Animal Friends of Turkey (AFOT) Privacy and Cookies Policy

1. Introduction

We want everyone who supports us, or who comes to us for support, to feel confident and comfortable with how any personal information you share with us will be looked after. This Privacy Policy sets out how we collect, use and store your personal information (this means any information that identifies or could identify you).

2. Who we are

AFOT is a UK-registered charity – number 1182513.  As a charity, we are committed to protecting your personal information and making every effort to ensure that your personal information is processed in a fair, open and transparent manner.

We are a “data controller” for the purposes of the Data Protection Act 2018 and the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016 (“Data Protection Law”).

This means that we are responsible for the processing of your personal information.

For further information about our privacy practices, please contact us by:

Following this link to our contact form.

Or in writing to: 31 Honey Pot Road, Brompton-on-Swale, Richmond, DL10 7HT

3. How we may collect information about you

Everything we do, we do to help alleviate the suffering of abused and abandoned dogs in Turkey and to help give them a transformed life in the UK.  All our communications and focus is in supporting this important work. In doing so, we want to make sure you receive the communications that are most relevant to you, be it through visiting our website or receiving emails, post or phone calls. We want to make sure you receive the best attention when you book on an event, become a member or make a donation.

We collect information from you in the following ways:

  • When you interact with us directly: This could be if you ask us about our activities, register your interest in adopting a dog, make a donation to us, ask a question about our work, purchase something via one of our auctions, apply to volunteer or foster for us, or otherwise provide us with your personal information. This includes when you phone us, visit our website, make an auction or merchandise purchase, or get in touch through the post, or in person.
  • When you interact with us through third parties: This could be if you provide a donation through a third party such as Just Giving or one of the other third parties that we work with.
  • When you visit our website: We gather general information which might include which pages you visit most often and which services, events or information is of most interest to you. We may also track which pages you visit when you click on links in emails from us. We also use “cookies” to help our site run effectively. There are more details below – see ‘Cookies’.

We use this information to personalise the way our website is presented when you visit to make improvements and to ensure we provide the best service and experience for you. We use anonymous information which does not identify individual visitors to our website.  The Cookies we use are the most basic ones required for the functionality of our site.

From other information that is available to the public: In order to tailor our communications with you to your background and interests we may collect information about you from publicly available sources or through third party subscription services or service providers (we have provided further details about this below – see ‘Profiling: Making our work unique to you’).

4. Information we may collect and why we use it

Personal Information

Personal information we collect includes details such as your name, date of birth, email address, postal address, and telephone number, as well as information you provide in any communications between us. You will have given us this information whilst making a donation, applying to adopt or foster one of our animals, offering to act as a volunteer, purchasing an item through us or any of the other ways to interact with us.

We will mainly use this information:

  • To process your donations or other payments, to claim Gift Aid on your donations and verify any financial transactions.
  • To provide the services or goods that you have requested.
  • To update you with important administrative messages about your donation, an event or services or goods you have requested.
  • To comply with the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Act 2016 and follow the recommendations of the official regulator of charities, the Charity Commission, which require us to identify and verify the identity of supporters who make major gifts so we can assess any risks associated with accepting their donations.
  • To keep a record of your relationship with us.
  • To process applications made to us via our website
  • Where you contract with us to foster or adopt an animal, to administer the arrangements under the contract.
  • Where you volunteer with us, to administer the volunteering arrangement.

If you do not provide this information, we will not be able to process your donation, confirm the adoption or foster arrangements, process your application or otherwise engage with you.

5. Sharing your information

The personal information we collect about you will mainly be used by those directly involved in running the charity and its rescue and rehoming work at AFOT.

We will never sell or share your personal information with organisations so that they can contact you for any marketing activities. Nor do we sell any information about your web browsing activity.

Legal disclosure

We may disclose your information if required to do so by law (for example, to comply with applicable laws, regulations and codes of practice or in response to a valid request from a competent authority); or, in order to enforce our conditions of contracts and other agreements.

6. Keeping your information safe

We take looking after your information very seriously. We’ve implemented appropriate physical, technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information we have under our control, both on and off-line, from improper access, use, alteration, destruction and loss.

Unfortunately the transmission of information using the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information sent to us this way, we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to our site.

Our websites may contain links to other sites. While we try to link only to sites that share our high standards and respect for privacy, we are not responsible for the content or the privacy practices employed by other sites.

7.  How long we keep your information for

We only keep it as long as is reasonable and necessary for the relevant activity, which may be to fulfil statutory obligations (for example, the collection of Gift Aid).

8. Your rights

You have various rights in respect of the personal information we hold about you – these are set out in more detail below. If you wish to exercise any of these rights or make a complaint, you can do so by contacting us at AFOT; 31 Honey Pot Road, Brompton on Swale, Richmond DL10 7HT by email at Https://rehome-a-rescue-dog.co.uk/home/contact-us/.

You can also make a complaint to the data protection supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, https://ico.org.uk/

  • Access to your personal information: You have the right to request access to a copy of the personal information that we hold about you, along with information on what personal information we use, why we use it, who we share it with, how long we keep it for and whether it has been used for any automated decision making. You can make a request for access free of charge. Please make all requests for access in writing, and provide us with evidence of your identity.
  • Right to object: You can object to our processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes. Please contact us as noted above, providing details of your objection.
  • Consent: If you have given us your consent to use personal information (for example, for marketing), you can withdraw your consent at any time.
  • Rectification: You can ask us to change or complete any inaccurate or incomplete personal information held about you.
  • Erasure: You can ask us to delete your personal information where it is no longer necessary for us to use it, or you have withdrawn consent, or where we have no lawful basis for keeping it.
  • Portability: You can ask us to provide you or a third party with some of the personal information that we hold about you in a structured, commonly used, electronic form, so it can be easily transferred.
  • Restriction: You can ask us to restrict the personal information we use about you where you have asked for it to be erased or where you have objected to our use of it.

Please note, some of these rights only apply in certain circumstances, where one of your rights does not apply, we will communicate the reason to you.

9. Cookies

‘Cookie‘ is a name for a small file, usually of letters and numbers, which is downloaded onto your device, like your computer, mobile phone or tablet when you visit a website.

They let websites recognise your device, so that the sites can work more effectively, and also gather information about how you use the site. A cookie, by itself, can’t be used to identify you.

How do we use cookies?

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you come to our website and also allows us to improve the user experience.

The cookies we use

We use the categorisation set out by the International Chamber of Commerce in their UK Cookie Guide.

We use three key categories of cookies:

  • Strictly necessary cookies are essential for you to move around our website and to use its features, like our shopping basket and your account.
  • Performance cookies collect anonymous information about how you use our site, like which pages are visited most.
  • Functionality cookies collect anonymous information that remember choices you make to improve your experience, like your text size or location. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog.

To reflect recent changes in guidelines we are reviewing how we use cookies and how we seek consent for their use when people visit our website.

No cookies, please

You can opt out of all our cookies (except the strictly necessary ones). Find out how to control and delete cookies in your browser.

But, if you choose to refuse all cookies, our website may not function for you as we would like it to.

If you have any questions about how we use cookies, please contact us.