Privacy and cookies

How do we collect your information?

We collect information from you in a number of ways, for example when you:

  • Make a donation
  • Sign up to our campaign
  • Sign up to stay updated

We won’t collect or record your personal information unless you choose to give it us.

What do we do with your personal information?

We use the information you give us in the following ways:

  • To make sure we have an accurate record of all the donations we receive
  • To email you with news and information about Sightsavers and our campaigns, but only if have agreed to this.
  • To find out more about you and the people who are visiting our website, donating or joining our campaign.

How we protect your personal details

We protect the privacy of everyone using our website and comply with the United Kingdom Data Protection Act, 1998. The Act includes strict rules on the storage and disclosure of the information you give us and is designed to prevent unauthorised access or loss of your information.

Read the Data Protection Act

We use secure server software (SSL) to encrypt any financial information you send when you donate or buy something. This software encrypts all your personal data so that these details cannot be accessed as they are transferred to us over the internet.

Cookies

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that your web browser creates every time you visit a website. A good way of thinking about them is as a small memory for the website. The most common use of cookies is to help provide you with a better experience by remembering your preferences when you visit a website and helping you get around more easily.

Read more about cookies at the All About Cookies website.

Information we collect

Like many websites we use cookies to improve your experience with us, we use them in the following ways:

  • We use styling cookies to remember your preferences for page format, text size and other display preferences
  • We use cookies to remember your needs for media player functions
  • We also use session cookies to remember information when you make a donation, purchase a Gift of Sight or sign up to our campaign.

We also use cookies to gather information about what our users are doing on our website. We do this to understand how people use our website and how to improve our service. The analytical data we gather to do this is always anonymous.

You can turn off cookies at any time, if you do you may notice that the site does not work as well and you may not be able to use every service.

Here are some of the tools and services that we use which rely on cookies:

Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics to understand how the site is being used so that we can improve it for other visitors. The data we collect is always anonymous.

Social buttons

Most of the pages on the site include social buttonsThese buttons allow you to share pages with your friends using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. In order to connect to those sites we use cookies.

You should also be aware that these websites are likely to be collecting information about you and your use of the internet. Check the policies of each site to find out how they collect information and how to opt out or delete the information.

External web services

We use a number of external web services on our site to display content within our web pages. For example, to display video we use YouTube. As with the social buttons, we cannot prevent these sites, or external domains, from collecting information on your use of the content we embed on our site.

Turning off cookies

All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. The help function of your web browser will tell you how.

By using the Sightsavers websites you are agreeing to the use of cookies as described.