Privacy policy

Mental Health UK takes great care to preserve your privacy and safeguard any personal details you provide to us, whether on Clic or by any other means. This Policy explains how we collect and use your information.

By using Clic or providing us with your personal information you are agreeing to this Policy. We update this Policy from time to time, so please check it regularly.

We will communicate changes as often as we can.

1. Your details

We collect personal information such as name, address, telephone number, email, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and primary mental health diagnosis on sign up to Clic or one of its communities.

2. Why do you need my details and how do you use them?

We collect your details for the following purposes:

  • To keep you safe if our moderators feel you are at risk of causing harm to either yourself or others based on what you post on Clic, they are trained to contact emergency services to request a welfare check. In this instance, our moderators may pass on your personal data including name, telephone number and address to emergency services to enable them to carry out that check.
  • To email you in the event that your content has been judged to be in breach of our House Rules and removed from Clic. Repeated breaches of the House Rules will result in the issuing of warnings, temporary suspension of your account, and ultimately permanent exclusion from the platform.
  • To verify your age and permit/prevent access to the main Clic platform for users of communities that are open to under 18s.
  • To invite you to a meeting held on Clic Spaces (see below).
  • To enable us to produce anonymised reporting on the demographics of Clic users.
  • To ensure that the information and support provided on Clic is appropriate and relevant.
  • To keep professional records of the support that we have given you in case of a query.
  • Marketing, where consent has been given at sign up.

‘Marketing’ is defined as anything which ‘furthers the aims of the charity’ and includes things like email updates from Mental Health UK, fundraising appeals and campaigning actions like us asking you to sign a petition or email your MP.

Where you have provided your address and consent for us contacting you for marketing purposes, we may send you marketing communications by email, phone or post. This is using legitimate interest as a basis for Mental Health UK processing your data. You can opt-out of receiving postal communications at any time by emailing [email protected] or writing to us at Mental Health UK, The Dumont Building, 28 Albert Embankment, London, SE1 7GR.

You can withdraw your consent for marketing communications at any time via the same means as above. We’ll ask you every now and again if you’re still happy to hear from us.

When dealing with your personal information we will always comply with the Data Protection Act 2018, and any other applicable legislation including UK GDPR.

3. Clic Spaces

Clic Spaces are private online meeting rooms and groups made available to our charity partners to deliver peer support, training, therapy and advice. Spaces can only be booked by Mental Health UK team members and staff working in our four founding charities: MindWise, Adferiad, Rethink Mental Illness and Change Mental Health.

When a host from these charities books a Clic Space, they may enter your email address to invite you to a meeting. In this case, we use your email to process invitations. After the meeting has concluded, your email address and the contents of the closed space will be securely stored for a period of 14 days before being permanently deleted. If you register for Clic in order to take part in the meeting, your information will be collected and used in line with the rest of this policy.

4. Do you pass my details to any other organisations or individuals

Please rest assured that we will never sell your details to any third party.

Clic is brought to you by Mental Health UK. We’re the only mental health charity that works UK-wide, and were founded by four charities coming together: Rethink Mental Illness in England, Adferiad in Wales, Change Mental Health in Scotland and MindWise in Northern Ireland. Mental Health UK may share your personal data with the other charities to allow them to provide you with a relevant service for you. Before doing so, we will ask for your consent.

We may on occasion need to send data to a third party (for example, a funder) to report on Clic’s impact. In this instance, no personally identifiable data will be shared, and all data will be fully anonymised.

If we ever need to send your data to a third party where it cannot be anonymised (i.e. for consented marketing purposes), we will make sure the company we use has signed a data processing agreement with us, so that they are bound to take care of your data in the same way we do. For instance, our partners at Engaging Networks (who manage large e-campaigns for us where we might encourage supporters to email their MP) use the exact same wording on their sign-up page to our campaigns as we use on our own website and must treat your data with the same care that we do. Mental Health UK has a full list of the partner organisations we work with for marketing.

We may also share or disclose your personal information if we are required to do so by any law or court order. This is called a legal need.

5. How do you keep my information secure?

We take precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or unauthorised alteration of personal information you give us.

