How the Animal Health Innovation Network handles your personal data
The Animal Health Innovation Network (AHIN) is part of the University of Surrey. We are registered as a data controller with the Information Commissioner’s Office (our notification number is Z6346945) and we are committed to ensuring that the personal data we process is handled in accordance with data protection legislation. We have a Data Protection Officer who can be contacted via dataprotection@surrey.ac.uk.
One of our responsibilities is to tell you about the different ways we collect and use your personal data. This statement provides details about these uses. In addition to this statement, you may be given further information about the uses of your personal data when you use certain services offered by the University of Surrey.
What information do we collect from you?
The Animal Health Innovation Network platform holds and processes personal data about members of Animal Health Innovation Network (the users). We also collect and process personal data about visitors to our website animalhealthinnovation.net.
The personal data we hold about you consists of your contact details (email address) if you join our mailing list or apply for an Animal Health Innovation Network user account (name, email address, organisation, and LinkedIn handle) and information on how you use our online services.
We receive this data from you when you visit our website, complete the online form to receive email notifications from us, when you use Animal Health Innovation Network platform or when you contact us by email, telephone or in person to discuss partnership opportunities.
We do not use the data we collect to make decisions about individuals or to analyse information on an individual level.
What information is visible to other platform users?
When you post a blog, update or engage with the AHIN forum the following information will be visible to other platform users and the AHIN administrators:
- Username
- User comment, update or blog post content
- Timestamp
Why do we collect this information?
We collect only the data we need, keep the data up to date and only retain it for as long as it is needed.
We collect your personal data in order to keep you informed, to manage your membership of the Animal Health Innovation Network (AHIN) platform and to process animal health data that you choose to upload to AHIN.
We take our obligations for data handling very seriously and it is therefore important for you to know the lawful basis for us processing your information:
We process data to ensure that we can carry out our public role as an educational and research establishment, meeting legal, moral and contractual obligations as laid out in the University’s Charter.
We also process data to meet our contractual duties to you and provide you with data services as laid out in our contract with you.
What do we do with your information?
The University processes personal data and special category data in accordance with data protection legislation and its own Data Protection Policy.
We use your email address to notify you of developments to the Animal Health Innovation Network platform. When you subscribe to our newsletter we will add your name and email address to our Twitter Revue account. Twitter Revue is a newsletter creation platform. You can easily unsubscribe from the AHIN newsletter at any time.
We track activity via log files, cookies and web beacons to obtain information about the way you access the service to analyse the effectiveness of the Animal Health Innovation Network. See below for more detail.
We analyse the effectiveness of our service at an aggregate level so that no individuals are identified from the data.
Log files
The Animal Health Innovation Network follows a standard procedure of using log files. These files log visitors when they visit websites. All hosting companies do this and 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
Like any other website, the Animal Health Innovation Network uses ‘cookies’. These cookies 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 optimise the users’ experience by customising our web page content based on visitors’ browser type and/or other information.
How long do we keep your information?
We keep your personal data in accordance with the University’s retention schedules.
We review our mailing list annually and remove anyone who chooses not to re-subscribe.
If you express an interest in partnering with us, we will retain your contact details for up to 3 years and then securely destroy the records.
We retain user membership records for the duration of your membership and for 18 months after your membership lapses.
Any anonymised data you upload to the Animal Health Innovation Network or that we upload on your behalf is harmonised with the overall data model and preserved indefinitely for future research.
All relevant safeguards are met in relation to this future research.
Who do we share your information with?
We don’t share any personally identifying information publicly or with third-parties, except when required to by law.
Internally, we share the data you provide to the Animal Health Innovation Network with the project team.
We do this in order to manage your user account and to process any datasets you upload. This may include sharing the data with University of Surrey subject experts in animal health to understand and process your data to harmonise it with the overall data model.
We check whether the data you upload contains any personal data as part of our data processing and we will help you to anonymise, or pseudo anonymise your data if necessary.
Any personal data on the platform is required to have a signed consent by the relevant parties covering its intended use. System architecture prevents the possibility of creating central surveillance on users or groups of users.
Users, such as animal farms and labs, may have existing infrastructures with which our platform will integrate. No personal data will be exchanged with these third parties.
We share your personal data externally with the following third parties:
- Our cloud storage provider: Microsoft Azure https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/trusted-cloud/privacy/
We do this in order to provide web hosting and data storage for the Animal Health Innovation Network. The Azure instance is hosted, owned and paid for by the University of Surrey.
Our website may link to external sites that are not operated by us. Please be aware that we have no control over the content and practices of these sites and cannot accept responsibility or liability for their respective privacy policies.
What rights do you have in relation to the way we process your data?
As an individual whose data we process (a data subject), you have certain rights in relation to the processing. You can find detailed information about your rights as a data subject on the University’s webpage.
You have the right to:
- withdraw your consent for us to process your personal data
- to ask us to confirm that your personal data is being processed and to access (i.e. have a copy) of that data as well as to be provided with supplemental information about the processing.
- request that we rectify any inaccuracies where the data we hold on you is inaccurate or incomplete
- to have your data erased by us, although in certain circumstances we may not be able to do this. The circumstances where this applies can be found in the data subject rights information on the University’s webpage
- to restrict the processing of your personal data in certain ways
- to obtain your personal data for reuse
- to object to certain processing of your personal data
To exercise any of these rights, please contact dataprotection@surrey.ac.uk
You also have the right to complain independently to the Information Commissioner’s Office about the way in which we process your personal data, if you are not satisfied with our response to your concerns.
You are free to refuse our request for your personal information, with the understanding that we may be unable to provide you with some of your desired services.
Your continued use of our website and the Animal Health Innovation Network will be regarded as acceptance of our practices around privacy and personal information. If you have additional questions or require more information about our Privacy Policy, do not hesitate to contact us through email at dataprotection@surrey.ac.uk