At Samaritans, privacy is at the heart of what we do.
We are committed to protecting your privacy and the personal information that we hold. The purpose of this statement is to be clear and transparent about how Samaritans in the Republic of Ireland uses your personal information, whether you are using our service, interested in volunteering, making a donation or just browsing our website.
Who are we?
Samaritans offers a safe place for you to talk, any time, in whatever way is best for you.
Samaritans has more than 200 branches and locations in the UK, the Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, some of which are independent charities. All of the branches in the Republic of Ireland are independent charities but are coordinated and supported by Samaritans Central Charity (registered charity number in England and Wales) and Samaritans Ireland (registered charity number 20033668).
As all of the branches in the Republic of Ireland are independent charities, they are each separate data controllers for the purposes of the data protection laws. If you are in contact with a particular branch only, you should refer to the branch website to read their data privacy statement.
Samaritans Ireland is also registered as a company under company number 450409 and is a separate data controller for the purposes of the data protection laws.
Which laws apply to us?
Your ‘personal information’ is information that can be used to identify you. This can include your name, email address, postal address, telephone number, date of birth and credit/debit card details, as well as ‘special category data’ such as details about your ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, physical or mental health and details of criminal offences. Samaritans Ireland and the Samaritans branches in the Republic of Ireland collect, store and handle personal information for a variety of purposes, including to manage volunteers, to process donations, to engage with supporters and to provide services to the public.
The following laws apply to Samaritans Ireland and the Samaritans branches in the Republic of Ireland, as organisations that collect, store and handle personal information:
- The Data Protection Act 2018
- the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003
- the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679
- the 2011 ePrivacy Regulations (S.I. No. 336 of 2011)
We will handle your information in accordance with these laws.
Changes to this Privacy Statement
As the service we provide changes, we may need to alter this Privacy Statement. If you have any queries about this statement please contact the Data Protection Officer at Samaritans Central Charity, The Upper Mill, Kingston Road, Ewell, Surrey, KT17 2AF or email [email protected].
If you use Samaritans' services in the Republic of Ireland
Samaritans supports people in distress through its support service. Our service is available by telephone, email, text message, letter and face to face.
Our telephone helpline is designed so that Samaritans volunteers can’t see your phone number when you contact us. However, some information that could be used to identify you is available on our central systems and can be accessed by Samaritans Central Charity or Samaritans Ireland office staff, for example:
- If we need to investigate a call or series of calls (e.g. if you make a complaint), we can use an encrypted telephone number shown on our central system to identify the specific calls.
- If you contact [email protected], we do our best to mask your email address by replacing it with a caller ID and message ID before it reaches a volunteer. If you reply to the email we send you, your actual email address may be visible in the addressee line. This depends on how your computer is set up. If you would like to avoid this, you should review the whole of your email message (including any historic messages, usually shown below your current reply) and delete any mention of your email address before you press send.
- If you contact us by letter, the volunteer will be able to see your postal address
- Unlike the telephone helpline, your telephone number will be visible if you contact Samaritans Central Charity or Samaritans Ireland office.
In general, we try to keep as little information about you as possible. Volunteers may take notes when they talk to you to assist in the conversation. These notes are shredded at the end of the call. We don’t record your phone calls to the helpline but volunteers and staff may from time to time listen in to calls for training, support, or research purposes.
Any records about callers are kept for a limited amount time. This ranges from 30 days for caller emails and SMS messages to 6 months for letters to our Correspondence service.
We record some statistical information on each contact we receive, to report on and improve our service. This includes non-identifiable information, such as gender and how distressed the individual was at the time of contact. This information is never used to report on specific people. Where we provide emotional support in locations outside of the branches, our volunteers will take steps to ensure that any notes taken for statistical purposes are kept secure and securely disposed of once the data has been entered into our central contact log.
Samaritans will never pass on information relating to your use of the service to any other organisation, except in the following situations:
- We receive a call about acts of terrorism or bomb warnings
- We receive a court order requiring us to share information
- We are working in partnership with another organisation and you have given consent for your information to be shared
- You directly ask us to pass on information about you to someone else
- We are concerned that you are not able to make a decision for yourself (please read more about our policy on confidentiality here: https://www.samaritans.org/confidential)
- You threaten the safety of our volunteers
- You misuse or compromise the delivery of our service, for example by making it difficult for other people to get through
- You are a child who has experienced harm or is at risk of harm, and you have told us information which identifies you, or if you have provided information about a child in these circumstances, in which case we may contact the relevant services as we are required to do so in line with Children First: National Guidance for the Protection and Welfare of Children
- You provide information that identifies someone who has caused harm or says they are going to cause harm to a child.
We may record your contact details in any of the circumstances set out above. You can find more information about our confidentiality policy in these circumstances here.
Additional support
If we are concerned about you and want to offer you extra support, we may agree to call you back or for you to call us at an agreed time. In these cases, we will record information you’ve given us so that we know it’s you when you call again. We may need to share this information within Samaritans (including with Samaritans Central Office), because we work as a team to provide you with the best possible support and we want to ensure that whoever you speak to is up to date with your situation. This can be helpful if you find it difficult to go over previous conversations or if you are going through a particularity difficult time.
We may contact you to offer our support if you are referred to us by another organisation or individual. Once we have contacted you we will destroy your contact details, unless you agree to further contact – in which case we will, with your consent, keep your contact details.
Our additional support is not meant to be long term, it is a temporary form of extra support and is only put in place with your input and agreement.
Transfers of information outside of the EEA
Samaritans uses a number of ‘cloud-based’ applications to process some types of personal data. This data may be stored outside of the European Economic Area. Where this happens we ask our suppliers to provide evidence that they have the appropriate measures in place to make sure that your data is secure.
In order to provide its email and text services in the Republic of Ireland, Samaritans Ireland and the Samaritans branches in the Republic of Ireland use technology that stores data in the United Kingdom. Where you require additional support or Samaritans needs to pass your information on to an external organisation, Samaritans Ireland or the branch will need to share your information with the relevant team at Samaritans’ Central Office in the UK.
In each of these cases, Samaritans has put in place appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure your data is kept safe.
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