Privacy Policy (v5.0)

The Shropshire Art Society takes its Data Protection obligations seriously and always works to comply with the latest legislation.

We reserve the right to make changes to, and to publish the latest version of, our Privacy Policy here. This current version 5.0 was published on 4/9/24.

1a. Some specific information for our members:

The personal information you give us, on your Membership Application Form, on your Annual Subscription Form, and on any other forms or in any other ways, throughout the membership year, is stored securely and is only accessible to authorised Shropshire Art Society Committee Members; your details may be disclosed to other people for the purposes of Shropshire Art Society business only, and will not be given to others for any other purpose.

In addition, your email address will be added to the INTUIT MailChimp mailing system which we use to send you Focal Points and other Society News. The MailChimp system records your interactions with our mailings, so that we can best help you in the event of a problem. You can unsubscribe from MailChimp or update your MailChimp data at any time via the link included in the footer of the mailings. You may click HERE to read the INTUIT Privacy Policy.

When you join the Shropshire Art Society and when you renew your Annual Subscription, we ask you to sign to give your consent to your personal data being used by the Shropshire Art Society as described here, as required by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 2018. If you want us to completely remove/erase you from our systems, please email your request to our Secretary Frank Hilton at secretary@shropshireartsociety.org.uk

1b. Some specific information for visitors to our exhibitions who sign our forms, at an exhibition, to receive invitations to our exhibition events:

The form you sign at the exhibition states: We will retain your personal information securely for a period of three years and use it to send you invitations to future exhibitions. Your data will not be passed to others nor used for any other purpose. Please sign this form/tick below to indicate your preferences and sign this form to give your consent to your data being stored and used in this way, as required by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR 2018).

If you indicated your preference as being to receive our invitations by email, we will email you via our Google Workspace account to confirm your email address and your consent to hear from us via the Google Workspace and INTUIT MailChimp systems that we may use. If we don’t hear back from you by email, we won’t email you again; this is because it is sometimes difficult to decipher handwriting on forms and we may not have deciphered the email address correctly (though we do our best!). If we do hear back from you in the affirmative, we will email you invitations over the three year period; at the end of that period we will email you to ask if you wish to remain on the list for a further three years.

2. Regarding the general use of this website

We want to explain what personal data (see a. below) we capture when you visit our website, including our use of cookies (see b. below).

a. Personal data

i. In general, we don’t collect any personal data e.g. name, email addresses via this website, as we do not use a Contact Form or Mailing List Subscription Form. We do not have a blog comment facility. If you email us for any reason via the email addresses given on this website, the email you send us, and any responses to it, will be stored in our Google Workspace system; although Google Workspace encrypts emails, we cannot guarantee that your email will be encrypted at all stages of its life. We will only use the information you send us to respond to your request. If you email us to ask us to add you to our Exhibition Invitations List we will contact you by email to gain the required consent to add you to that list.

ii. We offer you the option to pay for Shropshire Art Society Membership and other activities and events using PayPal, either with your PayPal account or via the PayPal ‘guest checkout’ facility. We do this using a simple form on our Payments page where you enter your name, code(s) identifying what you are paying for, and the total amount you are paying. This information is not stored in the website database, but is passed to PayPal so you can complete your payment. You will be asked to give your consent to the passing of this data from our website to PayPal when you complete the form. Once you reach the PayPal login or guest checkout screen you will be subject to PayPal’s Privacy Policy https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full ; the Shropshire Art Society will have access to your PayPal transaction data in the Shropshire Art Society PayPal account, in order to complete and record the necessary payment transaction with you. We do not use this data for any other purpose. We retain the transaction information for the legally required accounting purposes and time frame only.

iii. We do not collect IP addresses for tracking purposes; we do not use tracking software.

iv. The website uses Limit Login Attempts Reloaded security software which notes IP addresses to limit the number of login attempts from any IP address. This helps to prevent brute force attack login attempts by unauthorised users. We do this to keep our website protected and secure. However, we opt to turn on GDPR compliance, so all logged IP addresses get obfuscated (md5-hashed), which means you can’t be personally identified.

v. For your protection, we use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) – a standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a server and a client – to encrypt any data sent between your browser and our website. You can tell we do this because our website url starts with https:// rather than http:// and your browser will tell you that our website is secure by showing the word ‘Secure’ and/or a green padlock icon or similar.

b. Cookies: our website does not place cookies.

3. How to contact us

Should you wish to contact us or if you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please use the email link provided on the Contact page of our website.

Thank you for visiting our website.