New Cochrane Privacy Policy – community.cochrane.org

The Cochrane Collaboration (company number 03044323 and charity number 1045921) (“Cochrane”, “we”, “us”) are committed to protecting the privacy and security of those whose personal data we process. We acknowledge the need to protect personal data that is collected by or disclosed to us and to manage it in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR (“Data Protection Laws”).

Please read this policy carefully to understand how we collect and use (process) your personal data during and after your relationship with us, in accordance with Data Protection Laws.

We will review this Privacy Statement regularly to comply with our legal obligations. We will notify you of any important changes, but please check back for updates at any time.

We collect personal data when you interact with Cochrane. We make it clear when and why your data is being collected. In most cases the personal data that we process will be provided by you. This includes details provided when:

• Accessing Cochrane websites and online resources
• Creating a Cochrane Account
• Completing an activity with us
• Contacting our support services 
• Filling in a form on our websites
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Attending a Cochrane event or visiting our offices
• Contacting us for any other reason
• Exercising any of your rights under Data Protection Laws

We collect the minimum personal data required for your interaction with Cochrane.

We may request personal data such as gender and/or date of birth in order to monitor and improve the diversity of our community and to support the advancement of charitable objectives and outreach activities. Where data are used for diversity monitoring, they are anonymised for processing. You can choose not to provide this data.

Data Protection Laws recognise that certain ‘special categories’ of data are more sensitive. These include information relating to health, race, ethnic origin and political or religious beliefs. We only ask for special category personal data if there is a specific need for this. We will use it only for the purpose for which it was provided, such as to refer patients and carers with specific health issues to relevant Cochrane Reviews or Cochrane groups and only ever with your explicit consent.

Unless we have a lawful basis for doing so, Cochrane will not share your personal data with or sell your personal data to any third party for marketing purposes and you will not receive offers from other companies or organisations as a result of giving your details to us. 
We may share your personal data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in the section “How do we use your personal data?”:

• Service providers acting as processors based in
  • the UK, for the collection of online payments, the provision of online learning services the provision of IT support services and CRM hosting services and the provision of publishing services;
  • the EU, for the provision of IT support services, and the sale of Cochrane Interactive Learning subscriptions to customers in Spain, Portugal and South America;
  • the USA for the provision of IT support services, editorial management software services, the hosting of our event registration website, and the provision of CRM services; and
  • India for the sale of Cochrane Interactive Learning subscriptions to customers in India.
• Professional advisers acting as processors or joint controllers including lawyers, bankers, auditors and insurers based in the UK.
• Regulators and other authorities acting as processors or joint controllers based in the UK who require reporting of processing activities in certain circumstances.
• Third parties to whom we may choose to sell, transfer or merge parts of our business or our assets. Alternatively, we may seek to acquire other businesses or merge with them. If a change happens to our business, then the new owners may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this privacy policy.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party processors to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

We take appropriate physical, electronic and managerial measures to ensure that we keep your data secure. We undertake regular IT security and data protection auditing to ensure our systems meet the expectations of the law and those of our clients. Those of our employees and contractors who have access to personal data are required to undertake data protection training.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and the ICO of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

We may transfer your personal information to third party data processors who are based outside the UK to the jurisdictions listed in the section above, “Disclosure: Do we share your personal data?”

We will retain your personal data as long as is necessary to provide the services to which you have requested, or where we have another legitimate and lawful reason to do so. Different Cochrane departments and groups have specific data retention schedules related to their areas of activity. For instance, personal data included in documents related to review production, may be archived by review groups for our editorial records. These data will be stored securely. We may need to retain some information to comply with our legal obligations such as financial and accounting records. In most cases we will delete your data 7 years after your last transaction with us. Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal data are [available in our retention policy which you can request from us by contacting us.

You can:

We keep our privacy notices under regular review. This notice was last updated in August 2023.

Cookies are small files of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer. We use necessary cookies to make our site work. We’d also like to set optional analytics cookies to help us improve it, but we won’t set these optional cookies unless you enable them. You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them in the table below.

Our websites ask you to consent before we place cookies on your machine. You can always change your cookie preferences at any time by clicking on the ‘Cookies settings’ link in the footer of every page. Alternatively, most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. Please refer to the help information contained in your browser or search the internet for ‘How to disable cookies’.

Table: Use and storage of cookies on our websites