PRIVACY AND COOKIE NOTICE

Last Updated: May 2024

Welcome to our privacy and cookie notice (Privacy Notice).

vHelp is a digital payment service for reimbursing expenses to volunteers and others not on an organisation’s payroll, provided by VeeLoop Ltd (”We”, “our” or “vHelp”) are committed to protecting your information and respecting your right to privacy. This Privacy Notice will inform you how we look after your personal data when you visit our website www.vhelp.co.uk and use our app and related services (vHelp Platform) and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

This Privacy Notice aims to give you information on how vHelp collects and processes your personal data through your use of the vHelp Platform, including any data you may provide directly through the vHelp Website.

Our digital payment service enables volunteers to collect payment for purchases they make for vulnerable people or to be reimbursed for expenses incurred during approved activities. It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes, for example you change your email address.

We review this Privacy Notice regularly, and it is your responsibility to check regularly to see whether this Privacy Notice has changed. If you do not agree to any change to this Privacy Notice, then you must immediately stop using our services. In the event we make any significant changes to this Privacy Notice we will use our best endeavours to inform you of such changes in advance by email.

Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it. If there are any terms of this Privacy Notice that you do not agree with, please do not use our services.

For the purposes of data protection law, the data controller is VeeLoop Ltd of, 3 Totman Crescent, Rayleigh, Essex, SS6 7UY. Our ICO registration number is ZA257303.

Our nominated Data Protection Officer (DPO) is Patricia Salume, one of our co-founders, and you may contact our DPO to find out more about the way we treat and use personal data via email at hello@vhelp.co.uk.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). The ICO’s address:

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow – Cheshire - SK9 5AF

We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact us in the first instance.

WHO IS THE PRIVACY NOTICE FOR?

This Privacy Notice describes the way we treat and use personal data that we collect about any adult that uses vHelp.

WHAT PERSONAL DATA DO WE COLLECT AND USE?

We will collect and process the following data about you:

Data Type Example From Whom Notes Grounds For Processing
Identity data Full name All users Business purposes
Contractual
Legal Obligations
Contact Data Email and address All users Business purposes
Contractual
Legal Obligations
Payment data Credit, debit card or bank account details All users including organisations These details allow us to process payment for services provided to you (e.g. so you can reimburse a volunteer for shopping that a volunteer has collected and delivered to you). If you are a volunteer, we use your bank details to reimburse you. Please note that whilst we capture this information, your card details will be stored securely by a third party and we will not keep a copy of this information. Business purposes
Contractual
Transaction data Transaction dates, amounts, receipts Service users and volunteers Transactions carried out whilst using the vHelp service. Business purposes
Information we receive from other sources All users We are working closely with third parties (including, for example, business partners, sub-contractors in technical, payment and delivery services, analytics providers, search information providers). We may receive personal data about you, provided the third party has the right to share such data with us. Business purposes

We automatically collect certain information when you visit, use or navigate the vHelp Platform. This information does not reveal your specific identity (like your name or contact information) but may include device and usage information, such as your IP address, browser and device characteristics, operating system, language preferences, referring URLs, device name, country, location, information about how and when you use the vHelp Platform and other technical information. This information is primarily needed to maintain the security and operation of the vHelp Platform, and for our internal analytics and reporting purposes.

We will only use personal data when the law allows us to. We process your personal data for these purposes in reliance on our legitimate business interests (Business Purposes), in order to enter into or perform a contract with you (Contractual), with your consent (Consent), and/or for compliance with our legal obligations (Legal Obligations). The specific processing grounds we rely on are set out in the table above.

IF YOU DO NOT PROVIDE US WITH YOUR PERSONAL DATA

If we need to process the data you provide us with about yourself to fulfil our service and you fail to provide that data when requested, we will not be able to fulfil your request. We will of course notify you if this is the case at the time.

WILL YOUR PERSONAL DATA BE SHARED WITH ANYONE?

We only share and disclose your personal data in the following situations:

Selected third parties include:

WHERE DO WE STORE YOUR INFORMATION?

All personal data we process is processed by our staff and contractors who are based both in the UK and outside the European Economic Area (EEA).

Some of our external third parties such as Go Daddy and AWS are based outside the EEA so their processing of your personal data will involve a transfer of data outside the EEA.

Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the EEA, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented:

Please contact us at hello@vhelp.co.uk if you want further information on the specific mechanism used by us when transferring your personal data out of the EEA.

We have implemented appropriate technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any information about you that we process. However, please also remember that we cannot guarantee that the internet itself is 100% secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, transmission of personal data to and from the vHelp platform is at your own risk. You should only access our services within a secure environment.

HOW LONG DO WE KEEP YOUR INFORMATION FOR?

We will only retain personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data. See below for further information.

THIRD-PARTY MARKETING

We do not currently share your details with any third parties for marketing purposes, but if we would like to do so in the future, we will first get your Consent.

WHAT ARE YOUR RIGHTS?

You have certain rights in relation to the personal data that we hold about you. Details of these rights and how to exercise them are shown below. Please note we will require evidence of your identity before we are able to respond to your request. This is a security measure to ensure that your personal data is not disclosed to a person who does not have the right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up your response. To exercise or discuss any of your rights please contact us at: hello@vhelp.co.uk

If we are relying on Consent to process your personal data, you have the right to withdraw your Consent at any time. Please note however that this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before its withdrawal.

CHANGE OF PURPOSE

We will only use your personal data for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If you wish to get an explanation as to how the processing for the new purpose is compatible with the original purpose, please email us at hello@vhelp.co.uk

If we need to use your personal data for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.

THIRD-PARTY LINKS

The vHelp Website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave the vHelp Website, we encourage you to read the Privacy Notice of every website you visit.

Cookies

A cookie is a small text file that a website or application saves on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site.

We use the following cookies:

Enabling these cookies is not strictly necessary for the vHelp Platform to work but it will provide you with a better browsing experience. You can delete or block these cookies, but if you do that some features of the platform may not work as intended. The cookie-related information is not used to identify you personally and the pattern data is fully under our control. These cookies are not used for any purpose other than those described here.

NAME DESCRIPTION
csrftoken Necessary - Used to help protect a site against at particular type of software attack on web forms.
_gat_gtag_UA_104156229_2 Google uses this cookie to distinguish users
__ga Google Analytics cookie
_gid Google Analytics cookie
_hjid HotJar performance cookie
_hjIncludedInSample HotJar performance cookie

You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish - for details, see aboutcookies.org. You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site and some services and functionalities may not work.

If you have any questions, we are happy to answer!