Privacy Policy

Your privacy is important

We hold and process personal information to allow us to provide opportunities for all to worship and serve God in His Universality and offer spiritual guidance and inspiration. We appreciate that you have decided to trust us with your information and will always try to act responsibly and professionally with it.

Who we are

  • Our full name is the Community of the Many Names of God. We are also known as Skanda Vale. We operate four multifaith temples that provide the opportunity for thousands of pilgrims to worship God in His Universality.
  • The Community of the Many Names of God is a charity registered in Wales (Registered Charity No: 511166). Our address is Skanda Vale, Llanpumsaint, Carmarthenshire SA33 6JT. Our website is: www.skandavale.org and https://sanatanadharma.global.
  • The Community of the Many Names of God is registered as a Data Controller with the Information Commissioner’s Office under number Z111297X. We are responsible for the personal information we process either directly or through organisations working on our behalf.

Our Privacy Promise to you:

  • We will keep your information secure and confidential and will not do with it anything which you would not reasonably expect.
  • We will ensure all Community members are trained to know how to handle your information properly and lawfully.
  • We will only send you our e-mail newsletter or other e-mail or text communications if you specifically agree to us doing so. You can opt-out at any time.
  • We will never sell or swap your data with a third party.
  • If we pass information to other companies to do some specialist work (eg. donations processing, events management etc.) we will check that these companies comply with Data Protection laws.
  • Any credit or debit card donations or transactions with us are secure and encrypted and comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. All card donations online are processed by third-party providers, we do not have access to or hold any record of card numbers, expiry dates or security codes. If we take card donations over the phone the details are processed via a third-party provider, we do not store any record of card numbers, expiry dates or security codes.
  • This Privacy Notice details how and why we obtain, use and protect your personal information.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

EMAIL NEWSLETTERS
  • If you have subscribed to our e-newsletter we will, from time to time, send you news and updates about the teachings of Guru Sri Subramanium, plus occasional related event notifications.
  • We will only do so with your consent and rely on this legal basis to provide you with this service. We will always provide you with a link in these e-mails to give you the option to remove yourself from this service.
COMMENTS
  • When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
  • An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
  • Our blog is moderated and we do not display the full names of individuals nor addresses. If you post personal information on our website, your information is publicly accessible. Such information can be viewed online and collected by third parties. We are not responsible for the use of information by such third parties.
  • If you’re aged 16 or under, you must get your parent/guardian’s permission before you provide any personal information on our website.
  • Our website may contain links to other websites. This Privacy Notice only applies to our website so when you link to other websites you should read their own privacy policies.
MEDIA
  • If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
COOKIES
  • If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
  • If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
  • When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
  • If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
EMBEDDED CONTENT FROM OTHER WEBSITES
  • Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
  • These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
ANALYTICS
  • Our website uses Google Analytics (www.google.com/intl/en_uk/analytics) to allow us to track how popular our site is and to record visitor trends over time. Google Analytics uses a cookie to help track which pages are accessed. The cookie contains no personally-identifiable information, but it does use your computer’s IP address to determine where in the world you are accessing the site from and to track your page visits within the site.

The purpose for our use of cookies and Google Analytics is to maintain and monitor the performance of our website and the legal basis we rely on to process your information is our legitimate interests in making our website as effective as possible.

Donations

TYPES OF INFORMATION

If we receive a donation from you we will need to process information such as your name, donation amount and date (other than for anonymous donations). Where relevant we will also need to process other information such as your address, e-mail, telephone number, credit/debit card details (we may process card donations over the phone, but we never store card numbers, expiry dates or security codes), bank account details, Gift Aid declarations, IP address and any other relevant information you may provide to us. We also hold records of our communications with you and of any communication preferences for e-mail or text messages you tell us about.

SOURCES OF INFORMATION

We collect this personal information about you when you make a donation or debit/credit card payment (in person, on the telephone or online), if you sign a Gift Aid form or give us any other associated personal information. We may also obtain this information about you from other sources such as Virgin Money Giving, Just Giving and PayPal who pass on donations you make to us.

