Privacy Policy

Greenpeace is committed to keeping your personal information secure and to being transparent about how we collect and use your data so you can have confidence when learning about our campaigns and supporting us.

The purpose of this policy is to help you understand what personal information Greenpeace collects, how we use it and what your rights are. We take care to ensure that we use your information in accordance with all applicable laws concerning the protection of personal information.

This policy applies to:

  • Greenpeace Ltd, company number 1314381, Canonbury Villas, London N1 2PN.
  • Greenpeace Environmental Trust, registered charity in England and Wales 284934, company number 1636817, Canonbury Villas, London, N1 2PN.

Greenpeace Ltd and Greenpeace Environmental Trust are registered as data controllers with the Information Commissioner for the United Kingdom and are collectively referred to as Greenpeace in this document.

This policy applies to all the pages hosted on this site and other services Greenpeace UK runs. It does not apply to pages hosted by other Greenpeace sites around the world, or to other organisations to which we may link and whose privacy policies may differ.

Please read the following policy to understand how your personal information will be treated. It may change from time to time, so please check back periodically.

Contents

1. The Information Greenpeace collects about you and how it is collected and used

1.1 People Who Support Us

1.2 Volunteers and our Greenwire Online Community

1.3 Job Applicants

1.4 Visitors to Our Website and Digital Platforms

2. How your data is kept secure

2.1 What Greenpeace does to keep your data secure

2.2 Who has access to your data

2.3 Data Retention

3. How Greenpeace Communicates with you

4. How you can affect the way Greenpeace communicates with you

5. Your Data Protection Rights

6. How Greenpeace protects children’s privacy

7. People in vulnerable circumstances

8. How to find out more or make a complaint

9. Changes to This Policy

1. The Information Greenpeace collects about you and how it is collected and used.

Greenpeace collects personal information about you in a number of ways:

When you support us by;

  • Signing one of our petitions
  • Signing up to make a donation to Greenpeace
  • Engaging with our social media and digital advertising
  • Joining our volunteer and activist communities

As well as

  • When you apply for a job at Greenpeace
  • When you visit our website
  • When you contact our Supporter Care team

To comply with UK data protection rules Greenpeace will always ensure we have legal justification for collecting and using your personal information.

The legal basis that we rely on will depend upon the circumstances in which we collect and use your personal information. In almost all cases, our processing of your personal information will fall into one of the following categories:

  • Where you have provided your consent to allow us to use your data in a certain way.
  • Where it is necessary for us to process your data in order to comply with a legal obligation.
  • Where it is in our legitimate interests to contact you in order to raise funds and achieve our campaign objectives. Where we rely on a legitimate interest to use your information, we will always ensure that this is done in a way so as not to be intrusive or cause distress, and that respects your rights.
  • Where it is necessary for us to process your data in order to carry out the performance of a contract with you.

1.1 People Who Support Us

How we collect consent via petitions

Unlike many other organisations involved in generating large-scale petitions, Greenpeace does not require mandatory email address or phone number capture on petition forms. Email address, phone number, and postcode are clearly marked as not being required on our petition forms. Greenpeace wants our petitions to be as inclusive as possible, and to accommodate supporters who do not have, or do not want to share, an email address.

If supporters try to sign a petition with their name only, they are prompted to provide their postcode via a message saying ‘Please leave your postcode so we can verify your petition signup’. When only name and postcode are given, this information is used only for the purposes of applying that person’s support for the petition and the personal data is not processed for any other purpose.

While email address and phone number are entirely unnecessary for signing a petition, supporters may choose to leave either or both if they would like to give their consent for us to contact them for the purposes stated in the text on this page. Supporters may opt out of this contact at any time, either via a link included in every email Greenpeace sends; via our Preference Form; or via contacting our Supporter Services team.

How we collect your data

Greenpeace obtains personal information from you when you support a campaign, engage with our social media and digital advertising or make a donation.

In most circumstances, Greenpeace will only ask for your name and contact details (plus payment details if you are joining or donating). Sometimes we may ask for additional information where it may either help us in our campaigns or help us keep our communications relevant to you. We may also use your name and contact details to check against sources, such as Royal Mail’s National Change of Address and the BT Operator Services Information System (OSIS) file, to ensure we have the most up to date contact details for you.

We may occasionally supplement your data with other publicly and commercially available information where it meets GDPR standards. This may include information such as your parliamentary constituency or the characteristics of your local area to inform campaigning and requests for support, or on rare occasions, information such as company directorships, estimations of your wealth or potential interest in legacy giving, to ensure our communications are relevant. We may store relevant information about you that you voluntarily share with us.

We will only collect sensitive personal data where absolutely necessary and with your explicit consent.

