Our promise to you

The Chartered Institute of Housing is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. By visiting www.cih.org or any site associated with events you are accepting and consenting to the practices described in this notice.

This notice (referred to as this “privacy notice”) explains what Personal Data the CIH holds about you in connection with your use of our website and networks, how we collect it, and how we use and share Personal Data collected via the website. Please ensure that you read this privacy notice when we collect or process Personal Data about you.

Who can I contact if I have any questions?

CIH is the controller for the Personal Data collected from website visitors and individuals who access My CIH, unless this is stated otherwise. CIH is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) with registration number (Z8363658). In this privacy notice, references to ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’ mean CIH. You can contact CIH in a number of ways as follows:

Email: governance@cih.org

Data Protection Officer,
CIH,
Suites 5 and 6, First Floor,
Rowan House,
Westwood Way,
Coventry,
CV4 8HS
United Kingdom

Telephone: +44 (0) 247 685 1700

What is Personal Data?

Personal Data is any information which directly or indirectly identifies an individual, for example, your name, email address, membership number.

Special categories of Personal Data are a set of Personal Data that we are required to look after even more carefully. Special categories of Personal Data include details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data.

What personal data do we collect?

Where we collect information, we are doing so in order to offer you better services, both on the website and in the rest of our operations.

Identity data

Name

Contact Data

Email address

Activity Data

Information of your ‘read, edit and download’ activity of documents shared with you.

Membership Data

Your membership number

Web Chat Data

Any personal data provided by yourself to us via webchat

Website Data

Information collected during your use of our website.

Survey/Questionnaire Responses

Information provided by you in response to CIH and Questionnaires


We do not collect any financial information on this website. If you make a debit or credit card payment online for example, to pay subscriptions or fees, or to purchase any of our services or products, you will be taken to a secure payment service provider who will take your payment on our behalf and return you to this website when your order has been completed.

We collect your personal data for the following purposes:

PURPOSE AND/OR ACTIVITY

TYPE OF DATA

LEGAL BASIS FOR PROCESSING 

Conducting Research

Identity Data
Contact Data
Survey/Questionnaire
Responses

Consent: Where you have consented to take part in our research activities.
Legitimate Interests: in our legitimate interests to understand more about our users and how better to serve our users.

Building a profile of how you use our website

Identity Data
Website Data

Legitimate Interest - to improve our website and interactions.

Serving you with targeted and retargeted advertisements

Cookie Data

Consent: Where you have consented to the use of cookies to provide you with targeted advertisements

Sending you Emails

Identity Data
Contact Data 

Consent - where you have consented to receiving the communications.
Legitimate Interest: where CIH has a legitimate business interest to send you service/research emails

Collecting Management Information on Our Email Campaigns

Contact Data

Legitimate Interest - to improve content and services

Communicating with you via and responding to your queries

Identity Data
Contact Data
Member Data
Web Chat Data

Legitimate Interest – to provide easily accessible means of communication and support.

Audit related activities to ensure CIH understands it business practices

A Sample of all Personal Data

Legitimate Interests: where we have a legitimate interest in auditing our internal processes and procedures to ensure that we are complying with applicable laws and internal and managing risk appropriately.

Anonymisation of personal data for the onward activities of Management Information and Business Intelligence

All Personal Data

Legitimate Interest of the CIH for business improvement and intelligence purposes.

Monitoring of One Drive Downloads and activity for IT Security purposes

Identity Data
Contact Data
Activity Data

Legitimate Interest: in CIHs legitimate interests to ensure the safe sharing and transfer of data.


You can delete or change your email address at any time or unsubscribe to particular types of email. You can do this by logging into your My CIH profile, or by clicking on the links provided in any of our emails.

If you have a web chat conversation, we will record a copy of that conversation will be stored with the membership number/student number/other identification ID you used to log in to this website.

Who will have access to the information?

Any information you give will be available to CIH, including our devolved nations and regional groups. 

We may need to share your information with our service providers and agents for the purposes set out in this privacy policy, but we will ensure that it is protected. These service providers and agents include;

  • Email campaign service providers
  • Insights and analytics service providers
  • Webchat service providers
  • We also occasionally work with external organisations to carry out market research about CIH on our behalf. We may share your email address with these organisations so that they can contact you directly and carry out this research independently from CIH. We only use organisations that adhere to the Market Research Society code of practice.

