Privacy Notice for children and young people
What is a privacy notice?
A Privacy Notice explains what personal information (or “personal data”) the University of Birmingham collects about you, how we use it and what you can do about it. Personal data means any information that can be used to identify you, such as your name or address.
If you need any help in understanding anything you can ask a grown-up who you trust (a parent, guardian or teacher) to go through it with you. Trusted adults can view our more detailed Privacy Notice here. If you still have questions, you can ask the researchers whose contact information is provided at the bottom of this page.
Who we are
Dr Sophie King-Hill and Dr Willem Stander are researchers from the University of Birmingham. We have done a lot of work with children and young people especially around their health and wellbeing needs. We also train health and social care professionals, write and publish our research, and talk about what it is like for young people so that more people out there can help provide the kinds of support, information and services you need or want.
Where do we get the information from and what do with it?
Basically, we get your personal information from you when you fill out our survey. This could be quite sensitive and personal information about what has happened and how you are doing, but it is your choice to decide what information to share with us.
We collect the following types of sensitive and personal information:
- Personal information: your age.
- Diversity information: things like your ethnicity, your religion, and sexual orientation and gender identity (whether you are heterosexual/straight or part of the LGBTQ+ community).
- Sex life information: information about your sexuality, dating and sex life.
- Health information: things like pregnancy, drug or alcohol use, and sexually transmitted infections.
We do NOT collect personal information such as your name, IP address or contact details as part of this study. An IP address (short for Internet Protocol address) is used to identify a device on a computer network such as the Internet and can be compared to a postal address. Because of this, all information we collect about you is anonymised so you cannot be identified.
We use the data to help adults provide the best care and support we can to young people. This information will be used to give advice and recommendations to health and social care services, educators, and caregivers so we can improve the support available to you.
The University has a legitimate interest in collecting and processing this data to help inform tools used by professionals for supporting children and young people. You can read more about the legal basis we use for processing your information in our general Privacy Notice.
How do keep your data safe and who do we share it with?
It is important that you know we are really careful with this information. We have been trained to keep your information safe and will store your personal data on the University’s servers which has several layers of protection.
We take our responsibility to safeguard the welfare of young people very seriously. We don’t share your personal data with others unless we are legally obliged to do so. We use some organisations (third parties or “data processors”) who provide services for us, such as the platform the survey is hosted on. We have contracts in place with these organisations. This means that they cannot do anything with your personal data unless we have instructed them to. They will not share your personal information with any organisation apart from us. They will hold it securely and retain it for the period we tell them to.
How long do we keep your data for?
The University has thought a lot about how long we should hold on to personal data. We believe it is only as long as you would consider reasonable, or where we have to because of the law. We keep your personal information for 10 years after the study has been completed. We keep your data very safe on the University’s systems, just like you would expect us to. After 10 years, your data will be deleted.
Your rights
You have all the same ‘rights’ with regard to your personal information as adults do. There are 12 rights. If you want to know more, have a look at our general Privacy Notice.
This privacy notice was last updated by the research team in September 2023. It will be reviewed research team regularly.
Get in touch
If you want to know more about the personal information we have about you or if you have any questions, then do drop us a line:
Dr Sophie King-Hill is contactable at s.kinghill@bham.ac.uk
Dr Willem Stander is contactable at w.stander@bham.ac.uk
You can also contact the University’s data protection officer or ethics manager. We think it would be best if you discussed this with your parent or carer first, and that you copied them into any emails you send.
Our data protection officer is contactable at dataprotection@contacts.bham.ac.uk
Our ethics manager, Mrs Susan Cottam, is contactable at s.l.cottam@bham.ac.uk