Simply Fostering

SIMPLY FOSTERING LTD PRIVACY POLICY

This privacy policy sets out the standards you can expect when we ask for or record your personal information, and explains how we’ll use it.

1.0 Our beliefs regarding user privacy and data protection

  • All user privacy and data protection are human rights
  • Simply Fostering has a duty of care to the people within our data
  • Data should only be collected and processed when absolutely necessary
  • We will only share your personal information with fostering agencies who we identify as able to help you with your enquiry and who are registered with Simply Fostering Ltd.

2.0 Relevant legislation

This website and our business is designed to comply with the following national and international legislation with regards to data protection and user privacy:

This site is therefore likely compliant with the data protection and user privacy legislation set out by many other countries and territories.

3.0 Giving your consent

We must ask for your consent to record, use, or share personal information.

What you’re agreeing to:

If you give us your consent by submitting your data you are saying that we can:

  • Record and use your personal information to help with your enquiry about fostering.
  • Share your personal information with fostering agencies so that they have the information to then decide or not to contact you to discuss your interest in fostering.

If you’re contacted by a fostering agency we work with and you don’t want to continue to work with that agency, you can say that you don’t want to be contacted again.

If you decide to take the next step and to discuss their assessment process with a particular fostering agency, you are under no obligation to proceed.

Simply Fostering works with Fostering Agencies who will manage your data in confidence and with regard to their individual agency Privacy Policy procedures.

3.1 How you give your consent

How you’re asked for and give your consent depends on which of our services you’re using:

  • Email Forms: by submitting an enquiry or contact form you will be giving your consent to Simply Fostering to record and to share your personal information with fostering agencies.

  • Telephone contact:  you will be given the opportunity to give your consent to the recording of personal information about you.

3.2 How to withdraw your consent

If you decide you no longer want to give your consent, contact Simply Fostering.

4.0 Personal information that this website collects and why we collect it

This website collects and uses personal information for the following reasons:

4.1 Site visitation tracking

This site uses Google Analytics (GA) to track user interaction. We use this data to determine the number of people using our site, to better understand how they find and use our web pages and to see how they move through the website.

Although GA records data none of this information personally identifies you to us. GA records your computer’s IP address which could be used to personally identify you but Google do not grant us access to this. We consider Google to be a third party data processor (see section 6.0 below).

GA makes use of cookies, details of which can be found on Google’s developer guides. FYI our website uses the analytics.js implementation of GA.

Disabling cookies on your internet browser will stop GA from tracking any part of your visit to pages within this website.

4.2 Our blog

Although we currently do not allow comment to any posts that we have published on our blog, should this change, the name and email address you enter with your comment will be saved to this website’s database, along with your computer’s IP address and the time and date that you submitted the comment. This information is only used to identify you as a contributor to the comment section of the respective blog post and is not passed on to any of the third party data processors detailed below.

Your comment and it’s associated personal data will remain on this site until we see fit to either 1.) remove the comment or 2.) remove the blog post. Should you wish to have the comment and it’s associated personal data deleted, please email us here using the email address that you commented with.

If you are under 16 years of age you MUST obtain parental consent before posting a comment on our blog.

NOTE: You should avoid entering personally identifiable information to the actual comment field of any blog post comments that you submit on this website.

4.3 Contact forms and email links

Should you choose to contact us using the contact form on our Contact us page or an email link like this one, we strongly advise you to re check any information you provide by email before sending so that the information we share with fostering agencies is accurate. For example by providing a wrong contact telephone number, someone other than you might be contacted by the fostering agencies.

None of the data that you supply will be stored by this website or passed to / be processed by any of the third party data processors defined in section 6.0. Instead the data will be collated into an email and sent to us over the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Our SMTP servers are protected by TLS (sometimes known as SSL) meaning that the email content is encrypted using SHA-2, 256-bit cryptography before being sent across the internet. The email content is then decrypted by our local computers and devices.

