Privacy Policy

DATA COLLECTION AND USE

The Friends of Sri Lanka Association is the sole owner of any information we collect. We never sell, share, or rent this information. We collect data in FIVE different ways, all of which are listed below.

  1. Join our Association

If you wish to become a member of our association, we collect some personal data from you as detailed in our membership application form. Your name, address, occupation and reason for joining are collected in order for the committee to assess your suitability to join our association. If we decide you are unsuitable for membership, we only keep a record of your name and all other data about you is destroyed.

If you become a member, your name and contact details are transferred to our membership database, which is in the sole possession of our membership secretary (Bruce Rawlings) who is also our data controller (see below under "Security").

Your payment information is securely provided to our treasurer and our bank to process your membership payment. They retain your payment details for the duration of your active membership and only for the purpose of your membership dues being paid. Following termination of your membership, our treasurer arranges for the destruction of his copy of the standing order instructions and notifies our bank. We are not responsible for the data retained about you by the bank. Our bank is the Bank of Ceylon, 1 Devonshire Square, London EC2M 4WD.

We also invite you to provide information about yourself for publication in our Members' Directory (see below for more details on how this Directory can be used). This information includes contact details and anything you wish to disclose to other members of our association about your connections with Sri Lanka and/or reason for joining the association.

  1. Contacting us through our website

If you email us through our website, we collect your name, telephone number and email address. This information is used by our membership secretary to direct your enquiry to the relevant committee member and enable them to respond. This information is not retained unless you become a member of our association in which event your contact details go into our membership database.

  1. Stay Informed

We use your name and postal address or email address to send you our quarterly newsletters. We use this information to contact you about our events and let you know our news.

  1. Events

We ask for your name, telephone number or postal address and email address if you seek to attend an event that we have organised, this is so our events secretaries can let you know if your payment for the event has been received, provide updates about the event and if necessary in the unlikely event of a cancellation of the event, we can return your cheque, issue a refund or let you know that we have destroyed your cheque. Once the association event has taken place, the information provided by you on the event reply slips is destroyed. Please note this information is NOT transferred to our membership database but may be used from time to time by our event secretaries to let you know about our forthcoming association events that we think may be of interest to you.

If you are a supplier, for example, guest speakers or a venue hire company, our events secretaries retain your contact details for future reference.

A spreadsheet of name, payment type and amount is provided to our treasurer by the events secretaries as part of the income and expenses for the event. Where necessary, this document is retained by our treasurer for a maximum of 6 years to enable our auditors to inspect and verify our association accounts. Our events secretaries retain a copy of this income and expenses spreadsheet to be able to build a picture about the popularity of certain events and who might be interested in particular events and to forecast expenses for holding similar events.

5. WhatsApp FoSLA News Alerts "FNA"

Having become a Member, if you choose to join our optional WhatsApp FoSLA News Alerts ("FNA") Service, we collect your data and the important details of how we do this and what data is retained by us are noted below.

The aim of the FoSLA News Alerts service via a WhatsApp Group is to enable members to receive news information in accordance with FoSLA’s objectives as a friendship organisation whose members share a strong interest in Sri Lanka. We plan to include frequent news items, exclusively about Sri Lanka, of a factual nature covering politics, economics, commercial, social issues and sport. It is a free optional service open exclusively to FoSLA members, who may join, unsubscribe and re-join at any time. The service comprises a nominated FoSLA Committee member (the WhatsApp Administrator “WA”) posting messages or ‘posts’ to members who have individually consented to join the service. Joiners may only receive posts and the opportunity to send comments is disabled for everyone, except the WA.

Members wishing to join the FNA service, should be aware that their name, mobile telephone number and profile picture are automatically stored and displayed by WhatsApp in the Group Info section and as such these details may be seen and accessed by other group members.

Group Members who consent to join the FNA service may already be accustomed to their contact details being shared in the Member’s Directory. However, in the case of WhatsApp, it should be noted that any profile picture that a member uses will also be automatically shared amongst the FoSLA members who join the FNA service. WhatsApp LLC is responsible for the transmission of digital data posted as message posts on this service. By installing and using WhatsApp on your device, you also agree to WhatsApp’s terms and conditions over which FoSLA has no influence. This includes granting WhatsApp permission to access details on your device. Please visit www.whatsapp.com to read their terms of service and privacy policy for more information about WhatsApp.