Call recording data

Greenpeace has a telephone call recording system in operation and may record both outgoing and incoming telephone calls from and to our Supporter Services team. An ‘incoming call’ is a call received by Greenpeace, and an ‘outgoing call’ is a call made by Greenpeace. We record calls for quality and training purposes so that we can make sure we are dealing with your questions in the best way that we can.

When we make outgoing calls, we will ask for your consent before making a recording and will only make such a recording with your consent. For incoming calls, due to the volume of calls we receive, we will make an announcement around the recording of calls before the call begins.

Calls are recorded under the legal basis of legitimate interest and consent. If you would prefer for your call not to be recorded, you may state this at any time during the call and we will stop the recording immediately.

Call recordings will be retained in line with our Retention Policy, and deleted once they fall outside time limits determined in this policy. Call recording data will be stored securely and in an encrypted manner within the UK.

How we use your data

Greenpeace uses our supporters’ personal data in a variety of ways which include the following:

  • Providing you with information or products that you have requested from us.
  • Providing you with information that is relevant to your interests.
  • Processing donations and joining fees received from you.
  • Making enquiries or informing you about your interactions with us (e.g. resolving issues with Direct Debits, or informing you of changes to events).
  • Responding to any complaints from you.
  • Offering you ways to fund our work.
  • Inviting you to campaign with us.
  • Keeping you updated on our campaigning work.
  • Informing you of volunteering opportunities.
  • Inviting you to participate in surveys or research.
  • Reviewing records such as for financial audits.
  • Analysing and refining our advertising, campaigning and other operations to increase our effectiveness.
  • Monitoring your information to prevent fraud.
  • Working with authorities in cases of fraud or criminal investigations.

Personalised Communication and Profiling

In order to ensure our communication with you is relevant, timely and will ultimately provide a better experience for you, we may build up a profile of you based on the interactions you have had with Greenpeace.

This profiling may include details of your past engagement with Greenpeace together with information gathered from sources detailed elsewhere in this Privacy Policy and may be carried out either by Greenpeace or by a trusted partner. For example, in deciding who to email about a coastal fisheries campaign, we might look at which supporters have supported similar campaigns in the past and which supporters live in coastal constituencies. This enables Greenpeace to most effectively target relevant information and appropriate requests for support. This does not affect any of your rights or limit you in how you can get involved with us and our campaigns. You may opt out of profiling at any time by contacting us using the details at the bottom of this policy.

1.2 Volunteers and Our Greenwire Online Community

Greenpeace Greenwire is an online community that offers support to anyone who wants to make an active contribution to the goals Greenpeace seeks in its campaigns. It is an online platform for people who want to join activities of Greenpeace, or for people with similar goals who want to organise their own activities.

When you join the Greenpeace Greenwire community website for Greenpeace UK we collect your name, email address and date of birth. We will use this information to create an account for you and to be able to identify you if there is a problem with your account or if we need to enforce our website terms.

We Initially rely on your consent to provide us with information to create an account, and also on fulfilment of contract as you must comply with the Greenpeace Greenwire terms to register with the online community.

Once you start volunteering with us we rely on legitimate interests to process your information – this enables us to send you information about volunteering opportunities we think will be of interest to you, and to use your information to investigate complaints or serious incidents, for example. We also need to process your information to run an efficient volunteer scheme and to evaluate your progress.

For some volunteering opportunities, it might be necessary for us to collect sensitive personal data. For example, if you volunteer with us at one of our events we might ask you about your accessibility needs, health or dietary requirements in order to make any reasonable adjustments you might need. When collecting sensitive data we will always ask for your explicit consent.

Sensitive data is only shared with staff who need it to carry out their duties; for example, a member of staff responsible for health and safety at an event might need to know if you have any medical conditions. We have measures in place to ensure the confidentiality of your sensitive data.

1.3 Job Applicants

If you apply for a job on our careers site your personal data will be collected and processed by Greenpeace and our Recruitment Software Provider Recruitee.

We will collect a range of information about you, including:

  • Your name, address and contact details, including email address and telephone number.
  • Details of your qualifications, skills, experience and employment history
  • Whether or not you have a disability for which we need to make reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process.
  • Information about your entitlement to work in the UK.
  • Equal opportunities monitoring information, including information about your ethnicity, sexual orientation, health, and religion or belief. We will only collect this sensitive information with your explicit consent, which can be withdrawn at any time. We keep this information separate from your application.

We initially rely on your consent to process your information as a job candidate. We are legally obliged to process information about your right to work in the UK and we will take a copy of your passport as evidence of your right to work if we interview you. We are legally obliged to make reasonable adjustments for you if you have a disability.

Your information will not be used for any purpose other than processing and managing your job application, and for internal reporting on our recruitment processes. Only people involved in the recruitment process for the role you apply for will have access to your personal data.

Personal information about unsuccessful candidates will be held for one year after the recruitment exercise has been completed and will then be destroyed. We retain de-personalised statistical information about applicants to help inform our recruitment activities, but no individuals are identifiable from that data.