4.4 Securing your data

We use the Social Care Network, CHARMS.

CHARMS has been developed in the UK and is hosted in the UK on a private cloud in data centres provided by our partner, UKFast. UKFast are ISO27001 accredited and work closely with our team at SCN to offer complete security for our customers an their data. Data security is paramount and backups are only stored in the UK; our developers are all UK based and all our staff are enhanced DBS checked.

CHARMS (Privacy Policy)

4.5 Email newsletter

If you choose to join our email newsletter, the email address that you submit to us will be forwarded to MailChimp who provide us with email marketing services. We consider MailChimp to be a third party data processor (see section 6.0 below). The email address that you submit will not be stored within this website’s own database or in any of our internal computer systems.

Your email address will remain within MailChimp’s database for as long as we continue to use MailChimp’s services for email marketing or until you specifically request removal from the list. You can do this by unsubscribing using the unsubscribe links contained in any email newsletters that we send you or by requesting removal via email. When requesting removal via email, please send your email to us using the email account that is subscribed to the mailing list.

If you are under 16 years of age you MUST obtain parental consent before joining our email newsletter.

4.6 Social media account connection

Whilst we do not need to seek permission from each person who ‘likes’ our page or ‘follows’ us, any information we gather from people from social media sites is handled in accordance with the GDPR privacy guidelines.  If you chat with us using Facebook Messenger, we delete the chat history when it’s done and in accordance with GDPR privacy guidelines, we suggest the person emails us so that we can hold the formal connection outside of a social media channel.

5.0 How we store your personal information

As detailed in section 4.2 above, if you submit a comment to a blog post published on this website some personal information will be stored within this website’s database. This data is currently stored in an identifiable fashion; a limitation of the content management system that this website is built on (WordPress). In the near future we aim to change the storage of this data to a pseudonymous fashion meaning that the data would require additional processing using a separately stored ‘key’ before it could be used to identify an individual.

Pseudonymisation is a recent requirement of the GDPR which we will implement on this website as soon as we are able to.

5.0 About this website’s server

This website is hosted by Paragon Internet Group Limited within a UK data centre IP Address: 185.119.173.104 located in Slough, just outside London.

About Paragon:

Specialising in pairing cutting edge technology with exceptional customer support Paragon Internet Group has experienced strong organic growth, and today hosts over 1,000,000 websites, for 120,000+ customers.

Our 100+ Paragon team members are spread between two offices. Our UK office and datacentre are on the Slough Trading Estate. We also have a support and sysadmin office in Sofia, Bulgaria.

6.0 Our third party data processors

We use a number of third parties to process personal data on our behalf. These third parties have been carefully chosen and all of them comply with the legislation set out in section 2.0.

7.0 Data Breaches

We will report any unlawful data breach of this website’s database or the database(s) of any of our third party data processors to any and all relevant persons and authorities within 72 hours of the breach if it is apparent that personal data stored in an identifiable manner has been stolen. Further information on the reporting of a data breach can be found on the Information Commissioner’s Office website.

8.0 Data Controller

The data controller of this website is: Simply Fostering Ltd, a UK Private limited Company with company number: 07623164

Whose registered and operating office is:

Simply Fostering Ltd
18b Church Hill
Exeter
EX4 9EX

9.0 Data Protection Officer

Under Article 29 Guidelines on Data Protection Officers, we are not required to appoint a DPO as we ARE NOT:

  • Processing data on a Large Scale.
  • Regularly and systematically tracking data on or offline.

10.0 Changes to our privacy policy

This privacy policy may change from time to time inline with legislation or industry developments. We will not explicitly inform our clients or website users of these changes. Instead, we recommend that you check this page occasionally for any policy changes.

11.0 Policy changes

6th April 2008 : Complying with GDPR
9th April 2008 : CHARMS

Scroll to Top
Free ‘Fostering Essentials #1’ E-book

Please provide your email so we can send you a download link and password.