Your data
Privacy Notice
How we collect, use and protect your personal data.
Privacy notice
Version: 2.0 · Last updated: 2 October 2026 · Replaces: version 1.0 of 3 June 2026
This notice explains how the Socialist Federation (previously Members’ Charter) collects and uses your personal data when you:
- sign up to hear from us;
- contact us;
- come to our events and meetings, online or in person;
- volunteer with us or join a working group;
- take part in our online forum and the other shared tools we give volunteers.
The Socialist Federation does not yet have a formal membership. Throughout this notice, “supporters” means people on our mailing list, and “volunteers” and “forum participants” mean people who take an active part in our work. We will revise this notice before any formal membership begins.
The short version
- Being involved with a socialist organisation reveals your political opinions, so we treat everything we hold about you as sensitive.
- We host our forum, sign-in, supporter records and shared workspace ourselves, on servers we rent. We do not sell your data and never will.
- We only send you campaign messages on the channels you asked for, and you can stop them at any time.
- What you post on the forum is seen by other participants. Your contact details are seen only by the people who need them to organise with you.
- You can ask for a copy of your data, or for it to be corrected or deleted. Contact details are in section 1.
1. Who we are
The data controller is the Socialist Federation, an unincorporated association, previously known as Members’ Charter.
Contact for anything in this notice: privacy@in.socialistfederation.org.
The person responsible for data protection on our behalf is Mark Gage.
2. Who this notice covers
| If you are… | This means… |
|---|---|
| A supporter | You have signed up to our mailing list or registered interest. Most of sections 3–5, and section 7, apply to you; section 6 does not. |
| A volunteer | You have taken on a task, joined a working group or been through volunteer onboarding. All sections apply. |
| A forum participant | You have an account on our forum. All sections apply. |
| Someone who contacts us or comes to an event | Sections 3.1, 3.5 and 4 apply, and the relevant retention periods in section 10. |
3. The data we collect
Depending on how you are involved, we may hold:
3.1 Contact details: your name, email address and phone number.
3.2 Where you are (optional): your postcode, or its first half. We use it to place you in one of our regions, so that the regional coordinator can contact you about local organising, and to help organisers plan events, for example by showing on an internal map roughly where supporters are. We never publish it. We work out your region on our own servers, using the Office for National Statistics postcode directory. If that directory cannot place your postcode (for example, a Northern Irish one), we look it up on OpenStreetMap, which receives the postcode and nothing else.
3.3 About you (optional): age bracket and employment status, if you choose to give them. We use these only to understand our support as a whole.
3.4 Trade union or political group membership (optional): we process this only with your explicit consent. You can withdraw that consent at any time, and we will then stop using it and delete it.
3.5 Your contact history and preferences: the channels you have chosen (email, text, WhatsApp, phone), opt-outs, messages you send us, event and meeting attendance, and your answers to our forms.
3.6 Volunteering: the working groups you join, skills you tell us about, onboarding notes and tasks, roles you hold, and meetings you attend.
3.7 Your forum account and activity: your name, display name, username and email address; what you post (proposals, comments, amendments, endorsements); what you follow; and the notifications we send you. The same applies to files, calendar entries and task cards you add in our shared workspace.
3.8 Votes: see section 6.
3.9 Conduct and moderation: if content is reported or moderated, or a complaint is made by or about you, we keep a record of what happened and the outcome.
3.10 Technical data: our servers log your IP address, browser details and the pages you request. Our sign-in and forum use cookies to keep you logged in (section 11).
Some surveys ask more sensitive questions. Those have their own notice, which explains how that data is kept apart from everything else and deleted.
We do not take payments or donations yet. We will update this notice before we do.
