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The Balint Consultancy – Privacy Notice
When you trust us with your personal data, we take our responsibility to protect it very seriously. We respect privacy, and your rights to control your personal data. With that in mind, we want to be clear about the data we collect and why.
The prime purpose of collecting your data is to provide you with services (“Services”) offered by our website (“Site”), whether that’s using our Site to find information, to contact a professional, or for some other reason.
We do not and will not sell your data to third parties.
This privacy notice explains how we will process any personal data we collect from you, or that you give to us. It’s relevant to anyone who uses our services. Please read this Privacy Notice carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data, and make sure you understand it. Your acceptance of our Privacy Notice is deemed to occur upon your first use of our Site, so if you do not accept and agree with it you must stop using our Site immediately.
Please be aware that when you correspond or undertake therapy with one of our Psychotherapists, this Privacy Notice will not cover your interactions with them. Each Psychotherapist will have their own privacy policies which they will share with you when you begin therapy.
The Site
We take a proactive approach to user privacy and ensure the necessary steps are taken to protect the privacy of our users throughout their visiting experience.
When you use our Site, you do so at your own discretion and provide any personal details requested to The Balint Consultancy at your own risk. Your personal information is kept private and stored securely until it is no longer required or has no use, as detailed below.
The types of personal information we collect
We may collect and process the following data about you:
Information you give us. The information you give us may include your name, address, e-mail address and phone number. You may also provide us with information such as financial and credit card information. Where we take any financial payments from you, these will be done securely and in accordance with industry standards.
Contacting professionals on our site
When you contact a psychotherapist displayed on our site, you are in control of how much and what type of information you choose to provide to us. Although we only require initial contact information from you, we accept that you may choose to provide us with further information for the benefit of the psychotherapist you wish to see. We will not however collect or store sensitive personal data such as information about your mental or physical health, your sexual life or orientation, or your religious or philosophical beliefs. By emailing our practice administrator or calling our enquires line you agree to us processing your information and providing a copy of it to the therapist selected to offer a first appointment for you.
Information we collect automatically.
Whenever you visit our Site we may automatically collect the following information about you:
Technical information.
We may, for example, collect information about the type of device you use to access our websites, the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet, your login information, browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access this Site;information about your visit, including the full Uniform Resource Locators (URL) clickstream to, through and from our Site (including date and time); pages you viewed or searched for; page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), and methods used to browse away from the page.
Like many websites, we use “Cookies” to enhance your experience and gather information about visitors and visits to our websites.
Analytics includes third-party analytics services (such as Google Analytics) to evaluate your use of the Site, compile reports on activity, collect demographic data, analyse performance metrics, and collect and evaluate other information relating to our Site and internet usage. These third parties use cookies and other technologies to help analyse and provide us the data. By accessing and using the Site, you consent to the processing of data about you by these analytics providers in the manner and for the purposes set out in this Privacy Notice.
Under GDPR we will ensure that your personal data is processed lawfully, fairly, and transparently, without adversely affecting your rights. We will only process your personal data if at least one of the following basis applies:
a) processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are a party, or in order to take steps at the request of you prior to entering into a contract – for example, if you apply to see a psychotherapist.
b) processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject;
c) processing is necessary to protect the vital interests of you or of another person;
or
d) processing is in our legitimate interests or those of a third party such as our credit card payment processing unless these interests are overridden by the fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject (this will normally be you). For example, we rely on our legitimate interest basis to analyse and improve our Services and the content on our website. We can use your personal information in this way because it is in our legitimate interests to provide you with relevant information when appropriate.
In some instances, it may be appropriate for us to combine your information with other information that we may be holding about you – such as combining your name with your geographic location or your history with us.
If you fail to provide personal data
If you choose not to provide the personal information we request, you can still visit most areas of the Site but you may be unable to access certain options and services. You have the final decision on whether to proceed with any activity that requests personal information.
In some cases, the collection of personal data may be a statutory or contractual requirement, and we will be limited in the services we can provide you if you don’t provide your personal data – for example, if you do not provide us with your personal data we cannot contact you to arrange a service.
What do we do with information we collect about you and why
We use your personal information in order to provide you with the services we offer. Here are some examples of some of the ways we may use your data:
If you use our Site to contact a therapist, we only use the personal information you give us via email or phone to produce an email which is sent to the psychotherapist(s) selected. In this scenario, we will not store your data any longer than needed to complete this process, and we will not use it for any future purposes.
Our servers record the IP addresses of visitors to our web pages for a short period to enable us to monitor the performance of our website, but we will generally delete this data as we do not retain it any longer than necessary.
Data security is of great importance to us, and to protect your data we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure data collected through our Site. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
We have put procedures in place to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.
Disclosing your information
We are allowed to disclose your information to a third party such as a GP in the following cases:
If it is considered there is a real possibility of harm to yourself or others or in such instances when information is of such a gravity that confidentiality cannot be maintained for example:
Safeguarding adults (adult protection)
Safeguarding children (child protection)
Offences involving children under the age of 18
In cases of terrorism, fraud or money laundering
Retaining your personal information
We will retain your personal information for as long as we deem it necessary to enable us to provide Services to you, to comply with applicable laws (including those regarding document retention), resolve disputes with any parties, and otherwise as necessary to allow us to conduct our business.
We are committed to maintaining confidentiality when you contact our professional members for help we will delete the information you give us from our system immediately after settling your enquiry.
All personal information we retain will be subject to this Privacy Notice and our internal retention guidelines. We will also retain data in an anonymous form for statistical and analytical purposes, for example, to understand how our users interact with our service.
Your rights
Under the GDPR, you have the right to control how your personal information is used in the following ways:
You can ask for a copy of your personal data held by us, at no cost to you
You can ask us to correct any personal information that we hold about you, or inform us about any changes to your personal information
You can request that your personal data be transferred to another person (data portability)
You can ask to be informed of what data processing is taking place
In certain situations, you can ask that we restrict processing of, or object to processing of, your personal data
In certain situations, you can ask that we delete personal information that we hold about you.
Where we are using your personal information on the basis of your consent, you are entitled to withdraw that consent at any time. Where we process your personal information based on legitimate interest or the public interest, you have the right to object at any time to that use of your personal information.
Changes
This Privacy Notice was last updated on 20 June 2018 to add new provisions to the policy applicable regarding GDPR. If we change our Privacy Notice, we will post the changes on this page.