We may send communications to you by email regarding your use of Clic. E-mail is not a fully secure means of communication, and whilst we do our utmost to keep our systems and communications protected at all times, we cannot guarantee this.

We make no representations about any other websites, and when you access any other website through a link on Clic, you should understand that it is independent from us and that we have no control over that site or the way your personal information is collected through them.

Other websites may have their own privacy policies and we encourage you to look at those policies or contact the website operators directly to understand how your personal information is used.

6. How do you use cookies on this website?

For information on how cookies are used on Clic and other Mental Health UK websites, please see our Cookie Policy.

7. How long will you keep my data?

We will keep data for only as long as it makes sense to. This becomes more important after you end your contact with us, for example. Legally we need to keep some records in case there is a query. In general, we use a 6-year rule.

Where you have consented to being contacted for marketing purposes by Mental Health UK, we will review supporter data 6 years after your last contact with us and delete or minimise those we have no reason to keep. You can read Mental Health UK’s Privacy Policy here.

In most cases we won’t totally delete a record of you (see note below in the next section).

8. Your Rights

UK Data Protection law provides you with rights over the personal information we hold about you.

Right to access your personal information

You have the right to request to access to and/or request a copy of the personal information we hold about you. We will provide you with this information unless legal exemptions apply.

Right to have your inaccurate information corrected (right to rectify)

You have the right to have inaccurate or incomplete information we hold about you corrected. If you believe the information we hold about you is inaccurate or incomplete, provide us with details and we will review, and where applicable, correct any inaccuracies.

Right to restrict use

You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of some or all of your personal information. You can request this if; some information we hold on you isn’t right; we are not lawfully allowed to use it; you need us to retain your information in order for you to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim; or you believe your privacy rights outweigh our legitimate interests to use your information and you have objected to us doing this.

Right to erasure

You have the right to ask us to delete some or all of your personal information. If we are unable to delete your information, as there are some exceptions where we are unable to delete personal information, we will explain why this is.

Right for your information to be portable

You have the right to receive your personal information in a commonly used format and to request that we provide the information to another provider (data controller).

Right to object to the use of your personal information

If we are processing your personal information, you have the right to object to the processing of that data at any time. If you request this, we will stop processing your data.

In relation to all of these rights, please email us at [email protected] or write to us at Mental Health UK, The Dumont Building, 28 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7GR. Please note that we will require proof of identity in order to carry this out and ask you the scope of the request you’re making, so that we can best help you within the applicable timeframe of one month (in accordance with the Information Commissioner’s Office guidelines).

In certain circumstances (for example where required or permitted by law) we might not be able to provide you with access to some of your personal information, but where appropriate we will notify you of the reasons for this.

If you would like us to delete your Clic account, please email [email protected] and we will process your request. This will delete all record of you on the Clic platform.

If you don’t want us to hold your data at all anymore, we have a duty to let you know that the best way for us to be sure we don’t contact you again is to minimise the data we hold (e.g. reduce it to name and last known address) and then ‘block’ those details from contact rather than delete them completely. It’s best practice (from the Information Commissioner’s Office) to hold ‘suppressed’ records rather than to delete completely, so that we can make sure we’re never able to accidentally acquire a person’s details again – that way we can recognise the address and prevent contact to it.

9. Using countries outside of the EU

Where you have consented to marketing communications from Mental Health UK, our marketing database has servers based in the USA, and our email software is based in the USA. All data is stored and transferred in accordance with current Data Protection regulations through contract. We will only work with USA based organisations who have certified under the EU-US Privacy Shield.

10. Contact

Our Data Protection Officer is Company Secretary Caroline Cannar. She can be contacted by email at [email protected] or by post: Mental Health UK, The Dumont Building, 28 Albert Embankment, London, SE1 7GR.

If you have any questions about this Policy, please contact us at [email protected] or Mental Health UK, The Dumont Building, 28 Albert Embankment, London, SE1 7GR.

Please use these details to complain about Data Protection practices, and if we don’t resolve your issue to your satisfaction, you can approach The Information Commissioner’s Office on https://ico.org.uk/ (or if it’s about our fundraising practices in relation to data) you can contact the Fundraising Regulator using their complaints form at www.fundraisingregulator.org.uk or on 0300 999 3407.

Updated: November 2022