Privacy Notice

Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is an independent policy institute based in London. Our mission is to help build a sustainably secure, prosperous and just world.

Chatham House is comprised of both a charity and a trading company. In this policy wherever you see the words ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’, it refers to both our charity and/or our trading company.

Our trading company is wholly owned and controlled by our charity. Any information we collect may be used by both our entities. Our trading company exists as a separate legal entity so that we can hold our conferences and provide some limited consulting services.

• Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), registered charity no. 208223. Our main trading address is 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE. Our VAT number is 653 2181 53.
• Chatham House Enterprises Limited, registered company no. 2979061. Our main trading address is 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE. Our VAT number is 653 2181 53.

Both our charity and our trading company are registered as data controllers with the Information Commissioners’ Office under the Data Protection Act 1998:

• Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs): registration number Z1808639.
• Chatham House Enterprises Limited: registration number Z1808673.

We take great care to comply with the requirements of the UK Data Protection Act 1998 (“The Act”), the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation 2003 and the General Data Protection Regulation 2018, all relating to the personal information you supply to us.

We may collect and process the following data about you:

Personal Data:

Information that you provide by filling in forms on our Site. This includes information provided at the time of registering to use our Site, subscribing to our service, posting material or requesting further services and might include the following:

• First name
• Last name
• Gender
• Date of birth
• Email (for login)
• Address
• Postcode
• Telephone number

We may also ask you for information when you report a problem with our Site.

If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence.

Information relating to your area of expertise as a result of communicating with us.

We may also ask you to complete surveys that we use for research purposes, although you do not have to respond to them.

Information that we obtain from you when taking part in an event or making a donation may, in addition to the above, include credit card, debit card or bank account details, but such information will be stored only by our payment provider, Worldpay and will not be held by us.

Sensitive Personal Data:

Information that we obtain from you when you apply for a role at Chatham House or have taken up employment with us. This may include, subject to your prior written consent, sensitive information such as:

• Racial or ethnic origin
• Religious beliefs
• Physical and mental health details
• Trade union membership
• Sexual orientation
• Commission of criminal offences and/or involvement in criminal proceedings

Information we get from your use of our Site and services:

In addition to cookies (for which see the section below entitled What Cookies We Use), we may also collect details about your usage of the Site. Those may include, but are not limited to:

• Traffic data
• Location data
• Weblogs and other communication data (whether this is required for our own purposes or otherwise)
• The resources that you access, such as text journals, newspaper articles or our library catalog

Information from third parties:

We may also receive information about you from third party event co-organizers or project funders. This can include information such as:

• Your name
• Postal address
• Email address
• Emergency contact details
• Dietary requirements
• Telephone number
• Whether you are a tax payer so that we can claim Gift Aid
• What browser you are using
• Your IP address
• The computer operating system you are using

From the public domain:

We may obtain some information from publicly available sources such as news articles or open postings on social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Where you have consented or a rule of law applies whereby your consent is not required, your Data will be automatically collected when you sign up to our Services.

We may use information held about you in the following ways:

• to ensure that content from our Site is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer
• to provide you with information, products or services that you request from us or which we feel may interest you, where you have consented to be contacted for such purposes
• to carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us, for example if you take up employment with us. If you unsuccessfully apply for a job at Chatham House, your personal information will be held for 12 months after the recruitment exercise has been completed and will then be destroyed or deleted
• to allow you to participate in interactive features of our service, when you choose to do so
• to invite you to events ran by us or our co-partners
• to administer your donations or support your fundraising, including processing Gift Aid (we do not store credit card details)
• to notify you about changes to our service
• to fulfil orders for goods and services
• to administer your membership
• to carry out in-house research and analysis, for example data mining, marketing statistics or equal opportunities monitoring
• to approach you for charitable funding where you have consented to be contacted for such purposes
• to monitor customer traffic patterns, Site usage and related Site information in order to optimize your use of our Site; data collected in this way will be aggregated and anonymized and passed to a reputable third-party, but these statistics will include no information personally identifying you
• For virtual conferences, your name, job title and company name will appear on the participant list through the official conference networking system enabling participants to connect with you during the conference

You can opt out of your data being used for any of the Purposes of Use by accessing your user dashboard and adjusting your preferences..

The Purposes(s) of Use in relation to:

• your Personal Data is lawful because it is necessary for us to hold and use your Personal Data so that we can perform our obligations under the contract we have entered into with you
• your Sensitive Personal Data is lawful because you have given us your explicit consent to process your data in this way when applying for a role at Chatham House or if you have taken up employment with us
• usage Data and Third Party Data is lawful because it is necessary for the purposes of legitimate interests pursued by us and/or our web developers in order to keep the Site up to date, organize events and functions and provide additional services to our users from time to time

Legitimate interest:

We may process your personal information for certain legitimate business purposes which are in our interests but which we believe also benefit people who we identify as potential supporters of the Institute.

Those carefully considered and specific purposes might for example include the following:

• inviting potential speakers and participants in a business / professional capacity to our meetings or events.
• engaging with particular individuals holding relevant policy-making positions, hand-picked experts, corporate professional individuals, journalists and those working in other relevant sectors in a business / professional capacity

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of our Site. We do not use cookies to track individual users or to identify them, but to gain useful knowledge about how the Site is used so that we can keep improving it for our users.

