Privacy Policy

Online Privacy Statement

The International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (“IAPB / We”) are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.

This policy (together with our terms and conditions and any other documents referred to on it) sets out the basis on which any personal data we collect from you, or that you provide to us, will be processed by us. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.

For the purpose of the Data Protection Act 1998 (the “Act”), the data controller is IAPB, WeWork 1 St Katharine’s Way, International House, 6th Floor, London, E1W 1UN, United Kingdom.

1. Information we may collect from you

We may collect and process the following data about you:

Information that you provide by filling in forms on our site www.iapb.org (“our site”). This includes information provided at the time of registering to use our site, subscribing to our service, posting material or requesting further services. We may also ask you for information when you report a problem with our site.
If you contact us (for instance to make a complaint or enquiry), we may keep a record of that correspondence.
We may also ask you to complete surveys that we use for research purposes, although you do not have to respond to them.
Details of your visits to our site and the resources that you access.
We may also collect information about you in accordance with our annual photograph competition. If you are an entrant to the competition, we require your name, contact details and other personal information that you submit to us via the entry form in order to communicate with you in relation to the competition. If you are an individual who features in a photograph which is submitted to the competition, we process your image data (see paragraph 2 below). In addition, we may process your special category health data, depending on the context in which the image is taken (for instance where a photograph of you shows that you are receiving medical treatment for vision issues).

Under UK data protection law, certain types of personal data are considered more sensitive (e.g. data on health, ethnicity, religion, race). This data is called special category data. We only process special category data if we have a valid reason and only if the law allows us to do so (for example, information relating to your health status).

2. Information we may collect about you from another source

We may collect your personal information from a source other than you.

For instance, we run an annual photo competition on World Sight Day in order to put a spotlight on eye care issues around the world and on those who are vulnerable to sight conditions. As part of this competition, we encourage individuals to share photographs of individuals who are receiving treatment for sight issues. You may have been asked by an entrant to the competition to provide your consent for your image to be shared with us in accordance with one of our competitions. This privacy policy contains details about how and why we process your personal data. However, please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions, by emailing [email protected].

3. Lawful basis

We will only use personal data when the law allows us to (i.e. where we have a ‘lawful basis’). Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests. For example, we have a legitimate interest in administering our photo competition.
Where it is necessary for the performance of a contract with you.
Where it is necessary to comply with a legal obligation on us.
We may have asked for your consent in order to use your image in accordance with our photo competition. Where we process your special category data, we may collect your explicit consent to do so.

4. IP addresses and cookies

We may collect information about your computer, including where available your IP address, operating system and browser type, for system administration. This is statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns, and does not identify any individual. This data is collected using Google Analytics.

For the same reason, we may obtain information about your general internet usage by using a cookie file which is stored on the hard drive of your computer. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive. They help us to improve our site and to deliver a better and more personalised service. These browser settings can be changed to automatically block all cookies or to allow or block certain types of cookie depending on who issued them. However, blocking all cookies makes some websites unusable.

Cookies enable us:

To estimate our audience size and usage pattern.
To store information about your preferences, and so allow us to customise our site according to your individual interests.
To speed up your searches.
To recognise you when you return to our site.

You may refuse to accept cookies by activating the setting on your browser which allows you to refuse the setting of cookies. However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our site. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies when you log on to our site. To find out how to change your cookie preferences, click on the relevant link below for instructions on accessing your browser’s cookie management settings:
Chrome
Firefox
Internet Explorer
Opera
Safari

The operational cookies chosen by the user are
– Language

The cookies we use for for visitor measurement are:

Google Analytics_
ga – Used to distinguish users. Expires after 2 years.
_gid – Used to distinguish users. Expires after 24 hours.
_gat_UA-36152063-1 – Used to throttle request rate. Expiry time: session.
Secure cookies linked to the website:
Cloudflare
__cfduid – Helps Cloudflare detect malicious visitors to our Customers’ websites and minimizes blocking legitimate users. Expires after 30 days.
Session_id for each Internet user who opens the website (Session ID)

Other specific cookies used are:

CookieConsent – Used to store user cookie consent preferences. Expires after 1 year.

Persona – Used to remember area of interest selected on the homepage. Expires 60 days.

5. Where we store your personal data

Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share a password with anyone.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

6. Uses made of the information

We use information held about you in the following ways:

To ensure that content from our site is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer.
To provide you with information, products or services that you request from us or which we feel may interest you, where you have consented to be contacted for such purposes.
To notify you about changes to our service.

Where you have given us your consent, we may also use your data to provide you with information about goods and services which may be of interest to you and we may contact you about these.

7. Disclosure of your information

We may disclose your personal data to third parties if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our terms of use and other agreements; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of IAPB or others. We may also share your personal data with other providers to assist us to host photographs which include your image, for instance, we may share your personal data with flickr in the context of our annual photo competition so that flickr can host photographs which are submitted to our competition.

8. Your rights

You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes. We will usually inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for such purposes. You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by checking certain boxes on the forms we use to collect your data. You can also exercise the right at any time by contacting us at [email protected].

Our site may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of our partner networks, advertisers and affiliates. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

If you have provided consent for your image to be shared in accordance with one of our photo competitions, you have the right to withdraw this consent at any time, by emailing [email protected].

9. International data transfers

Please be aware that your personal data we collect may be transferred to and maintained on servers or databases located outside your state, province, country, or other jurisdiction, where the privacy laws may not be as protective as those in your location.

Our photo competition, for example, transfers your photo submission to Flickr through a form on the IAPB website.

10. Access to information

Please write to IAPB at [email protected] if you have any questions about, or would like to access any information we store about you.

11. Changes to our privacy policy

Any changes we may make to our privacy policy in the future will be posted on this page.

12. Contact

Questions, comments and requests regarding this privacy policy are welcomed and should be addressed to [email protected].