Privacy policy

Who runs this service?

This site is a service provided to Borsetshire County Council by SocietyWorks Ltd, a limited company (05798215). SocietyWorks is a trading subsidiary of mySociety, a registered charity in England and Wales (1076346), who also run the national fixmystreet.com website with which this site is linked. Henceforth this privacy policy will refer to mySociety.

Reports made on this site also appear on fixmystreet.com, and vice versa.

These reports and the associated user data are stored in a single database which is hosted by mySociety. They are accessible to mySociety and Borsetshire County Council administrators.

What information we collect and how we use it

When you make a report

You may have provided us with personal information including:

  • Your name
  • Contact details

This information, together with details of the issue, are routed directly to the contact or contacts responsible for fixing it, based on two pieces of data: the issue category, and its location.

If the issue is the responsibility of Borsetshire County Council, your report comes into our system. But this site also has the ability to route your report to a different authority if they are the ones responsbile for it. This might be a different council, or a body such as TfL or Highways England.

If the report falls within our boundaries, your report appears publicly on both this site and on fixmystreet.com, in some cases even if it has been sent to another authority. It may additionally appear on that other authority’s website, if they also use FixMyStreet as their reporting software.

Information that you enter in the email address and phone number fields are not published, and your name is only published if you have checked the box opting to do so.

FixMyStreet provides RSS/JSON feeds, accessible from both fixmystreet.com and this site, which allow anyone to publish reports on their own website or page. Typically these feeds consist of reports made within a specific local area, and are published on community or local interest sites.

Note that anything you include in the body of your report will be published in one or all of the places listed above, so please take care to keep personal information such as your contact details to the correct fields.

mySociety stores your personal details, along with your password where used (passwords are stored in a format that is unreadable to anyone — including mySociety staff — known as a hash) and any reports or updates you make, in our own database.

These are accessible only to mySociety’s administrators, who adhere to strict data-handling policies, and to Borsetshire County Council staff, who abide by their own data-handling and security policies.

When you add an update

When you add an update to a report, this is recorded along with the initial report and your user data.

When you subscribe to an alert by email

mySociety collects your email address, which they store with the details of whichever alert/s you have subscribed to.

When you contact the support team

Your message will be accessible to Borsetshire County Council’s support staff, who adhere to our data-handling and security policies. If your issue is about the use or functions of FixMyStreet, it may be passed to mySociety’s support staff (including personal details, such as name and email address, in order to help troubleshoot issues), whose privacy policy can be seen here.

Your personal information is never shared, or used for purposes other than those listed above, unless we are obliged to by law.

Research

mySociety sometimes use report data, or share it with trusted third parties, for research. This data is completely anonymised and contains no identifying details such as names, email addresses or the content of reports. mySociety’s Research Data Release policy may be seen on request to them.

What to expect

  • When we respond to your report, if you have provided us with an email address, in most cases our reply will go directly to your email inbox. Responses and updates are also published on the report’s public webpage.
  • You’ll receive an email if someone leaves an update on a report you’ve made.
  • Borsetshire County Council and/or mySociety will only ever send you emails in relation to your reports or use of the site. Your personal details will not be used for any other purpose.

Subscribing to alerts

If you subscribe to an alert, you’ll receive an automated email every time someone makes a report within the area you specify. The frequency of these emails will depend on how large your chosen area is and how many reports are made within it, but you won’t get more than one an hour. If you’ve opted to follow a report, you’ll receive an email each time an update is made, which could be a change in status made by our team, a comment made by another member of the public, or an update from the person who made the report originally.

Unsubscribing

Every alert email we send contains an unsubscribe link at the bottom for you to stop receiving that alert.

Legal basis for processing

In using FixMyStreet for any of the functions listed above (sending a report, leaving an update, email alerts or site registration), your data is processed by both Borsetshire County Council and mySociety.

Borsetshire County Council is the data controller and mySociety is a data processor.

Your data is processed by Borsetshire County Council under the legal basis 6(1)(e) – public task. Borsetshire County Council asserts that the processing of users’ personal information is necessary for us to perform a task in the public interest or for our official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law. Our obligation to keep highways in good order and to keep public areas safe and functional are set in law.

mySociety also runs a service called FixMyStreet. If you report a problem that Borsetshire County Council is responsible for directly on FixMyStreet, rather than this site, mySociety will share your report (and personal details if provided) with us.

This sharing is in accordance with the FixMyStreet terms of service and their privacy statement. When Borsetshire County Council receives this information we will hold it as explained on this page.

Retention periods and your right to removal

Reports and updates

Except in exceptional circumstances, reports or updates made through this site or FixMyStreet are not deleted. Historic reports provide an invaluable resource for researchers into the quantity and type of street problems made across the UK during the years the site has been running. This research can help inform civic planners, developers, coders, historians and social scientists, among others.

Therefore, if you ask for a report to be removed, in most cases you will instead be invited to anonymise it, so that there is no public connection between the content and your name. You can anonymise reports singly, or in bulk, by logging in to your account on either this site or on fixmystreet.com and clicking on the ‘“Hide your name” link beside the time and date of your report. From here you may anonymise this report or all reports you have made.

If you do not already have an account, it is simple to register, and once you have done so you will have access to all the reports you have made under that email address.

Changes you make to your reports will apply immediately on this site, on fixmystreet.com and will also be reflected, sometimes with a delay, anywhere else they appear (see “What information we collect and how we use it”, above, for more details about where reports are published). If you do not see the changes, please ‘hard refresh’ your browser by eg pressing the Ctrl and F5 keys simultaneously.

Search engines such as Google often take a little time to reflect changes to content, but anonymising your report should also remove your name from their search results once the pages have been recrawled by their robots.

Your personal information

As well as your report or update appearing on this site and the FixMyStreet website, your details, including name and email address, are stored in FixMyStreet’s admin system.

If you submit a report but do not click on the confirmation email, your report will not be sent or published; however, the report and your details remain in our system and are accessible to site administrators.

Personal details will automatically be removed from the database after two years of inactivity of the associated account. Please contact us if you would like your details to be removed from our admin database sooner than that.

Your right to object

The General Data Protection Regulation gives you the right to object to our processing of your personal information and to ask us to stop processing it. However, it also gives us the right to continue to process it if we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds for the processing that override your interests, rights and freedoms. To exercise your right to object, you can contact us, giving specific reasons why you are objecting to the processing of your personal data. These reasons should be based upon your particular situation.

Your right to access

You may contact us at any time to ask to see what personal data we hold about you.

Your right to complain

If you believe that we have mishandled your data, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office. You can report a concern here (but do contact us first, so that we can try and help).

Cookies

To make our service easier or more useful, we sometimes place small data files on your computer or mobile phone, known as cookies; many websites do this. We use this information to, for example, remember you have logged in so you don’t need to do that on every page, or to measure how people use the website so we can improve it and make sure it works properly. Below, we list the cookies and services that this site can use.

Name Typical Content Expires
fixmystreet_app_session A random unique identifier When browser is closed