Cookies and privacy policy

Protecting your personal information

At TCM Alternatives to Wild Animal Preparations (TAWAP) we are committed to protecting your personal information and being transparent about what we will use it for. This policy sets out how and why TAWAP collects and uses your personal data, and how we keep it private and secure.

Personal data is information that identifies you or can be used to identify you. The policy relates to TAWAP’s use of personal information collected on our websites that link to this privacy policy, on social media or official TAWAP content on other websites. It also relates to our use of any personal information you provide to us by phone, SMS, email, in letters, in person and any personal information we may collect about you indirectly.

If you have any questions about this policy or how we use your personal data, please submit a request here: www.tawap.org/contact-us

How we use cookies

We use cookies to ensure you receive the best experience on our website. By continuing to use our site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. You can change your cookie browser settings at any time.

What are cookies?

A cookie is a small text file passed from your internet browser onto your computer's hard drive, allowing websites to remember who you are when you return. Cookies also track information such as how you arrived on sites, your time of arrival, the pages you viewed and how long you stayed.

Find out more about cookies

How do we use cookies on our website?

Cookies help TAWAP improve our website and make it more efficient for our users. Like many other website providers, we use cookies to make a link between you and the information you have provided to our website.

The information we collect through cookies is anonymous and not personally identifiable. It does not contain your name, address, telephone number, or email address.

We use cookies to:

Compile information on how our website is used, which helps improve our website and online services.
Help users easily navigate our website.
Check whether the website is operating effectively.
Personalise and improve the service we offer you by understanding your preferences and establishing which areas of the website are most relevant to you.

TAWAP sometimes use third-party advertising companies to serve adverts to visitors of our site. These companies may use cookie information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) to provide you with advertisements about goods and services that may be of interest to you.

Cookies we use

Domain: www.tawap.org

Strictly necessary:

These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions made by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy preferences or filling in forms. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies (details of how to do this are below), but our website may not work if you disable them.

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Performance Cookies:

Performance cookies help us to understand our visitor's behaviour and allow us to make improvements to better your experience on our site. They help us know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information collected is anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies, we will not know when you have visited our site.

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Advertising cookies:

These cookies are set by our advertising partners. They may be used to understand your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They work by uniquely identifying your browser and device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will not experience TAWAP’s marketing across different websites.

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How to manage cookies

You can update your preferences, including blocking, enabling or deleting cookies via your browsers settings, find out more about your browser below:

Other browsers have similar cookie management abilities in their preferences settings, please refer to your browser's privacy and security settings or help facility.

More detailed information on disabling cookies

Privacy policy

Who are "we"?

TAWAP is powered by World Animal Protection, a registered Charity in England and Wales (Registered Charity 1081849) and as a Company Limited by Guarantee in England and Wales (Registration No. 4029540). The Company has two subsidiary companies: TAWAP Trading Company Limited (Registration No. 2880146) and TAWAP Executor Service Limited (Registration No. 3106147). The registered office of all these entities is 5th Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB.

In this policy, whenever you see the words ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’, it refers to both our Charity, the company and the subsidiary companies.

Our International office is in London and we work with Group offices around the world. Our offices are linked through collaboration agreements that ensure we work in a unified and consistent way, supporting a strategy developed by staff worldwide.

We use “World Animal Protection Group" in this policy to refer collectively to all global entities (branches, subsidiaries and affiliates). Our branches, subsidiaries and affiliates must operate to Group standards but please make sure that you also check the privacy policy of the relevant national office so that you know how they will use your data.

What information do we collect from you and why?

When you donate, sign one of our petitions, ask to receive our email newsletter, email or write to us with an enquiry, or interact with us in any other way, TAWAP may collect personal information about you, such as your:

name
email address
postal address
home telephone number
mobile telephone number
bank account or payment card details

Where it is appropriate we may also ask you for:

your taxpayer status (so that we can claim Gift Aid on your donation)
your date of birth
your opinions on charitable giving and animal welfare issues (for example, to help improve and inform our marketing and campaigns, or understanding your motivation to support us)
information relating to your health or dietary requirements (for example, if you are taking part in a sporting fundraising event)

We may also collect details of your visits to our website*, including:

location data, web logs
resources that you access

*For more details, please see our policy on Cookies.

We may obtain information about you from other sources, such as from:

fundraising sites like Just Giving or Virgin Money Giving
payroll giving services for charities
data cleansing services
Telephone, Mailing, and Fundraising Preference Services
Royal Mail's National Change of Address Register
consumer classification services
other public sources (see Building profiles of supporters below)

How do we use your information?

