Accuracy of information
This website may have typographical or factual errors. While St Andrews Nightline makes every effort to maintain an accurate information database and up-to-date website, we cannot be held responsible for any actions taken because of the material within this website. The content of this website may be changed without notice.
Please note that any websites accessed through this website via hyperlink are not directly related or affiliated with St Andrews Nightline, and St Andrews Nightline takes no responsibility for the content of said websites or organisations.
The content of this website is protected by copyright by St Andrews Nightline and may not be copied, reproduced, stored, or otherwise transferred without prior consent from St Andrews Nightline.
Equal opportunities
The University of St Andrews Nightline (hereafter, Nightline) is an inclusive organisation. It is committed to ensuring that service users, listening volunteers, the Publicity Team, and potential volunteers are treated with respect and dignity and are not discriminated against on the basis of race, colour, national or ethnic origins, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability, financial situation, religion, age, or belief.
Nightline provides a service to the entire student community in St Andrews. It is committed to ensuring that it is an accessible service to as much of this community as possible. In line with this, the content, location, and types of publicity used to publicise Nightline target as broad a range of prospective and actual service users as possible.
Nightline aims to cater to the needs of each service user as much as possible by providing both a phone and email service.
All calls and emails are handled sensitively and appropriately and in accordance with Nightline’s five principles: anonymity, confidentiality, being non-judgemental, being non-directive, and empathy.
Nightline has an application process for potential volunteers and cannot take every individual who applies. The recruitment and selection of Nightline volunteers are publicised to as broad a range of the student community as possible. All potential volunteers are treated fairly and with respect. However, Nightline is unable to take volunteers who are in their final semester at St Andrews due to the nature and length of the training process. In order to maintain the standard of service provision, it is also necessary that the recruitment process is tailored towards ensuring an even spread of graduation dates from St Andrews within the listening volunteer team. Reasonable allowances will be made to ensure that Nightline can cater to the needs of every individual with the potential to make a good listening volunteer. Nightline will accommodate the needs of every Nightline volunteer as far as reasonably possible.
Confidentiality
The University of St Andrews Nightline will not disclose to any third party any information relating to the identity of a service user nor the content of any phone call, instant message or email received except in the following circumstances.
The duty to maintain confidentiality subsists both during and after a volunteer’s involvement with Nightline. Any breach of confidentiality during an individual’s involvement in Nightline will lead to disciplinary action being taken against them. Every Nightline volunteer is required to sign a Confidentiality Agreement during the initial training process in recognition of their understanding and acceptance of Nightline’s confidentiality policies.
Our confidentiality policy
- Under the Terrorism Act (2000) we are legally required to disclose any information that is provided by the Service User that relates to a terrorism attack.
- This information will be disclosed to the Police without the consent of the Service User.
- We will disclose the information if it is evident that the Service User holds a credible intention to harm others.
- This information will only be disclosed if it is provided voluntarily by the Service User.
- This information may be disclosed to the Police, St Andrews Student Services, other Nightline, or another third party without the consent of the Service User.
- We will disclose information in regards to safeguarding children.
- Any person under 16 is considered a child.
- If it becomes apparent that a child may be at risk of harm, the Service User will be informed that any information they disclose about a child at risk of harm may be disclosed to the NSPCC.
- We may disclose information in regards to the safeguarding of adults at risk. An adult at risk is anyone over the age of 18 who:
- has needs for care and support,
- is experiencing, or is at risk of, abuse or neglect, and
- as a result of those needs is unable to protect themself against the abuse or neglect or the risk of it
- We will also disclose information if the Service User explicitly requests that we disclose information.
- To whom we disclose this information will be explicitly determined by the service user.
Accessibility
Nightline has signed the Disabled Students Network Accessibility Pledge as a commitment to making our organisation as accessible as possible. We are continually working to improve in this area and welcome any suggestions you may have.
