About this Privacy Policy
This privacy policy explains how Darwin Dogs (we/us) use any personal information that we collect about you when you contact us by web form, email, letter, or phone.
Darwin Dogs aims to be clear and open about our data and privacy practices.
When we need to ask for any personally identifying information, it will only be used as described in this privacy statement, and in line with UK Data protection legislation, the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.
Who are we?
Darwin Dogs is a registered charity (charity number: 1191061)
Our address for correspondence is The Long Eaton Hub Ltd, 1 Union Street, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 1HH.
Our website is https://darwindogs.org.uk
What information do we hold about you?
Enquirers and applicants
If you have contacted us to enquire about our services or start an application, you may have supplied us with personal information such as your name, contact information, and any further details such as your personal living situation and health. This information is required for us to triage people onto our waiting list or to enable us to provide personalised information in response. Your personal data is stored securely within our Microsoft suite of products.
Our Clients
Once you are accepted as a client, we will ask you to provide personal information to verify your identity and health condition, and to enable us to provide you with our services. We will only hold the minimum necessary required personal information on our system, and you may exercise your right to view, change, or ask us to erase your data. See Your Rights, below.
Children’s Privacy
We work with clients from the age of 16, although we require parental consent. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under the age of 18 without parental consent. If you are a parent or guardian and you believe that your child provided us with personal data, please contact us so that we can remove that information from our servers.
Website forms
Darwin Dogs may collect personal information about you when you fill in our online contact form. This information may include your name, your email address, your location, and any other information that you supply in the Subject and Message form fields. This information is held in a secure database.
Meta (Facebook and Instagram)
We may occasionally post text, photos, or videos of you and your dog on Facebook or Instagram, but we will always ask for your consent before we do so. You may withdraw your consent at any time and ask us to change or erase any text, photos, or videos of you and your dog from our Meta accounts.
PayPal and PayPal Giving Fund
We use PayPal and PayPal Giving Fund to receive donations and have access to limited personal information related to your payments, such as your name and email address if you chose to supply that personal information. PayPal is an independent data controller and you may exercise your data rights with PayPal directly, as described in their Privacy Statement. https://www.paypal.com/uk/legalhub/paypal/privacy-full
EasyFundraising
We receive funds raised by supporters who shop using EasyFundraising web browser plug-ins, and have access to limited personal information related to you, such as your name and email address if you chose to supply that personal information. EasyFundraising is an independent data controller and you may exercise your data rights with EasyFundraising directly, as described in their Privacy Policy.
https://www.easyfundraising.org.uk/privacy/
Paper Forms
We keep paper forms from your application for our services and from any assessments carried out with your dog, to provide evidence to Assistance Dogs International, if required, of your suitability for our services, your training record, and qualification level. We keep those documents securely stored.
Photo ID
After you qualify, we provide you with photographic ID which includes your name, your dog’s name, the date on which you last passed a test, and a photograph of you both. We keep a digital copy of that ID and photograph for legitimate purposes, for example when an organisation or airline asks us for verification of the validity of your photographic ID.
Financial Data
Client financial data
We hold information about any payments that you made to us for lessons and any assistance dog equipment or replacement ID purchased through our service. This may include personal information such as full name and bank account details if you have submitted that information to us.
Health information
We have a legitimate interest in gathering information about your health to be able to deliver our services correctly and effectively. If you are a client, we will therefore hold some information about your health conditions relevant to using our services.
Security
Cookies
When you visit our web page, we ask you to select a privacy level that you are comfortable with when browsing our site.
For an explanation of what cookies we use, please read our Cookies Policy.
Your rights
Data protection regulations give you clear rights over how your data is used by us.
You can find out more about your rights by visiting the Information Commissioner’s Office website. https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/
Some of your rights are explained here:
Right to be informed
You have the right to be informed about the collection and use of your personal data, which is described within this Privacy Policy.
Right of access
You may request for us to provide you with a copy of any data that we hold about you, by emailing enquiries@darwindogs.org.uk. Please use “Data – Subject Access Request” in the email title.
Right to rectification
If you have changed your personal details, such as name or contact details, or if you become aware of a mistake in any information that we hold about you, you may contact us by emailing enquiries@darwindogs.org.uk to ask for those to be updated in our system. Please use “Data – Rectification” in the email title.
Right to erasure
You may ask for us to erase your data at any time, although there are some exceptions when we may not be able to do so. You can ask for us to erase your data by emailing enquiries@darwindogs.org.uk. Please use “Data – erasure” in the email title. If there is data which we can’t erase for legal or other reasons, we will keep you informed.
Right to restrict processing
You have the right to restrict our use of your personal data. This means that we can hold your data but only use it in accordance with your wishes.
To restrict usage of your data, please email enquiries@darwindogs.org.uk with “Data – Processing Restriction” in the email title.
Subject Access Request
You may request details of personal information which we hold about you.
If you would like a copy of the information we hold about you, please send an email to enquiries@darwindogs.org.uk. Please write “Data – Subject Access Request” in the email title, or write to:
Darwin Dogs,
The Long Eaton Hub Ltd,
1 Union Street,
Long Eaton,
Nottingham,
NG10 1HH.
If you believe that any information we are holding on you is incorrect or incomplete, please write to us or email as soon as possible at the above address.
Timings for data changes or erasure
When you exercise your right to make a data request for one of the above reasons, we will respond initially within one calendar month.
We will keep you informed of expected timescales for the completion of your request.
How long we retain your data
The following timescales are the default amounts of time that we will hold your data for.
You also have the right to ask for your data to be erased at any time, although we may have to retain some data for legal or other purposes. See Your Rights.
Emails, form responses, and text messages
For enquiries and non-successful applications, we retain your emails, form responses and text messages data for up to 3 years.
For clients, we retain your emails, form responses and text messages data while you are a client and for 3 years after you leave, unless there is a legal obligation for us to retain any data for longer, for example some financial data.
Paper forms
We may have client paper forms with your personal information, such as application forms or test results. We may retain these forms for a period of 3 years after you have left Darwin Dogs, or for up to 3 years if you never became a client.
Financial Data
We will keep financial data information for a period of 5 years unless otherwise required for legal or other reasons.
Sharing your information with other organisations
Darwin Dogs will not sell your information to any third party.
We may need to share your information with Assistance Dogs International or Assistance Dogs UK for .
We are sometimes asked to confirm to other organisations that you are an assistance dog team either training with us or having qualified through us. For example, checks from airlines when you fly, universities, hospitals. You should be notified by the organisation that they intend to carry out a check. You should notify us if a check will be carried out. If there’s any doubt about enquiry validity, we will contact you to confirm.
We may also collect some demographic and special category information for the ADUK Shared Outcomes Framework, for the purposes of finding out more about which categories of people we are reaching and helping, but this will be anonymised data, and we will ask for your consent when collecting such information. As this is anonymised data, we may not be able to erase it on request as it will not be linked to your personal data. We will explain this when collecting this information.
Concerns and complaints
We ask that if you have any concerns or complaints about how we’ve handled your data, you raise that concern or complaint with us first, to allow us to rectify any issues. Please write to us or email enquiries@darwindogs.org.uk with ‘Data – Concern’ or ‘Data – Complaint’ in the title.
You also have the right to report concerns or complaints about our handling of your data to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Details of how to do this can be found on its website.
Changes to our privacy policy
We keep our privacy policy under regular review, and we will place any updates on this web page.
This privacy policy was last updated on 20th April 2026.