The law states that we can store cookies on your machine if they are essential to the operation of the Site but that for all others, we need your permission to do so.

You can set your browser not to accept cookies - however, in a few cases some of our Site features may not function as a result.

If you do not wish to receive cookies from us or any other website, you can turn cookies off on your web browser: please follow your browser provider’s instructions in order to do so. Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings.

To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit www.aboutcookies.org, www.allaboutcookies.org or www.civicuk.com/cookie-control/browser-settings.

If you would like to know more about what cookies we use on our site, please get in touch. 

We aim to ensure that there are appropriate physical, technical and managerial controls in place to protect your Data. Within our offices, all of our staff receive training on handling data security.

Where we use external companies to collect or process data on our behalf, your Data may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area ("EEA"). It may also be processed by staff operating outside the EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers. Such staff may be engaged in, among other things, the provision of support services.

The purpose for such transfers can be a combination of a number of things: the costs of data storage may be lower in countries based outside the EEA; our support teams may be based there (again, usually for reasons of cost; or one of our subsidiary companies which deal with your Data may be based outside of the EEA.

However, we will meet our obligations under the legislation by ensuring that the information has the same protection as if it were being held within the EEA because our hosting company either benefits from the Privacy Shield or has entered into model EU clauses with any sub-processor it uses and based outside the EEA or has established a set of binding corporate rules with its foreign subsidiaries who are based outside the EEA or the Information Commissioner has made a positive finding of adequacy in relation to the territory in which the sub-processor is based and to which your Data may be transferred .

We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your Data is treated securely as we do and in accordance with this privacy policy.

Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our Site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share a password with anyone.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our Site; any transmission is at your own risk.Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

We may share your personal information to any member of our group, which means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and its subsidiaries, as defined in section 736 of the UK Companies Act 1985.

We may also share your Personal Information with third parties in the following circumstances:

• In the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we may disclose your Personal Data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets. In that event, we will attempt to notify you prior to the event and offer you the chance to cease use of the Services and remove your information from our database where we are able to contact you and you require its deletion. In any event, we will endeavour to ensure that your rights and freedoms in respect of the processing of your personal data are adequately and appropriately protected
• If we or substantially all of our assets are acquired by a third party, in which case Personal Data held by us about you will be one of the transferred assets
• If we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our terms of use and other agreements; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), our customers, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of terrorism, fraud protection and credit risk reduction
• When acting as agents and data processors carrying out work on our behalf such as fulfilment companies, event partners or program funders. Where we enter into a relationship with an external party, any such arrangements will be subject to a formal agreement between Chatham House and that organization to protect the security of your data
• Hotels, airlines and travel agencies should Chatham House arrange your travel and accommodation, for example if you are an invited guest speaker for one of our events
• When working with partners to deliver an online or physical event, registration details may be shared with event partners for the purposes of monitoring attendance.

The Purposes of transfer of your Data (save in the case of Sensitive Data, where we will have obtained your specific consent to do so for one or more of the Purposes) are lawful because it is necessary for us to hold and use your Personal Data so that we can perform our obligations under the contract we have entered into with you for the Purpose(s).

In the event of any of the above scenarios occurring, we will endeavour to ensure that your rights and freedoms in respect of the processing of your personal data are adequately and appropriately protected.

We will not sell your data to any third party.

Withdrawing your consent

You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing and donation request purposes. We will usually inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for such purposes.

You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by accessing our Preference Centre.

Our Site may, from time to time, contain links to and from external websites. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

Accessing and managing your personal information

You have the right to request a copy of your Personal Data by making a ‘subject access request’ under The Act and to have any inaccuracies corrected.

You also have the following rights:

• to request us to erase your Personal Data
• to request us to restrict our processing of your Personal Data
• to object to the way in which we are dealing with and processing your Personal Information.

Should you wish to exercise these rights, we will require you to prove your identity with two pieces of approved identification. Please address requests to the Data Protection Officer, Chatham House, 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE and we will respond within thirty days of receipt of your written request and confirmed ID.

Alternatively, you can log a request directly using our online Chatham House Subject Access Request Form. 

Please provide as much information as possible about the nature of your contact with us to help us locate your records.

To exercise any of these rights, you should contact our Data Protection Officer at the above address.

If you are not happy about the way in which we have processed or dealt with your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Complaining to the ICO

You have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office if you think there is a problem with the way we handle your data.

We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary to operate the service in accordance with legal requirements and tax accounting rules.

Where your information is no longer required, we will ensure it is disposed of in a secure manner.

We keep our privacy notice under regular review. This privacy notice was last reviewed and updated on 26^th June 2020.

Any changes we may make to our privacy policy in the future will be posted on this page and, where appropriate, notified to you by email.

By continuing to use our site, you shall be deemed to have accepted such changes.

Contact us

If you have any questions, comments and requests regarding this privacy policy you can email us or write to:

Data Protection Officer,
The Royal Institute of International Affairs
Chatham House
10 St James’s Square
London SW1Y 4LE