Privacy Notice – Alumni and Supporters

How we use your personal information

This statement explains how Magdalene College (“we”, “our” and “the College”) handles and uses information we collect about alumni (“you” and “your”). In broad terms, we use your information to manage the ongoing relationship between the College and you as part of our lifelong community of scholars, including keeping in touch with you, keeping up to date on your achievements, and engaging with you on how you can continue to contribute to College life and otherwise support the College.

We will retain your information indefinitely or until you request us to do otherwise. When changes are made to this statement, we will publish the updated version to our website and notify you by other communications channels as we deem appropriate or necessary.

The controller for your personal information is the Magdalene College, Cambridge CB3 0AG. The person within the College otherwise responsible for data protection at the time of issue, and the person who is responsible for monitoring compliance with relevant legislation in relation to the protection of personal information, is the Assistant Bursar assistant.bursar@magd.cam.ac.uk. This is the same address to contact if you want to exercise any of your data protection rights, including requesting copies of personal data the College holds about you.

The Data Protection Officer for the College is Intercollegiate Services Ltd (ISL), 64 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR; email: college.dpo@isl.colleges.cam.ac.uk. ISL should be contacted if you have any concerns about how the College is managing your personal information, or if you require advice on how to exercise your rights as outlined in this statement.

The legal basis for processing your personal information is that it is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests, where we have concluded that our interests do not impact inappropriately on your fundamental rights and freedoms, except where elsewhere in this statement we have indicated otherwise. You may ask us to explain our rationale at any time.

How your data is used by the College

We collect and process your personal information, as specified below, for a number of purposes, including:

A. maintaining a record of your academic progress and achievements of the College and the University of Cambridge and elsewhere;

B. retaining a record of your academic, career or other life achievements in order to promote and improve the reputation of the College and help you to network with other College members effectively;

C. engaging you in College and University events that we believe will be of interest to you, including alumni and open events, volunteering opportunities, and other ways you can contribute to the life of the College;

D. providing you with information about the development of the College, including major initiatives and programmes relating to either the academic endeavour or the provision of services and facilities to members and the wider public;

E. encouraging you to make a financial contribution to the College and/or the University, and processing any such contributions;

F. assessing the likelihood that you will, now or in the future, make a financial contribution (gift) to the College;

G. promoting third party services we believe will be of interest to you.

Further details are provided in the Annex. If you have concerns or queries about any of these purposes, or how we communicate with you, please contact us at the address given below.

Communications

If you are a new contact for our Alumni & Development Office, we will ask you at the outset how you would like to receive news and other communications from us. If you already receiving such communications, you are able to change your preferences (or ask us to stop sending you news and other communications completely) by emailing us at alumni@magd.cam.ac.uk, or by clicking the ‘Unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of each email we send out. You may request changes at any time.

How we share your personal data

We believe that most alumni understand in detail the complex and many interactions of the College with the University of Cambridge. Personal information of our members is shared with the University routinely throughout any course of study, and it is our strong preference to continue such collaborative working thereafter.

The University and its partners (including the College) have a data sharing agreement to govern the sharing of personal information of alumni and other supporters.  This is necessary because they are distinct legal entities. The agreement outlines that, depending on constraints set by you, and which you may change at any time, the University and College may share any of the above categories of personal information with the University, and can be viewed in full at Data sharing agreement (controller to controller). Any transmission of information to or from the University is managed through agreed processes which comply with UK data protection legislation.

For clarity, the College has a separate database from the University, but has access to the University’s database; additionally, we maintain other electronic and paper records.

The University has its own data protection statement and procedures – see: Data protection statement for alumni and supporters | Alumni

Additionally, we share information on a considered and confidential basis, where appropriate, with:

• Cambridge in America (the University’s affiliate alumni office in the US),
• third party agencies who provide us with information in the public domain about alumni and supporters, as outlined above,
• selected companies who provide College-branded or College-endorsed products and services, as outlined above,
• volunteer partners closely related to us (e.g. College trustees, development board members, alumni group representatives), and
• contractors providing services to you on our behalf or services to us (our “data processors”), as outlined above.

We also facilitate communication between individual alumni (of the College or the University), but in doing so we do not release personal contact details without prior permission.

Any transfers of your information overseas or to international organisations, as set out above, are protected either by an adequacy decision by the European Commission or by standard data protection clauses adopted by the European Commission (which are available from our Data Protection Officer) or, before 25 May 2018, by a self-assessment of adequacy. 

Your rights

You have the right: to ask us for access to, rectification or erasure of your information; to restrict processing (pending correction or deletion); to object to communications or direct marketing; and to ask for the transfer of your information electronically to a third party (data portability). Some of these rights are not automatic, and we reserve the right to discuss with you why we might not comply with a request from you to exercise them.

Where you opt out of all future communications or exercise your right to erasure, we will continue to maintain a core set of personal information (name, subject(s), matriculation and graduation details, unique University identification number and date of birth) to ensure we do not contact you inadvertently in future, while still maintaining our record of your academic achievements. We may also need to retain some financial records about you for statutory purposes (e.g. Gift Aid, anti-fraud and accounting matters).

You retain the right at all times to lodge a complaint about our management of your personal information with the Information Commissioner’s Office at Make a complaint about how an organisation has used your personal information | ICO.