Privacy Notice for social contacts of participants in the U-Belong Social Network Interviews
Ethical Clearance Reference Number: 200230106
You can download a copy of this social contacts privacy notice by clicking here.
Your Personal Data
The University of Glasgow, alongside Kings College London (KCL), will be what’s known as the ‘Joint Data Controllers’ of your personal data processed in relation to the social network portion of the U-Belong study. This privacy notice will explain how The University of Glasgow will process your personal data.
Why we need it
U-Belong aims to develop a better understanding of what helps students to feel socially connected at university. As part of the study, we will ask students about their friends and family, people they go to university with, and people that they are close with. These people are the “social contacts” of participants in the U-Belong Social Network study.
If you are a social contact of someone in this study, we will collect personal information about you, including your name, your relationship with the U-Belong participant, and your gender, for example.
We record your name so that the participant can talk about you and their other social contacts as part of the survey. We collect gender from social contacts so that we can measure how similar or different a study participant is from their social contacts. For example, to understand if students with mixed gender friendship groups experience better social support than students with single gender friendship groups.
We will only use name information to make sure that the information about social contacts is accurate. We replace these names with anonymous ID numbers when we analyse the data. We also remove the names of the original study participants to prevent anybody being able to identify personal information from the study data, apart from the research team who collect the data confidentially.
Legal basis for processing your data
We have a legal basis for processing all personal data. For the social network portion of the U-Belong study, the legal basis is public task. That is the legal basis for data processing is the public task of a University/Medical Research Council Unit to conduct research into student social relationships.
What we do with it and who we share it with
All the personal data submitted by our participants is processed by staff at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom. Your research data will be securely exported to our collaborators on the project at Kings College London, where it will be processed. Glasgow University will retain a copy of this data.
Pseudonymous data, that doesn’t contain any identifiable information about individuals who took part in the study, or their social contacts, may be made available in a secure repository, such as the UK Data archive, for future research and learning, and users will agree that they will not attempt to identify individuals from the data.
How long do we keep it for?
Your research data will be retained by the University of Glasgow for at least 10 years. It will be stored securely and kept confidential. The pseudonymised data will be kept in a secure archive as long as it is useful for research or learning.
What are your rights?*
You have the right to information about why we are processing data on social contacts, and this privacy notice is how we are giving you that information. We also have provided study participants with information about how we process their data.
We are conducting this project in line with article 89 of the General Data Protection Regulation, which means that we will not provide you with the right to see data about you that was collected as part of the research study. You also will not be able to delete or modify the data.
The reason we will not let social contacts see, modify or delete their data is to protect the confidentiality of the study participants. Everything that the study participants tell us is confidential. This includes any information they tell us about social contacts.
Study participants can choose to tell their social contacts about taking part in the study, so they might decide to share this privacy notice with you.
If you wish to discuss your data rights, please contact dp@gla.ac.uk.
Complaints
If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact the University Data Protection Officer who will investigate the matter.
Our Data Protection Officer can be contacted at dataprotectionofficer@glasgow.ac.uk
If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are not processing your personal data in accordance with the law, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) https://ico.org.uk