Privacy Policy

General Policy

As part of its normal business, SER collects a certain amount of personal information, normally name and address and/or e-mail address. This information is used in two main ways depending on the reason collected:

  1. Recorders supplying information
    • Names and addresses are used to validate the species records supplied and where necessary contact the recorder to ask for additional information pertaining to the identification of the species or its exact location – these personal details are retained in perpetuity as an integral part of a biological record. If you do not want your personal details retained in this way, please do not send us records, the personal information is an important part of any biological record, although we will not normally release this information in our normal business of answering enquiries. Anonymous records are likely to be rejected as ‘not fit for purpose’ because they do not adhere to the National Biodiversity Network’s minimum standards.
    • This information is only stored in our copy of the recording software Recorder6.
    • This information may be passed to relevant county recorders or National Recording Schemes, who are bound by the privacy policies of their parent organisations to respect the privacy of recorders and the data will again only be used to validate the associated biological records.
  2. Persons requesting information
    • Names and addresses are collected for the purposes of contacting the client to supply the requested information and, for commercial clients to enable us to raise invoices and other financial information, these data are passed to the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust, who acts as our financial department.
    • under no circumstances does SER undertake marketing or surveys using the collected personal information.
    • inclusion on any of the e-mail fora (run via GoogleGroups) is only by request of the person involved.
    • SER is operated by Staffordshire Wildlife Trust and it therefore additionally bound by their privacy policy which is much more involved than SER’s because of the more diverse nature of their business.
    • these details are stored in a bespoke MSAccess database.

Website

SER makes very little use of the personal data it collects to run the web-site, however, it is our normal policy to credit the authors of information supplied to the website and the photographers of any images used both on the main website and in SER’s Twitter feed – permission is always sought before publishing any image on the SER website or Twitter feed.

None of the personal data connected to the source biological records (see General Policy part 1 above) is ever uploaded to the website with the exception of first county records where the recorder’s name and the location of the observation are included.

Cookies

Staffordshire Ecological Record makes very little use of cookies, however we do use Google Analytics to monitor usage of the site – this does employ cookies to check on repeated visits to the site.

SER does not:

  • use cookies to monitor an individual’s use of the website
  • use cookies to store personal information of site visitors
  • use cookies to target potential customers
  • use cookies for any marketing purposes