Privacy Notice and Data Protection

This privacy notice is in response to the Covid-19 (coronavirus) Pandemic and supports our overarching Privacy Notice to explain how the Royal Borough of Kingston (as a Data Controller) will collect, use and protect personal data.

The council already holds data regarding residents, employees and stakeholders. You may have provided this information for a specific reason. Normally, the council would seek to inform you that the data provided would be used for a different purpose. Due to the rapidly emerging situation regarding the current pandemic this will not always be possible. If we already hold information regarding vulnerability as defined in the current guidance from the Government and Public Health England, we may share this for emergency planning purposes or to protect your vital interests by sharing with services both inside and outside the council. There will be other council services such as Housing Benefit, Council Tax and the Electoral Register which we may use to help us identify groups of individuals who may need our support because they meet the vulnerable criteria.

We may in this current crisis need to ask you for personal information including sensitive personal information for example if you have any underlying illnesses or are vulnerable, that you have not already supplied. This is so the council can assist and prioritise it's services.

Please also see the Council’s GDPR and Data Sharing Policy

The Information Commissioner's Office has published its own FAQs on data handling during the pandemic.

The council is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. Through this privacy notice we have sought to be as transparent as possible to fully explain how your personal information is held and processed. This notice explains how we collect, use and share your information and how we keep it and how we keep it secure.

This privacy notice also explains when and why we collect personal information about people who engage or come into contact with us, whether via applying or receiving our services, living or visiting the borough or our website. Upon visiting our websites we will use third party service providers to collect technical information from your device, including standard internet log information such as the Internet Protocol (IP) address, your browser type and version, and certain page interaction information. In addition to this privacy notice some services have their own dedicated privacy notice to tell people in more detail how they use your information and the legal basis for using the information all service specific data protection and privacy notices should be read in conjunction with this over arching notice.

Your personal data

Personal data relates to a living individual who can be identified from that data. Identification can be by the information alone or in conjunction with any other information in the data controller's possession or likely to come into such possession.  Some of your personal data is classed as 'special category data' because it is the information that is considered to be more sensitive and therefore requires more protection. This includes your medical data.

Legal basis for processing your personal data

How we are processing your personal data will determine the legal basis for processing. The legal bases for processing by the council as a public authority will be:

• Where disclosure is in the vital interests of yourself or another person (Article 6(1)(d) and 9(2)(c) GDPR)
• Where it is necessary in the public interest (Article 6(1)(e))
• Where it is necessary for the reasons of substantial public interest Article 9(2)(g)
• Where it is in the interest of public health Article 9(2)(i)

Sharing your personal data

In this current pandemic, and to support test and trace, we may share your information with government departments, other public authorities, emergency services, volunteer groups and other stakeholders as necessary and where it is proportionate to do so.

Changes to this privacy notice

We will keep this privacy notice under regular review and if we make any changes, we will publish the updated version on our website.

Data Protection Officer contact information

Data Protection Officer – dpo@kingston.gov.uk