information
We use the personal information we obtain about you for the following purposes:
- Provision of services, such as sending you free newsletters about new content on our website and respond to your enquiries.
- Communicating with you, such as sending you emails about your transactions.
- Improving our services, for example, by analysing and learning about how our website is accessed and used and evaluating and improving the information we publish.
- Enforcement, for example, enforcing our terms of service and other legal terms and policies.
- Protection, i.e., to protect our and others’ interests, rights and property.
Emails
If you subscribe to our newsletter, we may send you periodic emails, which you can unsubscribe from by clicking the link at the bottom of the email.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Updates to this Privacy Policy
We’ll update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in technology, law, our range of activities or any other reason we determine is necessary or appropriate. When we make changes, we’ll update the “Effective Date” at the top of the Privacy Policy and post it on our site. If we make material changes to it, or to the ways we process personal information, we’ll notify you (for example, by posting a notice of the changes prominently on our site before they take effect, or by sending you a direct notification).
We encourage you to check back periodically to review this Privacy Policy for any changes since your last visit.
How to contact us
If you have questions, comments or complaints about this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices or if you would like to exercise your rights and choices, please email us at cacuk@pm.me.