Posts on the FNA service enable members (entirely at their own risk and discretion) to access, use, or interact with third-party websites, applications, content, including other products and services (eg Youtube, Twitter etc). Some of those third-party platforms may offer their information for free or behind a “paywall”. An example of a paywall would be a platform requiring you to subscribe or provide personal data before granting access eg The Financial Times. As a not-for-profit organisation, FoSLA makes no benefit from such arrangements and does not advise or make recommendations on whether members should enter into any subscription or other arrangement offered by these third-parties. While the WA makes efforts to ensure the news information from third-parties is genuine and accurate, FoSLA takes no responsibility for the information contained in the posts, nor does it recommend or support any opinion therein.

The WA’s name and contact details appear in the Group Info section. The posts received are stored on each individual’s device and old posts may be deleted at the member’s discretion to preserve their device’s memory capacity. Members may switch the FNA service’s settings to “mute” in Group Info on their device to avoid being disturbed by posts or temporarily disable WhatsApp by switching their mobile device to Flight Mode. Members may opt to leave the FNA service at any time, by scrolling down on the Group Info section to select “Exit Group”; or a request to leave the FNA service may be communicated to the WA, who will then remove the member from the WhatsApp group.

Members of the FNA service should not offer or reproduce another member’s information, in full or part, in any format to any person or entity outside FoSLA, nor use the FNA service’s members’ information for any unauthorised or unsolicited communication. In the event of the loss of your device, you should report it to the WA so that your name may be removed from the FNA service to prevent any risk of data breach. Any instance where a member suspects that their personal information may have been compromised, or used in an unauthorised manner, should report their concerns immediately to the WA.

FoSLA welcomes feedback to improve the FNA service and any suggestions for enhancement may be communicated directly to the WA. The details of the current member of the FoSLA Executive Committee who has been nominated to be the WhatsApp Administrator and his contact details are below:
Amal Abeyawardene
Mobile phone: +44 77255 87509
Email: amal.abey@btopenworld.com

EMAILS FROM US

If you are signed up to our email mailing list, our membership secretary exercises his discretion in deciding to inform you about matters and external events, which may be of interest, balancing this interest with the need to ensure you do not receive too many emails from us. For example, we may send you information on radio programmes about Sri Lanka or other events not organised by us, such as invitations to the Sri Lankan High Commission events.

SECURITY

We take every precaution to protect your details. When you submit sensitive information via the website, it is secure both on its way to us and once we receive it. We also do everything in our power to protect your information once we have received it. Our committee can only access your details if they have a specific job to perform, such as responding to an enquiry made by you.

For the purposes of the Data Protection, our Data Controller is our membership secretary, Bruce Rawlings of 48 Cleveland Road, Salvington, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 2ES. Our Data Controller keeps up to date on our security and privacy practices.

Finally, the servers that store personally identifiable information are kept in a secure environment. Our website is hosted by 123ConnectLtd, of 101 Stansfield Rd, Benfleet, Essex, SS7 4NA, who may be collecting cookies and data from all visits to the website to establish which pages are popular. This data is anonymously collected and could be used in the future for improving the website user experience.

CORRECTING/UPDATING INFORMATION

We recognise that details such as your postcode or email address are bound to change over time. We will do what we can to ensure that you can change the information we hold about you.

MEMBERSHIP DATABASE

Contact details given freely by members are retained by our membership secretary in a membership database. Email addresses are also stored in our Yahoo Groups which we use to circulate our newsletters and correspondence in bulk to our members.

OPTING OUT/UNSUBSCRIBING

If you have signed up for emails from the Friends of Sri Lanka Association but want to stop us getting in touch, you can opt out by replying to our membership secretary, Bruce Rawlings on Rawlings@mistral.co.uk to request your name be removed from our membership database.

MEMBERS’ DIRECTORY

Our popular Members’ Directory, which contains information you have freely provided to us, is normally published every 2 years and circulated to our entire membership by post. We have now taken advice on its publication from the Information Commissioner’s Office. The Directory is only for the use of members and should not be reproduce in any format. The Directory or content therein contained should not be distributed outside the FOSLA in part or in full. Members must not use the Directory for unsolicited mass communications.

NOTIFICATION OF CHANGES

If we change our privacy policy, we notify you and update the privacy page on this website, so that you always know what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances. When we collect information from you, we tell you what we intend to do with it; in the unlikely event that we later want to use that information for a different purpose, we shall first send you an email setting out our plans - and it will be up to you whether or not we do so.