4. How we use your data
We use your data to:
- send you the communications you asked for, on the channels you chose;
- invite you to events and meetings, and run them;
- put you in touch with local organising through your regional coordinator;
- onboard and support volunteers, and run working groups;
- run the forum, where supporters and volunteers discuss, propose and decide things together;
- run internal nominations, elections and votes, and check who is entitled to take part;
- deal with complaints and keep our spaces safe and respectful;
- handle enquiries and requests, and keep a list of people who have asked not to be contacted;
- understand how our communications and website are used, in aggregate;
- keep our systems secure and recover from faults.
We do not make decisions about you by purely automated means that have legal or similarly significant effects. Assigning you to a region from your postcode is automatic, but it only decides who contacts you about local organising.
5. Our lawful bases (UK GDPR)
Because your involvement with us reveals political opinions, the law requires a lawful basis for each activity (Article 6), and also one of the conditions for sensitive, “special category”, data (Article 9).
| What we are doing | Lawful basis (Art. 6) | Special category condition (Art. 9) |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign messages by email, text, WhatsApp or direct message | Consent — Art. 6(1)(a). You choose each channel separately. | Explicit consent — Art. 9(2)(a) |
| Phone calls | Consent — Art. 6(1)(a). We call only if you asked us to. | Explicit consent — Art. 9(2)(a) |
| Optional trade union / political group membership | Consent — Art. 6(1)(a) | Explicit consent — Art. 9(2)(a) |
| Volunteering, working groups, regional organising, the forum, internal votes, moderation | Legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f): running a democratic political organisation with the people who take part in it | Not-for-profit political body — Art. 9(2)(d) |
| Opt-out lists, administration, security, logs and backups | Legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f) | Art. 9(2)(d) where the data reveals political opinion |
Article 9(2)(d) lets a not-for-profit body with political aims process data about people who are in regular contact with it in connection with its purposes, on condition that it does not disclose that data outside the body without their consent. We keep to that condition. Where we rely on legitimate interests, you have the right to object (section 12).
6. Votes and elections
When you vote in a secret ballot on our forum, the system records that you have voted, so that nobody votes twice and turnout can be published, and it stores your ballot.
Your ballot is stored separately from your identity. After the result is certified and the period for challenges has passed, we remove the information that could link a ballot to a voter. We keep only the anonymous ballots needed to check the published count, and a record of who took part. Nobody in the Federation is permitted to find out how an individual voted.
If you vote on a shared or borrowed device, sign out when you have finished. That clears everything about your vote from the browser.
Endorsements, and votes held openly (such as show-of-hands or named polls), are visible to other participants.
7. Who can see your information
Within the Federation
- Other forum participants can see your display name, your username, what you post and endorse, and which open working groups you belong to. Posts in a private space are visible only to that space’s participants.
- Regional coordinators can see the name, contact details and contact preferences of supporters and volunteers in their region, so they can organise locally.
- Working group convenors can see who is in their group.
- The Admin Team and volunteers with administrative or technical roles can see what they need for their task, and must keep it confidential.
- Nominations and proposals: if you stand for a role, second a nomination or submit a proposal or amendment, your name, and any affiliations and statement you give, are circulated to supporters. The rules for each process say exactly what is circulated.
- Group chats: if you opt in to a supporters’ WhatsApp community, everyone in it can see your phone number. We ask for that consent separately and it is never assumed.
Outside the Federation
We share data outside the Federation only with the service providers in section 8, acting on our instructions, or where the law requires it. We do not sell your data and never will.
8. Service providers and where your data is held
We host most of our tools ourselves: the forum (Decidim), sign-in (Keycloak), our supporter records (CiviCRM), the shared workspace (Nextcloud) and our website statistics. They run on servers we rent from Hetzner Online in Nuremberg, Germany, and our encrypted backups are also held by Hetzner in the EU. Hetzner provides the machines and storage; it does not use your data.