Data Privacy
Nightline aims to minimise as much as possible the amount of personal data we process. We may process personal data where the law requires us to do so, in order to safeguard vulnerable individuals, to protect our volunteers’ wellbeing and to continuously improve and develop the services we provide. All of our practices comply with UK GDPR. You can view our full Data Privacy Notice here.
St Andrews Nightline Privacy Notice
Date privacy notice was last updated: 13/11/22
Our organisational details:
Name: St Andrews Nightline
Contact Email: [email protected]
Our governing body’s details
Name: University of St Andrews
Phone Number: +44 (0)1334 47 6161
Address:
College Gate
St Andrews
KY16 9AJ
Useful Definitions
‘Personal data’ is information that is personally identifiable, i.e. you can use the data to find out who it is about. This could be a name, date of birth or location data.
‘Special category data’ is more sensitive information, for example, health or genetic information.
‘Processing’ is the action that St Andrews Nightline or a trusted third party takes when collecting, updating, storing, or sharing an individual’s personal data.
‘We’ or ‘Nightline’ refers to St Andrews Nightline.
Why we collect your data
We aim to minimise as much as possible the amount of personal data we process. We may process personal data where the law requires us to do so, in order to safeguard vulnerable individuals, to protect our volunteers’ wellbeing and to continuously improve and develop the services we provide.
All of our practices comply with UK GDPR. We have lawful bases for processing your personal data and special category data. The main lawful bases we rely upon are:
● We have a legal obligation
● Protecting vital interests
● Our legitimate interests as an organisation
How we protect your data
At Nightline, we only collect the data we need and we only share it on a need-to-know basis.
We do not share personal data externally with the exception of the circumstances outlined in this policy. In this situation, we will always make you aware of how your personal data might be affected and will always check that the organisation’s systems comply with privacy laws and have robust privacy and security practices.
We store most of our data on Google Workspace (i.e. Gmail, Google Drive etc). It is secured and supported by Google and has been security assessed by independent organisations (including the National Cyber Security Centre: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/g-suite-security-review). We store some personal data on other systems too. For every system we use, we check that it complies with privacy laws and has good privacy and security practices. One such system is Three Rings CIC, full privacy policy can be found here :https://www.threerings.org.uk/privacy-policy/
How we process your data
Nightline Service Users
As a general rule, Nightline does not store personal data of service users in call records. We keep call logs, but these are limited to primarily statistical information and no identifying information is recorded.
On some occasions, in order to detect and prevent abuse to Nightline services, we do collect data about calls we believe to be non-genuine, in order to prevent such calls taking place again in the future. This information includes details of the caller and the topics discussed on the call.
Some personal data (IP addresses etc.) and messages are stored in the databases of our anonymous instant messaging software. Volunteers at Nightline cannot access any personal data, the software provider does not access the databases (unless requested by us as outlined below), except in exceptional circumstances where system administrators must undertake system maintenance.
Emails to our listening email are anonymised such that no Nightline volunteer is able to view the senders’ email address. A short profile of non-identifying information may be compiled for longer, ongoing email reply chains, to facilitate an empathetic and consistent listening experience. After 6 months of inactivity, this data is archived to a folder only accessible to the Director of the organization. This archive is cleared ahead of each academic year.
In certain circumstances, Nightline may share personal data with a third party:
● Terrorism
Any information relating to an act or potential act of terrorism will be reported to the police in order to comply with our legal obligation under the Terrorism Act 2000
● Safeguarding
Any calls where there is a threat to either a child or an adult at risk may require us to make a report to the police or to the local authority. This is done to meet our responsibilities to protect vulnerable individuals.
● Threats of Harm
Any calls in which information is shared regarding intent to harm someone else may require us to make a report to the police or local student authorities. This is done to meet our responsibilty and legitimate interest to prevent harm to others.
● Court Order
Personal data may be disclosed to the police if requested under a court order. This is in order to meet our legal obligation to cooperate.
