Privacy & Cookies Policy

This privacy notice describes how we collect and use personal information about you during and after your relationship with us, in accordance with the applicable data protection legislation (the Data Protection Act 1998 until 24 May 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulations (the “GDPR”) from 25 May 2018.

SONICOM is a “data controller”. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. We are required under data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice.

This notice does not form part of any contract of employment or other contract to provide services. We may update this notice at any time.

It is important that you read this notice, together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information.

Data protection principles

We will comply with data protection law. This says that the personal information we hold about you must be:

Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way.
Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes.
Accurate and kept up to date.
Kept only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about.
Kept securely.

The kind of information we hold about you

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).

We may collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:

Personal contact details such as name, email address, contact number, company and enquiry information.

How is your personal information collected?

We collect personal information on completion of ‘Newsletter Subscribe’ form, via the contact us form and through direct contact of a member of our project team.

How we will use information about you and the legal basis for processing your data under the General Data Protection Regulations

We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal information in the following circumstances:

Circulation of half-yearlynewsletter to ‘Newsletter Subscribers’
To respond to queries submitted via the ‘Contact Us’ form.
Communicate events and news in relation to the SONICOM project.

Data sharing

Data will not be shared with other parties, however data will be stored in a secure mail manager system which is monitored and controlled by Imperial College London.

Data security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.

Data retention

How long will you use my information for?

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of communication in relation to SONICOM. Details of retention periods are as follows:

Personal information indefinitely unless you withdraw your consent.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

Rights of access, correction, erasure, and restriction

Your duty to inform us of changes

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes during your relationship with us.

Your rights in connection with personal information

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).
Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.

If you want to review, verify, correct or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact the College’s Data Protection Officer in writing.

No fee usually required

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is clearly unfounded or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with the request in such circumstances.

What we may need from you

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is another appropriate security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it.

Right to withdraw consent

In the limited circumstances where you may have provided your consent to the collection, processing and transfer of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact the College’s Data Protection Officer. Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your information for the purpose or purposes you originally agreed to, unless we have another legitimate basis for doing so in law.

Data Protection Officer

On behalf of the SONICOM consortium, we have appointed a Data Protection Officer to oversee compliance with this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact the Data Protection Officer at:

Imperial College London
Data Protection Officer
Exhibition Road
Faculty Building Level 4
London SW7 2AZ
e-mail: dpo@imperial.ac.uk

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues.

Changes to this privacy notice

We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.

Google and Cookies

This page describes how we treat the information provided by visitors, what other information we gather and how we use it, why we sometimes need to store “cookies” and how to prevent this.

In common with almost all professionally run websites, this website logs the IP address of each visitor in order to keep it running reliably. This is also essential for protecting the website and its visitors from malicious attacks, including infection with malware.

This website provides information as a service to visitors such as yourself, and to do this reliably and efficiently, it sometimes places small amounts of information on your computer or device (e.g. mobile phone). This includes small files known as cookies. The cookies stored by this website cannot be used to identify you personally.

How Cookies Are Used

We use cookies to understand what pages and information visitors find useful, and to detect problems such as broken links, or pages which are taking a long time to load. We sometimes use cookies to remember a choice you make on one page, when you have moved to another page if that information can be used to make the website work better. For example: avoiding the need to ask for the same information several times during a session (e.g. when filling in forms), or remembering that you have logged in, so that you don’t have to re-enter your username and password on every page.

Cookies for Analytics

We use analytics to measure how many visitors are using the website, which pages interest them and so on, and this involves storing cookies. For more information please visit the Google Analytics website.

Disabling Cookies

You can prevent the setting of cookies by adjusting the settings on your browser (see your browser Help for how to do this). Be aware that disabling cookies will affect the functionality of this and many other websites that you visit.

This page describes how we treat the information provided by visitors, what other information we gather and how we use it, why we sometimes need to store “cookies” and how to prevent this.

Cookies Used:

Google Analytics:
Name: _ga Expires: 2 years. Reason: Used to distinguish users.
Name: _gid Expires: 24 hours. Reason: Used to distinguish users.
Name: _gat Expires: 1 minute. Reason: Used to throttle request rate.

We also use social media buttons and/or plugins on this site that allow you to connect with your social network in various ways. For these to work the following social media sites including; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, will set cookies through our site which may be used to enhance your profile on their site or contribute to the data they hold for various purposes outlined in their respective privacy policies.