Privacy notice
Last updated 4 November 2026.
This notice explains what personal data The African Society of Imperial College (“the society”, “we”) collects through this website, why, and what you can do about it. We collect as little as we can and never sell or share it for marketing.
Who is responsible
The society's committee is responsible for your data. Contact us at africansociety@imperial.ac.uk about anything in this notice.
What we collect and why
When you join
- Name and Imperial email, to run your membership: confirm who you are, send you membership emails, and give members priority for events. Lawful basis: legitimate interests in running a student society you asked to join.
- Department, course and year of study (all optional), to plan events that suit members, such as careers sessions by faculty. Lawful basis: legitimate interests.
- The country you're connected to (optional). Because this can reveal ethnic origin, we only store it if you tick the box giving your explicit consent. It's only seen by the committee, used to plan events, and never published, not even as a count. You can remove it at any time.
- Newsletter choice (optional). We only send news and event emails if you opt in, and every email lets you unsubscribe. Lawful basis: consent.
- The date you agreed to this notice and its version, so we can show what you agreed to.
When you contact us
- Your name, email and message, so we can reply. Lawful basis: legitimate interests.
When committee members sign in
- Their email and a record of actions taken in the admin area (such as exporting or deleting member records), to keep members' data secure and accountable.
When anyone uses a form on the site
- A scrambled (hashed) version of your IP address, so we can stop people flooding the forms or other members' inboxes. We can't turn it back into your address. Lawful basis: legitimate interests.
We don't use advertising or tracking cookies. The only cookie is a strictly necessary one that keeps committee members signed in to the admin area.
Who can see it
Only committee members with membership duties can see member records. Committee members who only edit events or the team page can't. We use these service providers to run the site, under contracts that require them to protect your data:
- Vercel, which hosts the website.
- Neon, which hosts the database, in a UK or EU data centre.
- Resend, which sends our emails.
Some of these companies are based in the United States. Where data leaves the UK, it is protected by the UK's approved safeguards, such as the International Data Transfer Addendum.
How long we keep it
- Sign-ups that are never confirmed: deleted automatically after 30 days.
- Membership records: kept while you're a member. We review the list every September and delete records of people who have left Imperial.
- Contact messages: deleted automatically after 12 months.
- Admin activity records: deleted automatically after 2 years.
- Hashed IP addresses from the forms: deleted automatically after 1 day.
Your rights
Under UK GDPR you can:
- see the data we hold about you, and get a copy of it;
- correct it if it's wrong;
- have it deleted;
- withdraw consent (for the newsletter or your country) at any time;
- object to, or ask us to restrict, how we use it.
Members can do most of this themselves: on the manage membership page you can download your data, change your newsletter choice, remove your country or delete your membership. For anything else, email africansociety@imperial.ac.uk and we'll respond within one month.
If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.