● Abuses of the Service
Where a caller acts in an abusive or threatening manner towards our volunteers, we may disclose personal data of that caller to appropriate third parties. These parties include the police, other Nightlines, and other authorities with responsibility for the welfare of our volunteers such as St Andrews University and St Andrews Student’s Union. This is done in order to serve our legitimate interest to protect our volunteers from harm and to keep the service available for genuine users.
Volunteers and Potential Volunteers
During the process of recruiting new volunteers, we collect some information from everyone who registers their interest in volunteering. The data collected includes the following:
Name, pronouns, email and phone number.
Once the recruiting procedure is over, we do not retain the information of unsuccessful applicants. The information may be shared during the recruitment process with the University of St Andrews to verify an applicant is suitable for appointment. We will make all applicants aware of the fact that a factual reference on suitability of appointment from the University will be sought, the sources of information that the University will rely upon, and with whom consultation will take place before sharing any information, and will not share information without an applicant’s consent.
For our volunteers, we store this data (along with other relevant information such as the number of shifts you complete and ongoing training sessions you attend) for as long as you are a volunteer and until volunteers wish to discontinue contact with Nightline.
We collect this information in order to administer the recruitment process and effectively run the service.
Website Visitors
When you visit the St Andrews Nightline website, we automatically collect certain information about your device, including information about your web browser, IP address, time zone, and some of the cookies that are installed on your device. Additionally, as you browse the website, we collect information about the individual web pages or products that you view, what websites or search terms referred you to the Site, and information about how you interact with the Site. We refer to this automatically-collected information as “Device Information”.
“Cookies” are data files that are placed on your device or computer and often include an anonymous unique identifier. Cookies are sent to your browser from a web site and stored on your computer’s hard drive.
St Andrews Nightline uses “cookies” to collect information. You can opt-out of cookies but you are required to do this proactively by changing the setting in your browser – unfortunately, we cannot control this on your behalf. For more information about cookies, and how to disable cookies, visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org.
Anonymised data from visitors to our website will be collected, including your interaction with our website and cookies to track with pages you visit. This helps us to analyse how our website is being used and how we can improve.
Data Retention Periods
We only keep your information for as long as is necessary for the relevant purpose. We use a number of criteria for determining the retention period, including obligations under law, our legitimate interests, and consideration of the original purpose we collected it for.
Your rights
The right to be informed
You have the right to be provided with clear, transparent and easily understandable information about how we use your information and rights. This is why we are providing you with the information in this policy. If you have any additional questions, you can contact us using the contact details at the end of this policy.
The right to object
You always have the right to object to certain types of processing, including the option to stop receiving information from us across all of our communication channels (which is known as processing for direct marketing). This is at your discretion and we will respect your choice. However, for us to enact this we encourage you to notify us. You can use unsubscribe links on emails or contact us using the contact details at the end of this policy.
The right to access a copy of the personal data we hold.
You, or an organisation with legal purpose, can request a copy of your personal data for legitimate purposes. This is known as a ‘Subject Access Request’. To request this, contact us using the contact details at the end of this policy. Please note that proof of identity may be required and providing the reason for your request will allow St Andrews Nightline to respond most appropriately. We may ask for further details if needed.
The right to erasure
This is where you can request that St Andrews Nightline delete the data that we hold on you. Please note that this will not apply if there is lawful basis for us to continue to use the data we hold about you. To request this, contact us using the contact details at the end of this policy.
The right to rectify inaccurate data
As detailed above you can make corrections to the data we hold about you. To request this, contact us using the contact details at the end of this policy.
The right to restrict processing
You have rights to ‘block’ or suppress further use of your information. When processing is restricted, we can still store your information, but may not use it further. We keep lists of people who have asked for further use of their information to be ‘blocked’ to make sure the restriction is respected in future.
The right to data portability
You have rights to obtain and re-use your personal data for your own purposes across different services.
The right to lodge a complaint
You can lodge a complaint about the way we handle or process your personal data with us or your national data protection regulator.
Contact [email protected] with any complaints. We will aim to respond to your complaint within 48 hours.
The national data protection regulator for the UK is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and they can be contacted here: https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/.