We are committed to protecting your privacy.

Information collected by WDCAB

We collect and use your personal information to help solve your problems, improve our services and tackle wider issues in society that affect citizens in Scotland.

We only ask for the information we need, let you decide what you're comfortable telling us, and explain why we need it. We also treat it as confidential.

• When we record and use your personal information we:
• only access it when we have a good reason
• only share what is necessary and relevant
• don't sell it to anyone

We handle and store your personal information in line with the law. If we need to record any sensitive information, we will get your consent to do so. You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us.

Who's responsible for keeping your personal information safe?

Citizens Advice Scotland and West Dunbartonshire Citizens Advice Bureau are both responsible for keeping your personal information safe and making sure we comply with data protection law. This means we are 'joint data controllers' for your personal information.

Each local Citizens Advice Bureau is an independent charity and along with Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS), is a member of the Scottish Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux (SACAB). This means we use your information for monitoring purposes, our research and campaigning work and to keep improving our service for citizens in Scotland.

Working on your behalf

When you give us authority to act on your behalf we’ll need to share information with that third party. For example, very often we will need to contact West Dunbartonshire Council, or the Department of Work and Pensions, banks or building societies on behalf of clients.

At times we might need to use or share your information without your permission. If we do, we'll always make sure there's a legal basis for it. This could include situations where we have to use or share your information:

• to comply with the law, called 'legal obligation' - for example, if a court orders us to share information
• to protect someone's life, called 'vital interests' - for example, sharing information with a paramedic if a client was unwell at the bureau or one of our outreaches
• to carry out our aims and goals as an organisation, called 'legitimate interests' - for example, to create anonymous case studies and statistics for our national research
• for us to carry out a task in the public interest or for our official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law, called 'public task' - for example the Consumer Service
• to carry out a contract we have with you, called 'contract' - for example, if you're an employee we might need to store your bank details so we can pay you
• to defend our legal rights - for example, to resolve a complaint that we gave the wrong advice

What are my rights?

You have rights under data protection law that relate to the way we process your personal data. More information on these can be found on the Information Commissioner’s website. If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact us.

Your rights include:

• the right to access the personal information that we hold about you
• the right to ask us to correct any inaccurate personal information we hold about you
• the right to ask us to erase any information we hold about you, although this will only apply in certain situations due to us processing your data on the basis of ‘legitimate interests’
• the right to restrict our processing of the personal information we hold about you. This will only apply in situations such as:
• you are disputing the accuracy of the information we hold
• where we no longer need to use the information but it is needed for legal claims
• the right to receive personal information, which you have provided to us, in a structured commonly used and readable format

What we do with your information

First and foremost, your information will be used to provide you with advice. This also includes us sharing
anonymised statistical data that we can use for research purposes to show the value and impact of our service to funders and others who are interested in our work, such as external auditors who want to make sure we are giving you high quality advice.

We may also use it to refer you to any specialist services outwith SACAB. A record of your case will be kept on our secure electronic case management system.
Our services are also subject to external audit by the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB). They check that we are providing you with the highest quality of service and are allowed to access your information (if randomly selected) under the legal basis of ‘public task’.

Details of how long we store your information for are set out in our Data Retention Policy 

How we handle your personal information depends on how you interact with us.

What happens if you visit our website?

When you use this website, we take measures to ensure your information is private and secure.

When browsing our website, we collect 'cookies' to help us understand more about how our site is used by
visitors, and to develop and enhance our services to you - A 'cookie' is a bit of information kept on your computer. It tells us things like what device you're using and what pages you click on.

We use cookies to:

• track aspects of user visits, including the length of a user's visit, their browser, geographic location and the use of the search facility on this website
• remember users selected contrast and/or text resizing style preferences for this website
• When we would use your information without your permission

Security

Information you submit via this website is secure and is never shared to a third party unless as authorised by law. In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have created physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard the information we collect online.

Browser cookies

Most websites you visit will use cookies in order to improve your user experience by enabling that website to ‘remember’ you, either for the duration of your visit (using a ‘session cookie’) or for repeat visits (using a ‘persistent cookie’). New legislations means your website must make users aware if you use cookies and prompt them not to use cookies when viewing your site.

Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences, and generally improving your experience of a website. Cookies make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. If a website doesn’t use cookies, it will think you are a new visitor every time you move to a new page on the site. This can have an impact on sites that have log in areas where the user would need to create a new log in every time they moved from page to page.

Some websites will also use cookies to enable them to target their advertising or marketing messages based for example, on your location and/or browsing habits. Cookies may be set by the website you are visiting (‘first party cookies’) or they may be set by other websites who run content on the page you are viewing (‘third party cookies’). Websites which use Google Analytics to track visitor numbers are using cookies to monitor this information.

What is in a cookie?

A cookie is a simple text file that is stored on your computer or mobile device by a website’s server and only that server will be able to retrieve or read the contents of that cookie. Each cookie is unique to your web browser. It will contain some anonymous information such as a unique identifier and the site name and some digits and numbers. It allows a website to remember things like your preferences or what’s in your shopping basket.

What to do if you don’t want cookies to be set?

Some people find the idea of a website storing information on their computer or mobile device a bit intrusive, particularly when this information is stored and used by a third party without them knowing. Although this is generally quite harmless you may not, for example, want to see advertising that has been targeted to your interests. If you prefer, it is possible to block some or all cookies, or even to delete cookies that have already been set; but you need to be aware that you might lose some functions of that website.

How can I control cookies?

Web browser cookies - if you don’t want to receive cookies, you can modify your browser so that it notifies you when cookies are sent to it or you can refuse cookies altogether. You can also delete cookies that have already been set. If you wish to restrict or block web browser cookies which are set on your device then you can do this through your browser settings; the Help function within your browser should tell you how. Alternatively, you may wish to visit www.aboutcookies.org which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of desktop browsers.

Contacting us through LiveChat or our Social Media channels

In addition to our privacy policy, if you are contacting us on through our webchat service or through our social media channels, please familiarise yourself with their privacy and data retention policies before providing any personal or sensitive information, or if you have concerns about how your information will be used: LiveChat (www.livechat.com/legal/privacy-policy)  Facebook/Instagram (www.facebook.com/privacy/policy) Twitter (twitter.com/en/privacy)

Links to other sites

This website contains links to external websites. Privacy policies on these sites may vary and, as such, we are not responsible for the content or privacy policies of these sites.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may revise this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in law or the platforms we delivers our services through. As a result, you should visit this page periodically to keep up to date with changes.