We use your information:

to give you the information, products or services you asked for – such as responding to correspondence you have sent to us, or sending you participant information for events you have signed up to.
for internal administrative purposes (such as our accounting and records), and to let you know about changes to our services or policies
to receive donations, process payments and collect Gift Aid on your donation
to handle orders from our catalogue or shop, deliver products and communicate with you about orders
to maintain databases of our volunteers and supporters to keep a record of your relationship with us, including how you prefer to be contacted
to recruit and manage employees and volunteers
to provide you with information that we think may be of interest to you (see Direct marketing below)
to carry out research on the demographics, interests and behaviour of our supporters to help us understand how we can improve our services, products or information. Sometimes this information is used to build profiles (see Building profiles of supporters below)
to help us understand the ways you might prefer to support us or take part in our activities, we may create a profile of your interests. We’ll do this by comparing your details against publicly available information or social media (see Building profiles of supporters below)
to identify other similar people like you on social media who we believe would be interested in TAWAP, and we may then show them TAWAP content (see Facebook and other social media sites below).

Direct marketing

Direct marketing includes any communications we send you promoting the aims, ideas and work of TAWAP, including: news, campaign updates, fundraising appeals and other ways you can support our work.

We will only contact you by email, telephone and/or SMS if you have given us your consent to do so for direct marketing purposes.

If you have donated to us, pledged to leave a gift in your Will, or have supported one of our campaigns within the last three years, we may use your postal address (if you supplied it to us) to send you occasional information about our work that we believe may interest you, including our magazine, annual catalogue and vital fundraising appeals to help fight cruelty and suffering.

You can opt out of receiving direct marketing from us at any time. Simply follow the ‘unsubscribe’ links on our emails, submit a request here: www.tawap.org/contact-us

Building profiles of supporters

We use profiling techniques to ensure our communications are relevant and timely. We track the types of animal welfare topics that you respond to, and the frequency and value of your support. We may use additional information from third-party sources, including consumer classification tools that use postcodes to segment the population, to better tailor our communications to you.

In certain circumstances, we may research information about individuals to understand how likely it is that they will be interested in supporting our work and how we can match them with campaigns that align with their interests. In a small number of cases, this includes research to gain a better understanding of potential supporters who may be able and willing to give. This “prospect” research is carried out in house and is compiled using publicly available information, for example, news items that mention other charities an individual has supported, addresses, listed directorships, typical earnings or house prices in a given area. We carry out special assessments, called data protection impact assessments, to ensure prospect research doesn’t undermine the rights of individuals.

Facebook and other social media sites

Where you have given your consent for us to use your email address or phone number for marketing, we may use this information to match to your account on Facebook or other social media sites to show you TAWAP content while you use these services. We keep your data secure by encrypting it and no data we hold about you is retained by the third party.

In addition, we may also use your email address or phone number to link to Facebook or other social media sites to identify other users of these sites who we believe would be interested in TAWAP, and we may then show them TAWAP content. No data we hold about you is retained by the third-party when we do this.

If you would prefer for us not to use your personal data in this way, you can submit a request here www.tawap.org/contact-us or you can follow these instructions to alter your settings on Facebook.

Please note that this will not guarantee that you never see TAWAP content on social media, since the social media site may decide to show you content based on other criteria and without your data having been provided by TAWAP.

Who might we share your information with?

We will not sell or swap your information to or with any third-party.

Your information, including emails and other correspondence, may be passed internally within the Group to ensure you are connected with the most appropriate resources. This is usually to connect you with your local office. This may involve your personal data moving outside the European Economic Area (EEA). When this happens, we ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect your personal information and to keep it secure. If appropriate safeguards do not exist we will only transfer your personal data with your explicit consent, after informing you of the possible risks of such transfer.

We sometimes use trusted third-parties to process your information on our behalf because it is more economical to outsource some processing than to do it in-house. The kind of work we may ask them to do includes: processing and sending email newsletters, carrying out research or analysis, data cleansing and processing. These third-parties are bound by contract requiring them to keep your details safe and secure, and to use your information only to fulfil the service we have specifically asked them to provide. When they no longer need your data to fulfil this service, we ask them to dispose of your details securely, in line with our procedures.

Otherwise, we will only share your information when obliged to disclose it by law, or the disclosure is ‘necessary’ for purposes of national security, taxation and criminal investigation, or if we have your consent.

How long do you keep my information for and where is it stored?

The length of time that we store your information may vary depending upon the type of information it is, the reasons that we need to use it or other factors, like legal requirements. We regularly review the personal information that we store, including our paper records, so that we only store it for as long as we need to.