We also use these providers:
| Provider | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| EmailOctopus | Our mailing list | Ireland (EU) |
| Brevo | Sending and receiving email for forms, supporter records, and forum notifications | EU (France, Germany and Belgium) |
| Zoom | Online meetings | USA |
| WhatsApp (Meta) | Chat groups, only if you opt in | USA and elsewhere |
| Our original contact mailbox, and some shared meeting documents | USA and elsewhere | |
| OpenStreetMap (Nominatim) | Locating postcodes our own lookup cannot place, such as Northern Irish ones; receives the postcode alone | EU / UK |
9. International transfers
Our own servers and backups are in the EU. UK law treats the EU and EEA as giving adequate protection, so no extra safeguards are needed there. Zoom (meetings) and Google (documents) hold data in the USA. Both are certified under the UK–US “data bridge”, which UK law treats as giving adequate protection. WhatsApp is different: if you join our supporters’ WhatsApp community, you do so with your own WhatsApp account, and WhatsApp handles your data under its own terms and privacy policy, not on our behalf.
10. How long we keep your data
| Data | How long |
|---|---|
| Mailing list | Until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it. After that we keep only your email address on a do-not-contact list, so that we don’t add you again by mistake. |
| Volunteer and forum records | While you are involved. When you step back, we close your sign-in account and remove you from private spaces straight away, and delete or anonymise the rest of your record after 12 months. |
| Forum posts | Your posts form part of the record of what was discussed and decided. If you delete your account, they stay but are shown as coming from a “Deleted supporter”, and your name, email address and profile are removed. |
| Ballots | As set out in section 6. |
| Conduct and moderation records | 2 years after the matter is closed, unless a longer period is needed for an ongoing matter. If you have been banned from any Federation platform, we keep the minimum needed to enforce the ban (the ban record and a coded form of your email address) for as long as the ban is in force, even after you ask us to delete your data. |
| Event registrations | As long as needed to run the event and follow up, then 6 months. |
| Surveys with sensitive questions | As set out in that survey’s own notice. |
| Server logs | Up to 30 days. |
| Backups | Deleted data can remain in backups for up to 8 weeks (forum) and 6 months (our other systems) until they are overwritten. We restore from backups only to recover from faults. Backups are encrypted. |
11. Cookies
We use only cookies that are needed to keep you signed in and keep our services secure, on the forum, sign-in pages and shared workspace. If you choose to stay signed in, some of these last up to 15 days. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies, and our website statistics (Umami, which we host ourselves) do not use cookies at all. Because these cookies are strictly necessary, the law does not require us to ask for your consent to them.
12. Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to:
- get a copy of your data;
- have inaccurate data corrected;
- have your data deleted;
- restrict how we use it;
- object to our using it where we rely on legitimate interests;
- withdraw consent at any time (this does not affect what we did before);
- receive data you gave us in a portable format.
You can download your forum data, or delete your account, from your forum account settings. Deleting your account removes your name, email address and profile from the forum. Your posts stay, shown as from a “Deleted supporter”, and private messages stay visible to the people you sent them to. Deleting your forum account does not yet remove your sign-in account, your file-sharing account, your mailing-list subscription or our volunteer records. To have those deleted, or for a copy of anything beyond your forum data, contact privacy@in.socialistfederation.org. It is free, and we will reply within one month.
13. Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have used your data, please contact us first at privacy@in.socialistfederation.org. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or 0303 123 1113.
14. Keeping your data secure
We host our core tools ourselves, limit access by role so that people see only what their task needs, use a single secure sign-in, keep encrypted backups, and restrict full technical access to a small number of named administrators. No system is risk-free, but we aim to keep risk low and to act quickly if something goes wrong. Unless a breach is unlikely to put your rights at risk, we will report it to the ICO without undue delay and, where feasible, within 72 hours of becoming aware of it. If the risk to you is high, we will also tell you without undue delay.
15. Age
Our forum and volunteering are for people aged 16 and over.
16. Changes to this notice
We will post any change on our website and on the forum, and email supporters about significant changes. We will revise this notice before formal membership begins.
Adopted by the Socialist Federation Volunteer Team on 2 October 2026.