Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Online Privacy Statement

The International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (“IAPB / We”) is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.

This policy (together with our terms and conditions and any other documents referred to on it) sets out the basis on which any personal data we collect from you, or that you provide to us, will be processed by us. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.

For the purpose of the Data Protection Act 1998 (the “Act”), the data controller is IAPB, WeWork 1 St Katharine’s Way, International House, 6th Floor, London, E1W 1UN, United Kingdom.

1.  Information we may collect from you

We may collect and process the following data about you:

Information that you provide by filling in forms on our site www.iapb.org (“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. We may also ask you for information when you report a problem with our site.

If you contact us (for instance to make a complaint or inquiry), we may keep a record of that correspondence.

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

Details of your visits to our site and the resources that you access.

We may also collect information about you in accordance with our annual photograph competition. If you are an entrant to the competition, we require your name, contact details, and other personal information that you submit to us via the entry form in order to communicate with you in relation to the competition. If you are an individual who features in a photograph that is submitted to the competition, we process your image data (see paragraph 2 below). In addition, we may process your special category health data, depending on the context in which the image is taken (for instance where a photograph of you shows that you are receiving medical treatment for vision issues).

Under UK data protection law, certain types of personal data are considered more sensitive (e.g. data on health, ethnicity, religion, and race). This data is called special category data. We only process special category data if we have a valid reason and only if the law allows us to do so (for example, information relating to your health status).

2. Information we may collect about you from another source

We may collect your personal information from a source other than you.

For instance, we run an annual photo competition on World Sight Day in order to put a spotlight on eye care issues around the world and on those who are vulnerable to sight conditions. As part of this competition, we encourage individuals to share photographs of individuals who are receiving treatment for sight issues. You may have been asked by an entrant to the competition to provide your consent for your image to be shared with us in accordance with one of our competitions. This privacy policy contains details about how and why we process your personal data. However, please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions, by emailing communications@iapb.org.

3. Lawful basis

We will only use personal data when the law allows us to (i.e. where we have a ‘lawful basis). Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests. For example, we have a legitimate interest in administering our photo competition.

Where it is necessary for the performance of a contract with you.

Where it is necessary to comply with a legal obligation on us.

We may have asked for your consent in order to use your image in accordance with our photo competition. Where we process your special category data, we may collect your explicit consent to do so.

4. IP addresses and cookies

We may collect information about your computer, including where available your IP address, operating system, and browser type, for system administration. This is statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns, and does not identify any individual. This data is collected using Google Analytics.

For the same reason, we may obtain information about your general internet usage by using a cookie file that is stored on the hard drive of your computer. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive. They help us to improve our site and to deliver a better and more personalized service. These browser settings can be changed to automatically block all cookies or to allow or block certain types of cookies depending on who issued them. However, blocking all cookies makes some websites unusable.

Cookies enable us:

To estimate our audience size and usage pattern.

To store information about your preferences, and so allow us to customize our site according to your individual interests.

To speed up your searches.

To recognize you when you return to our site.

You may refuse to accept cookies by activating the setting on your browser which allows you to refuse the setting of cookies. However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our site. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies when you log on to our site. To find out how to change your cookie preferences, click on the relevant link below for instru