Buddhafield Privacy Statement

This Privacy Notice (updated 2019-05-05) describes what you can expect from us in the context of data protection.

When you book on our events you will also agree to our Booking Terms and Conditions.

Who we are

The legal structure of the central Buddhafield body is a private limited company that has charitable status:

Triratna Buddhafield, UK registered charity No. 1108826

We live all over the UK, but we run a programme of camping activities in the South of England, focused around the teaching and practise of Buddhism and Buddhist meditation.

Buddhafield organises its work using Mandate system. Each area of work is separated out and devolved responsibility for decision-making is given to a Mandate Holder.

GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is based on the principles of lawfulness, fairness and transparency and these are central to the formation of our policies and procedures for using personal data.

Our lawful basis for data processing under the GDPR is 'legitimate interests', meaning that we will only ever use your data in 'non-intrusive ways' that you 'would reasonably expect'. Specifically, our primary interest in using your personal information is to contact you about our activities.

Special category data is personal data which the GDPR says is more sensitive, and so needs more protection. Information about religion and health are classified as special category data. You may have provided information about your religion (such as by indicating that you are a member of Triratna Buddhist Order) or your health (such as by describing dietary requirements which we need when catering for you). We will only process special category data in compliance with the conditions (a, d, or e) set out in paragraph 2 of GDPR Article 9.

If you've supplied us with any information and you'd like to know what we have recorded for you, or if you'd like to be removed from our records, then please contact us.

Your personal information, and what we do with it:

Bookings, Contact, Mailout

We receive the personal information that you provide when booking for a retreat or event, or when contacting us through our ‘Front of House website’ (www.buddhafield.com). We need that information both to process your booking or message, and to communicate with you about it. If you chose to opt-in to our address/email lists then your details will also be added to our contacts database.

We use the information held in our contacts database when we send out our email newsletters and printed programme. In May 2018 we changed the way we send our newsletters by moving to use the MailChimp platform for sending emails. To make use of MailChimp we needed to copy name and email address information from our contacts database into our account on their service (you can view their privacy policy at https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/). MailChimp makes it easy for you to subscribe and unsubscribe from our newsletter, and if you do unsubscribe via MailChimp then we will also remove your details from our contacts database.

Participate

In January 2019 we opened ‘Participate’ – the Buddhafield volunteering and contribution website (participate.buddhafield.com). The Participate website has its own database to hold information submitted by volunteers, contributors, coordinators, and applicants.

We are currently using Google Forms for the application forms. When you submit information via one of these forms it is first stored in a Google Drive location, accessible only to Buddhafield IT admin. The Google Form Responses are then loaded into the Participate database so that the information can be accessed by the coordinator(s) of the area being applied to.

Area coordinators on Participate can also add information (name, email, phone number) about people to whom they wish to send invitations for volunteering or contribution.

In the Participate database we use email addresses as an identifier for linking information that may come from different sources (such as application form responses or coordinator input). You can view the data linked to your email address by registering on the Participate website: you will need to confirm your email address during that registration.

If you are invited to volunteer at an event you will be asked complete a ‘health and wellbeing questionnaire’ to provide information which includes questions about any allergies or medical conditions which may affect your work with us, plus emergency contact details. These data will be used only in relation to your stay onsite as a volunteer at our event(s). We will delete all ‘health and wellbeing’ data in the January of each year.

We do not pass your information on to anyone else.

We will not pass on your information to other organisations.

Requests for information about anyone other than yourself will be denied: even if we know you and/or the data subject personally, it would be inappropriate for information held in our databases to be used for interpersonal connections.

Photographs

When we're taking photographs for publicity purposes, we do our best to ask the permission of the subject beforehand.   Unfortunately that's not always possible at our (or any other) festival.   To that end, there's a condition on the purchase of a Buddhafield Festival ticket that we reserve the right to use photographs featuring attenders.   That said, please get in touch if you're unhappy about an image of yourself on this website or our own Flickr and Facebook accounts.

Please don't take images from this website and use them for your own purposes without asking the copyright holder first  (even if it's you in the photograph!).

Cookies

Our website uses ‘cookies’ to store information on your computer whilst you navigate around the site.

Some of these are essential to the functioning of the website, such as to hold information needed when you use the Shopping Basket.

We also use non-essential cookies to anonymously track page visits with Google Analytics. Pages that include embedded content (such as video from Vimeo) will use cookies from the content provider. In the case of a video from vimeo.com, their cookies enable such things as knowing if you have logged in to their service.

If you're not happy with these cookies, you can use your browser settings to control them.