Imperial College London respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy notice will:

• inform you as to how we look after your personal data when you visit our websites;
• tell you about your privacy rights;
• tell you how the law protects you.

This is a general web privacy policy which applies to the many Imperial websites we manage. Some sites managed by certain parts of the College may carry their own privacy notices or provide additional information relating to their activities, which will supersede or supplement this privacy notice.

What do we collect?

We may collect data about you, how you use our websites, and how our websites perform when you use them. This may include personal data.

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).

We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together as follows:

• Identity data - includes first name, maiden name, last name, username or similar identifier, marital status, title, date of birth, gender and your Internet Protocol (IP) address.
• Contact data -includes billing address, postal address, email address and telephone numbers.
• Transaction data -includes details about payments to and from you and other details of products and services you have purchased from us.
• Technical data - includes your Internet Protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access this website.
• Profile data - includes your username and password, purchases or orders made by you, your interests, preferences, feedback and survey responses].
• Usage data - information on how you use the site, using cookies and page tagging techniques
• Email data - your email address and subscription preferences when you sign up to any email alerts, newsletters and other Imperial mailing lists.
• Email usage - how you use our emails. For example, whether you open them and which links you click on

This data can be viewed by authorised people at Imperial, and trusted partners to:

• improve the site by monitoring how you use it e.g. pages you visit on the site and browser versions used
• gather feedback to improve our services
• help us respond to your feedback, if you’ve asked us to
• send email alerts or newsletters to users who request them
• allow you to access Imperial services and make transactions

We make every effort to collect data appropriately and restrict monitoring only to parts of our websites.

How we use your personal data

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

• Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you.
• 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.
• Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.
• To understand the behaviour of visitors to the site. This would include:
  • The number of visitors to different areas
  • The types of information being searched for via the sites search engine
  • To identify any anomalies in site usage
  • To evaluate the popularity of news articles

Find out more about how we process your personal data. 

Where we store your data

We store your data on secure servers in the European Economic Area (EEA). 

Although we make every effort to keep your data in the EEA, we occasionally work with third parties in the United States. In these cases, we ensure they are certified on the EU-US Privacy Shield programme. 

Use of third parties where information will be processed outside of the EEA will be identified prior to data being collected and a separate Privacy notice will be provided.

How we keep your data secure

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

You can read more about our data breach process on our data protection pages. 

How long will you use my personal data for?

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

Read more about data rentention. 

Cookies

Please refer to our Use of cookies page to find out about the different types of cookies we set and the retention periods.  

Disclosing your information

We may pass on your personal information if we have a legal obligation to do so, or if we have to enforce or apply our terms of use and other agreements. We may also share your information with other organisations who carry out marketing, market research for Imperial College London.

We do not pass on your details to other websites for their own marketing or commercial purposes.

Your rights

You can find out what information we hold about you by submitting a subject access request and ask us not to use the information we collect.

You also have the right to have data erased if it is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was originally collected/processed, or if there are no overriding legitimate grounds for the processing. This is sometimes known as ‘the right to be forgotten’.

You can find out more about your rights by reading our data protection policy. 

Opting out

Cookies

You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when websites set or access cookies. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of our websites may become inaccessible or not function properly.

More information about the cookies we use.

How to manage cookies in your browser

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Apple Safari
• Microsoft Internet Explorer/Edge

Direct marketing

You can ask us or third parties to stop sending you marketing messages at any time. If you’ve signed up for email alerts, you can unsubscribe or change your settings at any time by selecting the ‘unsubscribe’ link that appears in every email.

Links to other websites

The Imperial College London websites contain links to other websites.

This privacy policy only applies to imperial.ac.uk (including any sub-domain) and doesn’t cover other websites that we link to. These services, have their own terms and conditions and privacy policies. If you do go to another website from this one, read the privacy policy on that website to find out what it does with your information.

Following a link to Imperial College London from another website

If you come to Imperial College London websites from another website, we may receive information from the other website. You should read the privacy policy of the website you came from to find out more about this.