If you are successful in your application, our use of your data will be set out in our policies for Greenpeace Staff.

1.4 Visitors to our website and digital platforms

Cookies

Cookies are small files that are downloaded onto your computer or mobile device from websites that you visit. Cookies contain information that allows websites to recognise that you have used the site before.

How we use cookies on our website

Greenpeace uses cookies to ensure your privacy and security when you visit secure areas of our website, such as donation pages and registration forms.

Greenpeace will also collect information such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address for monitoring and improving the effectiveness of our website services as well its security.

Third party cookies on our website

Greenpeace uses Google Analytics to compile statistics on how our website is being used, which can help us to improve our website and online services.

Our website also uses Google Analytics advertising features to enable us to better understand the interests of our audience and to tailor our communications to be more relevant to you.

If you do not wish to see these adverts, you can:

Controlling your cookie preferences

All Internet browsers allow you to control which cookies you accept and which you delete. For more information about cookies, please see www.allaboutcookies.org.

Third party cookies and our social media and web advertising

You may also see our advertising online and on some social media sites if you have supported us before, or if your use of these channels suggests that you would find our campaigns relevant.

We use cookies to ensure that any investments we make in online advertising are as cost-effective as possible, by tracking how well individual adverts perform. These cookies are issued by third party service providers that we have assessed as secure.

If you do not wish to see these adverts, you can do so by managing the privacy settings on your social media accounts including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

Depending on your settings or the privacy policies for social media and messaging services, you may have given these services permission to share your details with us. For example, if choosing to register for an activity using a ‘Sign up with Facebook’ link, Facebook may share information such as your name and email address with us.

Our Social Media Pages such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter may also use ‘live chat’ services to allow Greenpeace representatives to offer you assistance or the opportunity to engage with Greenpeace in a manner relevant to you.

These services may involve the use of cookies and the transfer of information about your site navigation, such as your IP address, to secure networks for the purposes of storage and analysis. This information will only be used for the purposes of administering these live chats.

Hashed lists and social media and web advertising

We may send a list of ‘hashed’ email addresses to online social media platforms for the purpose of creating a group of people with similar characteristics, for the purpose of targeted advertising for our fundraising or campaigning activities. For targeted advertising, we may also upload ‘hashed’ files into social media platforms to use as an exclusion list for our ad campaigns, this helps us target new people for Greenpeace, rather than targeting people who have already engaged with us. This is both cost effective, and helps us grow the movement.

‘Hashing’ turns these email addresses into an unreadable code for the purposes of security and privacy during data transfer. The hashed data that we share with social media platforms is deleted after a short period of time and not used for any other purpose.

We may use social media platform advertising tools to build audiences matching particular characteristics to serve our advertising campaigns. For example, we might target people who have shown an interest in activism, or environmentalism. This targeting is based on pages and/or posts people have previously engaged with on the platform. These tools allow us to inspire new people to engage with our work, and help us spread awareness about the issues facing our planet.

Pixels

Pixels are tiny 1px-by-1px transparent images that can be embedded in websites, emails and online ads.

Our email server uses pixels to track when people are interacting with our emails. For example, when a user opens an email their browser downloads the transparent  image file, sending a signal back to our server letting us know the email has been opened.

We use this information to monitor the performance of our email campaigns, to help ensure we’re sending people emails that are relevant to areas of our work they are interested in, and to remove people who are no longer interested in receiving emails from us from our lists.

We don’t have the ability to turn off email tracking pixels at an individual level. If you would prefer to turn off email pixels, you can adjust your email settings to ‘Ask before displaying external images’ for gmail or a similar setting for other email providers. Preventing email images from loading will stop email tracking pixels from working.

2. How your data is kept secure

2.1 What Greenpeace does to keep your data secure

Greenpeace uses industry-standard tools to safeguard the confidentiality of your personally identifiable information. We make every effort to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control.

We always use a secure connection when collecting personal financial information from you and conform to PCI standards. All forms which request credit card or bank details use Secure Sockets Layers (a security protocol that provides communications privacy over the Internet in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery) for encryption. Most web browsers support Secure Socket Layers.

The link between your web browser and the server is secure if your web browser displays a small padlock or key symbol somewhere in the frame, or the address bar shows a web address beginning https:// (rather than http://)

We endeavour to keep all supporter data inside the European Economic Area (EEA), and ensure that any time data is transferred outside the EEA appropriate safeguards on data security and processing are applied.

2.2 Who has access to your data

Within Greenpeace

Within Greenpeace, only those authorised to process your data can access your data. We work hard to ensure our staff and volunteers can only see the data they need to perform their tasks. All our staff are trained to understand data protection and what they need to do to keep your data secure. We review our data awareness training regularly to ensure it is up to date. We ensure volunteers are given appropriate data awareness and protection training where they are responsible for handling data, for example, if they are collecting petition signatures at an event.