Information you give in response to surveys and questionnaires on the website will be used in two ways:

  • by CIH itself to help determine policy and to help improve our services to members; or
  • by third parties that CIH may give the information to for market research; in this case, the information will only be made available as anonymous statistical reports.

Your Personal Data may be transferred to other third-party organisations in certain scenarios:

  1. If we are discussing a merger or acquisition, Personal Data may be transferred to respective third parties under suitable terms as to confidentiality;
  2. If we are reorganised or sold, Personal Data may be transferred to a buyer who can continue to provide services to you;
  3. If we are required to by law, or under any regulatory code or practice we follow, or if we are asked by any public or regulatory authority, for example the Police, we may need to share your Personal Data; or
  4. If we are investigating or defending any legal claims your Personal Data may be transferred as required in connection with defending such investigations and/or claims.
Transferring Data Overseas

In some cases, we or our suppliers may need to process Personal Data outside the European Economic Area (EEA) and/or United Kingdom (UK). Where this is the case, we will only share the minimal amount of Personal Data necessary for the purpose of processing and, where possible, we will share the Personal Data in an anonymised form.

Whenever we transfer your Personal Data out of the UK, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented:

(a) we will only transfer your Personal Data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for Personal Data by the UK;

(b) where we use certain processors, we may use specific contracts approved by the UK which give Personal Data the same protection it has within the UK. When we rely on this measure, we will ensure that the third-party can comply with the provision of such contracts and we have confirmed that the country to which the Personal Data is transferred has adequate data protection laws in place to protect Personal Data.

Please contact us at governance@cih.org if you would like further information about the specific mechanism used by us when transferring your Personal Data

Use of Cookies

Like many other websites, the Site uses cookies. 'Cookies' are small bits of information sent by an organisation to your computer and stored on your hard drive to allow that website to recognise you when you visit. They collect statistical data about your browsing actions and patterns and do not identify you as an individual. For example, we use cookies to store your country's preference. This helps us to improve our website and deliver a better, more personalised service. It is possible to switch off cookies by setting your browser preferences. For more information on how to switch off cookies on your computer, visit our full cookies policy. Turning cookies off may result in losing functionality when using our website. 

Other websites

Our website and emails may contain links to other websites. We are not responsible for the content or practices of these other sites, and we recommend that you check their own privacy policies. 

How we protect your Personal Data

We have appropriate security measures in place to prevent Personal Data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We limit access to your Personal Data to those who have a genuine business need to know it. Those processing your Personal Data will do so only in an authorised manner and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We also have procedures in place to deal with any suspected data security breach. We will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected data security breach where we are legally required to do so.

Your rights

Under data protection law, you have rights including:

  1. Your right of access – You have the right to ask us for copies of your Personal Data.
  2. Your right to rectification – You have the right to ask us to rectify Personal Data you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete Personal Data you think is incomplete.
  3. Your right to erasure – You have the right to ask us to erase your Personal Data in certain circumstances.
  4. Your right to restriction of processing – You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your Personal Data in certain circumstances.
  5. Your right to object to processing – You have the right to object to the processing of your Personal Data in certain circumstances.
  6. Your right to data portability – You have the right to ask that we transfer the Personal Data you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances.
  7. Rights related to automated decision making, including profiling - You have the right not to be subjected to a decision based solely on automated processing (including profiling) which may significantly affect you. We do not make any employment decisions, solely using automated decision-making technologies.

In most cases we will deal with your request as soon as possible and at the latest within one calendar month of the request. If we need to extend the time period for responding to your request, we will let you know within the one-month period. We do not charge a fee for any such requests unless there are exceptional circumstances.

If you wish to exercise any of your rights, please contact our Data Protection Officer via email using governance@cih.org.

Complaints

If you have any concerns about the Personal Data we use about you, you have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues, by contacting them at www.ico.org.uk. We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO, so please feel free to contact us in the first instance via email using governance@cih.org.

Accessibility
We aim to make sure that everything we do is accessible to everyone. Web accessibility ensures people of all abilities and disabilities can use a website.
EDI privacy policy
Please find out how we store any EDI data we collect from you or that you provide, which we will process.
Terms and conditions
Please read these terms and conditions carefully as they govern your use of the CIH website at www.cih.org, including any contracts for supplying products or services you seek to enter with us through the site.