PURPOSE OF PROCESSING YOUR INFORMATION

Our purposes for processing this information are to process the donations and payments we have received from you and to claim Gift Aid on your donation if you have authorised us to do so, and:

  • to process donations and payments we have received from you;
  • to claim Gift Aid;
  • to keep a record of your relationship with us and for internal administrative purposes;
  • for fraud prevention, credit risk reduction or otherwise as required by law or regulation;
  • and we may also use your personal information for other purposes which we specifically notify you about and, where appropriate, obtain your consent.
LEGAL BASIS FOR PROCESSING YOUR INFORMATION

We rely on our legitimate interest in processing your donation for administrative and accounting purposes, for example, thanking you for your support, making appropriate entries in our charity’s accounts and ledgers and for financial and trend analysis.

If you have authorised us to claim Gift Aid on your donation, we rely on our legitimate interest in claiming Gift Aid in order to increase our income and the legal obligation we have to provide the specified information to HMRC in order to claim Gift Aid on your donation. We may also have a legal obligation to process personal information relating to your donation, for example for fraud prevention or money laundering purposes.

WHO DO WE SHARE YOUR INFORMATION WITH

Information about our donors is held securely on our central communication database (a Customer Relationship Management software package) where we store information such as donors names, contact details, donation amounts, Gift Aid declarations and other associated details about your interactions with us. Access to this secure database is restricted to Community members on a need-to-know basis. We also record information about donations (i.e. donor names, donation date and amount) on our accounting software.

We may sometimes need to share your information with trusted third parties who provide services to us such as our accountants. We have contracts in place with any of these trusted organisations and they are only allowed to process your information in strict compliance with our instructions.

We will also share your information with HMRC if we are authorised by you to claim Gift Aid and if required by law or regulation to do so.

SECURITY

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, loss, damage or destruction we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard your information. However no data transmission over the Internet is 100% secure, therefore whilst we try to protect your personal information we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us over the Internet and you do so at your own risk.

If you use a credit or debit card to make a donation or payment the processing is done in accordance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. You can find our more about this at www.pcisecuritystandards.org/pci_security/.

KEEPING YOUR INFORMATION

We keep your personal information only for as long as it is necessary and for compliance purposes. Generally, we are required to retain records of financial transactions, including donations, for at least 6 years after the end of the financial year of the transaction. When your information is no longer required we will ensure it is disposed of in a secure manner.

What rights you have over your data

You have the right to privacy and to expect us to keep your information confidential and secure. You have the following specific legal rights, although not all of these rights will be applicable in all circumstances:

  • Right to be Informed (to know how we are processing your personal data)
  • Right of Access (to know if we have your data and to obtain a copy of your data)
  • Right to Rectify (correct your data)
  • Right of Erasure (delete your data)
  • Right to Restrict Processing (to stop the processing of your data)
  • Right of Portability (obtain your data in a common, machine-readable format)
  • Right to Object (to direct marketing, to processing for scientific/historical research or statistics, and to processing based on our legitimate interests)

If you wish to request access to any information we hold about you; if you change email address or any of the other information we hold about you is inaccurate or out of date; or if you have any queries or concerns about how we process your personal data, please contact us on

If you have any concerns that our collection or use of information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate you can also raise this directly with the Information Commissioner’s Office (the ICO, the regulator that governs and controls the use of personal information and enforces your right to privacy and confidentiality) at https://ico.org.uk.

However, the ICO will generally expect you to have contacted us to let us try to resolve your complaint in the first instance.

Changes to this privacy notice

We keep our Privacy Notice under regular review and we will place any updates on this web page. This Privacy Notice was last updated in July 2020.

How to contact us

This Privacy Notice is not exhaustive, so if you have any queries or would like further information, please contact us by e-mail at .

 

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