Some of our electronic storage systems are located outside the European Economic Area (EEA). We may transfer your personal information to other offices in the Group and to other trusted third-party organisations as explained in this policy. They may be situated or use computers and storage systems that are located outside the EEA. Where data is transferred or stored outside the EEA, we ensure that safeguards are in place to protect your information.

We have security measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of personal data. For example, our employees are only authorised to see and use the personal data they need to see to do their jobs and we use secure server software (SSL) to encrypt financial and personal information you input before it is sent to us. While we cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur while it is under our control, we use our best efforts to try to prevent this.

How can I control my personal information?

Your personal information belongs to you and we want you to feel in control of it. Here’s how you can exercise your rights.

You have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you. Please put your request in writing to the Data Protection Coordinator, TAWAP, 5th Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB, together with two forms of identification (current passport (the page with your personal details); driving licence; birth certificate; utility bill from last 3 months; current vehicle registration document; bank statement from last 3 months; rent book from last 3 months. We don’t store this identification. It’s used solely to verify the requester’s identity.) It’s helpful if you explain what particular records you’re seeking, but you don’t have to say.

You have a right to ask us to correct data that we hold about you that is inaccurate or incomplete. To do this, please submit a request detailing the changes you want us to make here www.tawap.org/contact-us. We request a form of identification.

In certain circumstances you can ask for the data we hold about you to be erased from our records or transferred to another organisation. Where certain conditions apply, you have a right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information. You also have the right to object to certain types of processing such as direct marketing (see Direct marketing section above) or automated processing or profiling.

If you would like further information on your rights or wish to exercise them, please write to our Data Protection Coordinator, TAWAP, 5th Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB or submit a request here: www.tawap.org/contact-us. If we are unable to fulfil your request, we will provide you with a reason as to why.

How do I make a complaint?

If you wish to make a complaint about how your personal data is being processed by TAWAP (or any third-parties we use to help process your data), or how your complaint has been handled, please see our complaints policy.

You have the right to lodge a complaint directly with the Information Commissioner's Office.

Other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites that are outside our control and are not covered by this privacy policy. If you access other sites using the links provided, the operators of these sites may collect information from you that will be used by them in accordance with their privacy policy, which may differ from ours.

Changes to this policy

Any changes we make to this privacy policy will be posted on this page, so please check it regularly. When we make significant changes, we’ll notify you.

Investigations

What information do we collect about you?

The personal data we collect, and use will include personal data and special category personal data (also referred to as sensitive processing).

Types of personal data we process may include information such as:

Personal details such as name, email address and home and business addresses
Audio, footage and images
Complaint, incident and accident details
Employment details

Special category personal data (also referred to as sensitive processing) may include personal data revealing:

Racial or ethnic origin
Financial details
Political opinions
Religious or philosophical beliefs
Membership of trade unions, private/social clubs, academic affiliations

TAWAP will only use the minimum amount of personal information necessary to carry out an investigation activity.

Where do we obtain data from?

We collect personal data from a range of sources in the exercise of our aims and objectives. For example, we may collect data for our investigations, from partner agencies, via direct reporting from the public and from information that is publicly available.

Whose personal data do we handle?

For this particular processing, we process information relating to a wide variety of individuals. These may include:

Individuals engaged in unethical practices that endanger the well-being and protection of animals and other individuals
Individuals or business representatives selling unlawful products that impact on the well-being and protection of animals

Why do we use personal data?

TAWAP processes personal data to aid law enforcement and for the purposes of the publication of unethical practices as defined in the Data Protection Act 2018 and Article 10 Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). sets out the right to freedom of expression: “are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others”.

TAWAP's investigations and publications are in the interest of the public.

These are for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or unethical practice towards animals.

The legal basis for processing is in pursuit of our legitimate interest of exposing any unethical practices that may impact on the promotion of the wellbeing and protection of animals, in the vast majority of cases, is that it is necessary for the performance of TAWAP's aims and objectives. Alternatively, on rare occasions we may ask for your consent, where this do not compromise our investigation or criminal offence has not been committed.

How long do we keep personal data?

TAWAP will retain data for as long as is necessary for the particular purpose or purposes for which it is obtained and in line with the requirements of data protection legislation, taking into account factors such as the content and sensitivity of the data, the purposes for which the data is processed, and any legal or business requirements. We will securely dispose of your data when it is no longer necessary to retain it.

Who may we share data with?

Journalists
Law enforcement agencies
Media outlets
Academics
NGOs
Thinks tanks
Multilateral organisations