Privacy & Safety Info

Confidentiality

Worried about speaking with us?

We get it - talking about topics that may be personal to you such as drugs or alcohol can feel risky. We’re here to help, not get you in trouble. What you tell us stays private, unless we believe you or someone else is at serious risk of harm, or a serious crime is involved. Your worker at The Matthew Project will explain this to you when you first meet with them.

Examples of where we may need to share information:

Someone is being abused.
There is a serious threat to your life or safety.

Examples of where we wouldn’t need to share information:

You’ve been using drugs or alcohol.
You’re worried about how substance use is affecting you.

Contacting us

When you contact us, we will listen without judging and explain our confidentiality policy. We may ask you questions so we can explore your needs and provide you with the best support. Any information we record will be confidential and stored securely. We will only share information about you when we think that you or someone else is at significant risk of harm. You can see our Online Safety Policy here, and our Safeguarding Policy here.

When you contact us the information we collect from you will depend on why you have contacted us, what you are comfortable sharing and what action you would like us to take.

Advice line call information will be stored securely, detailing the date/time of the call and the reason for the call. We will not keep your name or contact details unless you have asked us to contact you back.

We will only keep data for as long as is necessary.

Privacy

We take your privacy very seriously. Before you start chatting with us, we will ask you to read our information, so you understand what this means for you and when we may have to share your information.

If you follow any links to any other website, you will no longer be subject to our privacy terms.

What is Data Protection?

The Data Protection Law is in place to make sure that we use your personal data lawfully and keep it safe. If you have any questions relating to GDPR/Data protection, please email dataprotection@matthewproject.org. You can see our Data Protection Procedure for more information. You can see our Privacy Policy here.

Consent

By starting a Chat, you will be consenting to us having information about you. You can withdraw your consent at any point by telling the worker, or by emailing us at unity@matthewproject.org

What Information we collect and who will see it.

We use your information to provide you with the support you have requested. There may be times where sharing information is helpful, for example, if we have serious concern for your safety or the safety of someone else.
When you use our Online Chat, we will save your IP address and details about why you have contacted us. We will keep a Transcript (a written record) of conversations between you and our workers. Your full information will only be seen by our staff unless we have a serious concern for your safety or the safety of others. Anonymised data collected from our Online Chat or website may be used to provide statistical data for our funders. No personal details will be shared.

Keeping your Information Safe

We do all we can to keep the information we hold about you safe, please read our Privacy Notice. We use other companies to provide services for us, we ensure that these providers meet all legal requirements in line with GDPR guidance Data protection laws.

Our website is provided by WIX https://support.wix.com/en/article/wixs-privacy-policy who process all the data collected from people who visit our website, including our ‘Contact us’ forms. Comms 100 provide our Online Chat https://www.comm100.com/platform/security/

Chat transcripts will stored securely and kept by us for a period of three months, they will then be automatically deleted. If there are safeguarding concerns in a chat transcript, these will be kept in a separate folder of the Unity chat email inbox for 12 months. Any safeguarding concerns will be shared with our safeguarding Managers and may be shared with other services if required. They will automatically be deleted after 12 months unless they are part of an ongoing investigation.

If you are already accessing support from Unity and you would like your chat to be saved to your record, or a message passed to your worker, we may need to ask you a few questions to confirm your identity.

Your Rights - Right of Access/What to do if your Info is Wrong

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you.

If you want to access your information, send a description of the information you want to see and
proof of your identity by post to The Matthew Project, 70-80 Oak Street, Norwich NR3 3AQ.

We do not accept these requests by email, so we can ensure that we only provide personal information to
the right person. If any if this information is wrong, let us know and we will correct it.

If you have any questions, please contact our Support Team on 01603 626123 or
enquiries@matthewproject.org.

Essential Cookies

Like most websites, we may use ‘cookies’ to help us make our site, and the way you use it, better.
Cookies are small text files that sites transfer to your device (computer, phone or tablet) and make
interacting with a website faster and easier. You may disable these by changing your browser settings, but this may affect how the website functions.

Young People