Who we are

TechExeter is a Community Interest Company and it values your right to privacy. We always have, and we always will.

We use your data to help us with core CIC activities like running meetups, conferences and tech events – we don’t use your data for general purpose marketing purposes or for selling onto third parties.

Types of data we collect

Website Cookies

We only use cookies to make our sites work. We hate the EU cookie privacy rules – they’re stupid and we think it’s ridiculous to have cookie consent for sites that need cookies to function correctly. I mean, how do you even have http sessions without cookies!

Goolge Analytics

When someone visits a TechExeter site, we use a third party service (Google Analytics) to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify anyone. We do not make, and do not allow Google to make, any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website.

Mailing Lists

If you register for our newsletter, we will use that information to tell you about stuff you’ve asked us to tell you about; to contact you if we need to obtain or provide additional information; to check our records are right and to check every now and then that you’re happy and satisfied. We don’t rent or trade email lists with other organisations and businesses.

We use a third-party provider, MailChimp, to deliver our newsletter. We gather statistics around email opening and clicks using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve our e-newsletter. For more information, please see MailChimp’s privacy notice. You can unsubscribe to general mailings at any time of the day or night by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our emails

Ticketing Data

If you register for a ticket to our events through meetup.com or Eventbrite then we will store your details so that we can administer that event. This data is not used for marketing purposes, and only used for contacting you with news in relationship to that event.

Payment details are held securely by these organisations and are never shared directly with us.

Surveys and Reports

We’ll periodically ask you for data to provide ‘state of the region’ reports. These often have their own privacy controls (including options to allow us to publish the data you provide in an anonymised format as open data), but in general the data is treated in accordance with the guidelines here – private by default.

Mentoring

Our mentoring programme requires us to maintain personal and contact information for those enrolled on it. This information will be kept confidential at all times, and only used for the purpose of running the mentoring scheme.

Photographs and Video Footage

We normally take still photographs and video at events that we are involved with, and we use them for promoting TechExeter’s activities. This media could be used inside video montages, posters, presentations and shared on social media, but in all cases they would remain under the control of TechExeter CIC and not passed onto third parties.

If you don’t want your picture to be taken at an event then just come talk to us, either before or at the event.

Third Parties

We work with a variety of organisations (e.g. Exeter City Council) in promoting Tech, Women in STEM and Open Data. We also provide reporting to TechNationUK based on our survey responses and anonymised datasets.

All of the information we provide is to give an idea of the technical makeup of the region, and to help develop our community.

In all instances we never share personal or private details, and we actively work to avoid providing statistics where individuals end up being identifiable. For instance, we may report that 35% of our members are female, or 5% of our members are non-white, but not both combined. And obviously we won’t share company names or contact details!

Access to your personal information

You are entitled to view, amend, or delete the personal information that we hold. Email your request to hello@techexeter.uk . Don’t be disappointed if we can’t find anything to send back to you 🙂

Changes to this Privacy Notice

5th March 2021: Added mentoring section.

We reviewed this policy when GDPR came into force on 25^th May 2018. We didn’t make any major changes as we’ve always respected your privacy, but we expanded our language to make things clearer and easier to read.