Privacy policy

Registration for TICTeC events does, of course, mean that we process some of your personal data. Here’s a rundown of what we do with it, what that means for you, and what rights you have.

What we collect

Registration for TICTeC events is via the third-party site Eventbrite.

When you register, we collect the following personal information:

  • Your name
  • Your email address
  • Your job title and organisation
  • Your country of residence
  • Your billing address and some payment details (if you are a fee-paying attendee)

See Eventbrite’s Privacy Policies.

During in-person TICTeC events, unless you have opted out, we may take photographs and videos which you appear in. Opt-out is offered during the registration process.

We collect and log some information about visitors to this site, in order to analyse and fix problems. Our webserver logs collect information about visits, including your IP address, data submitted (which might include your email address when you log on to the site), date and time of the visit, the page requested, browser version and referrer. Note that in normal circumstances, this data is infrequently accessed by a human, and when it is, they are likely to be assessing it in bulk, in order to understand an issue with the site, rather than at a granular level of individual users.

How we use your data

For our in-person TICTeC and TICTeC Local conferences, if you give consent, your name, job title and organisation will appear on the TICTeC website. This enables other attendees to find potentially useful contacts ahead of the event.

If you give your consent, your name and email address are added to a) our Mailchimp Research/TICTeC newsletter list and b) our general Mailchimp mySociety newsletter list. Newsletters are sent infrequently and only contain information about Civic Tech research, TICTeC or mySociety’s activities. Opting out from either of these is very simple and you may do so at any time via a link in every mailing.

Note that Mailchimp may transfer personal data outside the EU. Please contact Mailchimp with questions or concerns about this.

We never use your email address for any other purpose except for those listed above, and to contact you with logistical information about the event you’ve signed up for, such as details of travel grants or accommodation options. We will never pass your email address to a third party.

Your name, email address, title, organisation, country of residence and event preferences (e.g. regarding catering and photography) are added to a Google spreadsheet which is accessible to only mySociety staff, in accordance with their strict password protocols. This spreadsheet is used for planning the event. mySociety pays for Google’s G Suite. Therefore, according to Google’s G Suite Privacy policy and our agreement with them, the data collected and stored on Google sheets is not owned by Google and they thus will not share it with third parties or use it for advertising. This data will be used only by mySociety staff for event communications and logistics and will not be shared with third parties.

If you sign up to a TICTeC event where you need to buy a ticket, your billing information is processed through Eventbrite. Your name, email address, the billing address of your card and the last few digits of your card or bank account number are made available to us along with your purchase history.

Images and videos of TICTeC events are uploaded to Flickr and YouTube and shared via media including Facebook, LinkedIn, X, our websites, blog and newsletter. They may also be used to promote future events. Images are released under a Creative Commons licence, so others may use them too.

Where delegates have opted out of photography and videos, they may be captured on film during the event, but will be removed before any footage is published.

Retention period

Web pages: At the moment, attendee pages for previous TICTeC conferences may be kept live indefinitely. These may be web pages or simple Google spreadsheets (see, for example, this conference page). This is to prolong the period for which such lists can be useful for attendees’ networking and sharing of research projects. As time goes on, we may make the decision to retire the older attendee pages.

Financial data: We are obliged to keep records relating to financial transactions for at least six years following the end of the accounting period in which the transaction took place. We destroy our records after this point.

If you require further information on Eventbrite’s retention policies, please contact them directly.

Admin data: We keep spreadsheets of attendees for the purposes of an audit trail and to keep track of who has attended previous events. Information which is surplus to these needs, e.g. dietary requirements, is deleted after each event.

Web Server logs: We routinely keep this information for 28 days.

Lawful basis

Our lawful basis for collecting and processing this information is for the performance of a contract to which you are party (GDPR 6(1)(b) Contract): the contract to attend TICTeC.

If you give us Consent (GDPR 6(1)(a) Consent), we may publish your details in the list of attendees and add you to our mailing list.

When you interact with this site, information about the visit stored in our web server logs is stored under the basis of GDPR 6(1)(f) Legitimate interests. We collect this in order to analyse usage of the site, facilitate debugging and prevent abuse.

Your right to access

You may contact us at any time to ask to see what personal data we hold about you. Please contact us to request this.

Your right to erasure

Web pages: With the exception of speakers, you may opt to remove your information from the TICTeC website at any time: just contact us to request this. Speakers may request removal after the event has taken place. Please note that in such cases, all data such as slides, video, audio, and your bio page will be removed from the site and from our third party pages such as the mySociety YouTube channel. Alternatively you may request that we anonymise your information; in such cases we will discuss with you how best this might be achieved.

Financial data: As per the retention period, we cannot legally destroy records of financial transactions for a period of six years.

Admin data: Once the event is over, you may request that we destroy the data we hold in our internal documents and/or correspondence, provided that there is no legitimate reason for us continuing to hold it, that is to say if it does not relate to financial transactions or is unlikely to be of any legal or practical purpose in the future. Please contact us to request this.

Newsletter: When you unsubscribe from a newsletter managed via Mailchimp, your details remain on the list of past recipients. This is a measure to prevent circumstances such as a member of staff accidentally manually re-adding you. Mailchimp states: “As a compliance measure, subscribers who unsubscribe themselves can’t be deleted from your list.”

However, provided you are still a subscriber at the point when you contact us, on request your details can be permanently removed from the list – please contact us if you would like this to happen.

Your right to object

The General Data Protection Regulation gives you the right to object to our processing of your personal information and to ask us to stop processing it. To exercise your right to object, please contact us, giving specific reasons why you are objecting to the processing of your personal data. These reasons should be based upon your particular situation.

Your right to complain

If you believe that we have mishandled your data, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office. You can report a concern here (but do contact us first, so that we can try and help).

About us

TICTeC is run by mySociety, a UK not-for-profit social enterprise. Our registered address is:

mySociety
483 Green Lanes
London
N13 4BS
United Kingdom

…and we can also be contacted at hello@mysociety.org.