We take the privacy of those who visit our websites and use our services seriously and we aim to be transparent about our processing of personal information. Accordingly, this page explains the kinds of information we may collect about you as a result of your visiting or interacting with our website, contacting us through our forms, attending one of our events and so on.
Please read this notice carefully as it explains our purposes for using your personal information and includes information about your privacy rights.
If you use our websites, we will make a record of the information your web browser sends to us, typically identifying the type of browser you are using, and your IP address. We record this information in full where necessary, for example to detect bugs and prevent hostile access. Where we can, we only record an anonymized version of your IP address, for example to understand the ways in which people use our website and where in the world they are.
To make our websites work properly, we sometimes place small data files called “cookies” on your device. Most big websites do this too. We only use cookies when they are strictly necessary for the functionality of our sites.
A cookie is a small text file that a website (including this website) saves on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site. It enables the website to remember your actions and preferences (such as login, language, font size and other display preferences) over a period of time, so you don’t have to keep re-entering them whenever you come back to the site or browse from one page to another.
The following table explains the cookies we use and why we use them.
| Cookie/Technology | Name(s) | Purpose |
| Session | _openownership-register_session |
Strictly Necessary/Functional Enabling you to log into the register and remembering your session between page views |
You can control and/or delete cookies and other storage technologies as you wish – for details, see aboutcookies.org. You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site and some services and functionalities may not work.
If you sign up to be on our mailing list via this website, we will ask you for the following information:
Unless we are in direct correspondence with you – for example because you have asked us specific questions about our products or services – we will only use this information to send you newsletters. We will also record your details in our CRM system.
You may unsubscribe from our mailing lists at any time and any promotional email we send you will contain an option to enable you to unsubscribe.
If you have signed up to incorporate data about your company into the Open Ownership Register, we will also process:
We use this information in order to facilitate your contributor account, verify your identity whenever you login, to protect your identity from malicious access and we may use it to help us verify the accuracy of any information you submit for inclusion in the register. We may also contact you through the email address you provide to assist us with this verification process.
We have a separate page which covers the personal information we may include in our Open Ownership Register, our legal basis for collecting it and your rights. That page supplements this one.
If you use any of our online forms to report errors with our data, request that we correct or remove your information, or to contact us for general support, we will process:
We use this information to respond to you and act on your request. If you’re asking for data about yourself to be corrected or removed, we will also use the information to identify data which relates to you so that you may exercise your rights to it, as set out in our privacy policy for the Open Ownership Register.
If you register to attend a webinar or other online event we will process:
We use this information to give you access to the webinar event and to understand who is attending our events.
If you attend an online event, we will also process information about the times you start and stop attending the event. We use this information to understand how popular our events are and how our audience engages with them.
We may also use your personal information:
We will only keep your information for as long as is necessary, but this period varies depending on the information and purposes involved. For example:
In some cases we will keep personal information for longer where we need to comply with relevant regulatory or statutory requirements. We will also retain information, when and as long as necessary, to resolve legal disputes.
We use a variety of third-party data processors who may receive your information. Any use we make of data processors will require them to act only on our instructions concerning your personal information. To this end, we have signed data processing agreements with each of them, governing how they can use your information and requiring them to keep it safe.
Specifically, we may share information with:
As explained above, we may share your personal information with our suppliers.
There are other circumstances where we may need to share your personal information, such as:
It is lawful for us, under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), to process your personal information for the purposes described in this notice because one of the following applies:
We do not believe the way in which we are processing your personal information is likely to cause you any harm.
Any personal information we process may be transferred outside of the UK and European Union, in particular to the United States through our third-party data processors, many of whom locate their servers there. Some countries, including the US, have a lower standard of protection for personal information, including lower security requirements and fewer rights for individuals. In the US, for example, this means that your information may be at risk of access by the US government and law enforcement agencies. As described above, we have attempted to minimise this risk by having signed contracts in place, based on the European Commission-approved ‘Standard Contractual Clauses’ with recipients of your information outside the UK and EU.
Under EU and UK data protection laws you have a number of important rights which you can exercise free of charge. In summary, those include rights to:
These rights are not always available, and are subject to legal exemptions. For further information on each of those rights, including the circumstances in which they apply, see the Guidance from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on individuals rights under the General Data Protection Regulation.
If you would like to exercise any of those rights, please:
If you would like to unsubscribe from any email newsletter you can also click on the ‘unsubscribe’ button at the bottom of the email. Unsubscribing is automatic and effective immediately, but email may already be in transit when you unsubscribe.
EU and UK data protection laws also give you the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in particular in the European Union (or European Economic Area) state where you work, normally live or where any alleged infringement of data protection laws occurred. For example, in the UK this is the Information Commissioner’s Office.
We are Open Ownership, a fiscally sponsored project of Global Impact, 1199 N. Fairfax St., Suite 300, Alexandria, VA, 22314, US. Although we are based outside Europe, we have appointed our Technical Lead, info@openownership.org as our representative in Europe for data protection purposes.
Last updated November 2020