Data protection for Alumni

What is this document about?

This Statement explains to alumni how the personal data, including special category data, collected from them by the University, may be used, including some examples of how such data is processed.

Who is this for?

The statement is of primary interest to all University of Portsmouth alumni whose data is processed by the University and will be of general interest to the wider public.

How does the University check this is followed?

Alumni are given information about the use(s) that will be made of their personal data either when they are sent their welcome email from the alumni community at the end of their studies or when the University, through the Alumni & Advancement team, reach out to engage them. Links to this information are also provided via the graduate and alumni pages of the University website, including a link to this Statement.

Occasional queries about personal data from students and alumni suggest that this information is known about and read.

Who can you contact if you have any queries about this document?

All enquirers may contact the University’s Data Protection Officer, Samantha Hill, on 023 9284 3642 or Samantha.hill@port.ac.uk.

The University of Portsmouth processes your personal data and, where necessary, your special category data, in order to keep in contact with you as an alumnus. This enables us to update you on events and other ways to engage with the University, including volunteering and benefits available to you as a member of the University Community. We also share information about the University’s Careers and Employability services which is helpful to alumni who are building careers.

If you have any questions about how the University processes your data, then the following contact information may be useful.

The University’s correspondence address is:
The University of Portsmouth
University House
Winston Churchill Avenue
Portsmouth
PO1 2UP

Main switchboard: 023 9284 8484

The University’s Data Protection Officer is:
Samantha Hill – Information Disclosure Manager
Email: Samantha.hill@port.ac.uk
Direct telephone number: 023 9284 3642

‘Personal data’ is any information that relates to an individual (in this case, you, as an alumni) who can be identified either directly by that information or by a combination of that information and other identifiers, such as your name, student ID number, course.

‘Special Category data’ is information that reveals racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade-union membership, the processing of genetic or biometric data in order to identify an individual, data concerning heath or data concerning an individual’s sex life or sexual orientation. The University does not collect all of this data but will collect some for the purposes listed below.

We will collect your personal and special category data directly from your student record and through communications from the Alumni and Advancement team and / or the Careers and Employability Service, as well as through the completion of feedback surveys.

The University of Portsmouth, specifically the Alumni and Advancement team of the Marketing Department, the Careers and Employability Service and your former academic school/department, processes your personal data, and your special category data, for example ethnicity, for a variety of purposes as explained below. This includes equal opportunities monitoring.

We will transfer internally your name, address, contact details and your degree details (subjects and dates studied), from your student record to the Alumni and Careers database(s), when you finish studying at the University. The departments mentioned above may collect more data from you when they contact you directly, such as details of your employment status, and donation status (including Gift Aid options), or if you attend any events or complete any (feedback) forms.

The University of Portsmouth will use your personal data to make our communications relevant to you, to keep you informed of events we run for alumni and to advise you of volunteering and graduate opportunities. We will also contact you in relation to alumni surveys that the University is obliged to support, for example, the Graduate Outcome Survey; for fundraising opportunities, and to ensure we have recorded your contact preferences correctly.

The Alumni and Advancement Team provides further details of their specific use of your personal data in its Privacy Policy, including information on data cleansing, analysis and wealth screening

The University’s legal basis for processing the majority of your personal data as an alumnus is that the processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the University, in advising you of the work, and benefits, of the Alumni Community and of the Careers and Employability Service, and of graduate opportunities open to you as an alumnus.

The University is also under a legal obligation to process your contact details and to provide that data to third parties, for example, to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, so that you can be included in such surveys as the Graduate Outcome Survey.

If we process any special category data about you when requesting your information, we will either

• ask for your specific consent to process this data, or
• process the data to enable us to promote and maintain equality of opportunity or treatment between different groups of people.

If we ask you for any further data such as your graduate employment details, or possible donation status, we will only process that personal data with your consent, which we will ask for at the time we collect that data. You will be given further information on how your personal data will be used at the time it is collected.

Only those University staff who have access to the University’s CRM system will be able to see your data, but only those who need to engage with you as an alumnus, will actually use your data. Therefore, staff within the Department of Student and Academic Administration, the Marketing Department, and the Careers and Employability Service will have access to your data.

• We will share your contact details with HESA so that you can be contacted in relation to the surveys run by that organisation.
• If you take up any volunteering opportunities external to, but arranged by, the University, we will share your contact details with the organisations that provide these opportunities.
• Data may also be shared confidentially, with third party organisations that host University data, for example Campaign Monitor and Salesforce. This data sharing is covered in the contracts that the University has with these organisations.
• We will provide data on request to the police and other enforcement agencies in emergencies, and where crime detection or prevention can be aided by its release.

The University will not release data to any third party without there being a legitimate reason to do so, except where you ask us to. This means that we will not release data to anyone other than those organisations mentioned above, without your prior agreement. If you wish us to provide data in any other circumstances you should provide us with written consent to release the data, stating the name and contact details of the individual to whom you wish the data to be sent, and advise the particular data you agree can be released/discussed.

The University uses Google Apps for Education, which may involve personal data being stored on servers based outside of the European Union.

The data the Alumni and Advancement Team use to send its email campaigns – your first and family names and email address - is stored securely on a server in the USA for the limited time it takes for the email campaign to be sent. It is then permanently deleted within one month, allowing for any contact preferences to be registered and actioned by the University. This data sharing is controlled via the contract the University has to use the email message service.

For more information on how HESA may store your personal data, please see that organisation’s privacy statement.

The University holds your full student record for six years after you have left the University so that we can fulfil our function of recording details of the awards we make, and provide details of your education and references when asked to do so. (After these six years we will retain transcript data only in order to confirm details of your award.)

The Alumni Community keeps your contact details indefinitely, but these will be checked with you on a regular basis to ensure they are kept up to date. You have the right to have your details removed from the Alumni database at any time and unsubscribe options will be included in all email communications.

You are entitled to use the services of the Careers and Employability Service for five years after leaving the University, and therefore the Service will keep your contact details (and any other data you may provide the Service with) for that length of time, at which point your data will be deleted.

You are entitled to request a copy of the data you provide to us in an electronic format so that you may pass that data to another body (the right to data portability), as well as to request a copy of the data we hold about you (a Subject Access Request).

You are also entitled to raise an objection to the processing where the processing of data we hold about you is likely to cause you damage or distress, and to request either the rectification of any incorrect data, the restriction of any further processing of your data or the erasure of your data (right to be forgotten).

Whilst you have the right to withdraw your consent for processing your personal data where it is carried out with your consent, where we have a legal obligation to process your data it may not be possible for you to stop this processing if the data is required to comply with that legal obligation.

If you require any further information on, or wish to object to, any of the uses to which we put your data, you should contact Samantha Hill, the University’s Data Protection Officer on 023 9284 3642 or Samantha.hill@port.ac.uk.

Finally, you have the right to complain about the processing of your data to the UK regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office. For more information about this body and how to make a complaint, please see the ICO website.