Working with Third Parties

We will never sell or swap your details with other organisations

We do use trusted companies like fundraising agencies, fulfilment houses and software platform providers to administer some activities, in which case they will use your details only for that purpose – for example, applying your name and address to a mailing of Connect magazine.

We sometimes collaborate with other NGOs, social enterprises, and universities on research and analysis and occasionally share data with them with appropriate data-sharing agreements in place. For example, for ‘The Big Plastic Count’ we share postcode data with our partners to analyse patterns in household plastic use in different geographical areas. In such cases, your data will be used by our partners for research purposes only, and they will not use it to personally contact you.

2.3 Data Retention

Data collected by Greenpeace will be retained only for an appropriate length of time; We have a data retention policy which sets out how long we will keep information according to the type of record. In some cases, the retention periods are governed by law, while in others we are guided by best practice and our operational needs.

When we no longer need to retain your personal information we will ensure it is securely disposed of.

You have the right to ask us to delete personal information we hold about you in some circumstances, for example, if we are processing the data on the basis of consent and you wish to withdraw that consent.

3. How Greenpeace will communicate with you

For any marketing communications about our campaigning, fundraising or volunteering we will only contact you via email and SMS if we have your consent to do so.

We may send you marketing materials by mail or via phone if we have your consent or we believe you would be interested in our campaign unless you have expressed a preference not to receive such content. We will send those with a regular payment set up with us a copy of Connect, our informative magazine.

To respond to your queries we will contact you either via the medium you used to contact us or by a medium you have indicated you would like us to respond with. If we need to contact you for any administrative purposes then we will usually email you or call you depending on what contact details we have available for you.

4. How you can affect the way Greenpeace communicates with you

The first time you sign up to one of our campaigns or make a donation you will choose how you would prefer to be contacted. We will respect your choices and not make any changes to your preferences unless you change them yourself, or contact us to change them on your behalf.

You can change your mind on how you would like us to contact you or tell us that you would no longer like to hear from us through our preference form, by calling 020 4525 3241 or emailing us via the contact form.

If we are processing your data on the basis of consent and we don’t hear from you for five years we will stop contacting you. If this happens and you want to start hearing from us again you can tell us using the methods mentioned above.

The Fundraising Regulator, an independent body which regulates fundraising practices, also operates the Fundraising Preference Service (FPS) which you can use to indicate which non-profit organisations you would no longer like to hear from.

5. Your Data Protection Rights

Under data protection legislation you also have a number of additional rights which are outlined below:

  • You have the right to be informed about how Greenpeace uses your data.
  • Where we are processing data based on your consent, you have the right to withdraw this at any time.
  • You have the right to change your personal information if it is incomplete or inaccurate.
  • You have the right to request the deletion or removal of your personal information in certain circumstances, including where it is no longer necessary for us to hold it for the purposes for which we are processing it.
  • You have the right to restrict our processing of your data if there is disagreement about its accuracy or legitimate usage.

Subject Access Requests

You have a right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you, which Greenpeace will supply to you within one month. Greenpeace will ask for proof of identity and may charge a fee should any request be unusually complex or time-consuming. If you would like to request a copy of the personal information Greenpeace UK holds on you, please contact our supporter services team.

6. How Greenpeace protects children’s privacy

The safety of children is very important to us. If you are aged under 16 and would like to support or get involved with Greenpeace, please make sure you have your parent/guardian’s permission before sharing any personal information with us.

All applicable laws are followed with respect to data collection from children. Where we have date of birth information, we will not share data collected from children with any third parties at any time under any circumstances.

7. People in vulnerable circumstances

Greenpeace recognises the importance of protecting people in vulnerable circumstances and follows the guidance issued by the Institute of Fundraising on Treating Donors Fairly. This guidance supports our staff and volunteers to safeguard the privacy of people in vulnerable circumstances.

8. How to find out more or make a complaint

Greenpeace operates in accordance with all relevant UK data protection laws. If you would like to find out more about these laws and how you could be affected beyond what is mentioned in this privacy policy, please visit the Information Commissioner’s Office.

If you have any specific questions about how Greenpeace processes your data which are not answered here or you would like to make a complaint about how we have managed your data then please either write, call or email us via the details below.

Viv Hadlow
Head of Insight and Analytics
Greenpeace
Canonbury Villas
London
N1 2PN

Tel: 0330 335 3632 or email us via the contact form.

If you are not satisfied with our response to your enquiry then you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office directly via the details on their website.

9. Changes to this policy

Our Privacy Policy may change from time to time. The amended version will be published on our website and any significant changes will be communicated to supporters either on the website or directly.

This will replace any previous privacy policy wording and all conditions and terms of use will be in force from the date of publication.

Last updated: 12/01/2024