1. Introduction

1.1 Concise Clinical Consulting Ltd (also secretariat to the Cardiorenal Forum) collects personal information when conducting its business activities and takes your privacy very seriously. Some of this information, such as users’ behaviour when browsing our web site, is anonymous and cannot identify you personally. Other information is collected directly, such as when you register to attend the Cardiorenal Forum meeting or other event. This Privacy policy aims to ensure that everything we do with your data is as clear and transparent as possible and explains how we collect, hold and process your personal information. It also explains what rights you have to access or change your personal data. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

2. About us

2.1 We are a company, registered in England under company number 05825956 (registered address 89 New Bond Street, London W1S 1DA).

2.2 You can contact us as follows:
FAO: The Secretariat for the Cardiorenal Forum,
Address: 4th Floor, Elsley Court, 20-22 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 8BE
Email: info@cardiorenalforum.com

3. Information we may collect about you

3.1 Information that you provide us
3.1.1 We will collect any information that you provide to us when you:
a) are making an enquiry over the phone, email, mail or through our website;
b) register for one of our meetings, events or services;
c) speak at or sponsor one of our meetings or events;
d) work with us on a special project(s) such as articles, videos and podcasts;
e) subscribe or opt-in to our mailing lists;
f) enter into a contract with us;
g) submit an application to a job vacancy;
h) respond to any of our communications with you.
3.1.2 The information you provide to use might include your name, address, email address, phone number, place of work and job title. If you are attending, sponsoring or exhibiting at one of our meetings, you will provide your payment details. If you are speaking at one of our meetings or events, appearing in a podcast or video, submitting an article, or job application, you may also provide additional information about your academic and work history, references and any other such similar information as may be necessary.
3.1.3 From time to time we might ask if you would be willing to participate in our surveys; if you agree, we will also collect any information that you provide as part of that survey.

3.2 Information we collect about you
3.2.1 We will collect any information contained in any correspondence between us. For example, if you contact us by email or telephone, or by using a query button on our website, we will keep a record of that correspondence.
3.2.2 We will collect information relating to your attendance at our meetings or events (such as your name, job title, address, email address and phone number). We may also ask you for bank details if you have provided services to us.
3.2.3 We will also collect certain information about how you use our website and the device that you use to access our website. This might include your IP address, geographical location, device information (such as your hardware model, mobile network information, unique device identifiers), browser type, referral source, length of visit to the website, number of page views, the search queries you make on the website and similar information. This information may be collected by a third-party website analytics service provider on our behalf and/or may be collected using cookies. For more information on cookies please read the cookies paragraph below;
3.2.4 We will collect information about any Continuing Professional Development (CPD) accreditation you have earned undertaking any of our educational activities (which may include whether you attended a meeting or not).

3.3 Information we receive from third parties
3.3.1 We will receive information about you from third parties, for example:
a) if you have given your details to attend one of our meetings to a third party organiser we have appointed,
b) if they are recommending you to us for the purposes of any of our activities, such as speaking, chairing or exhibiting at the Cardiorenal Forum meeting, or writing an article for us, or working with us on educational activities or other projects;
c) in order to optimise your web experience, we use cookies to remember visitor preferences when interacting with the website. Log files are stored on the web server saving details such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, referring page and time of visit.
d) from services, such as: Google Analytics, that generate detailed statistics about how visitors use and navigate our website; LinkedIn which provides contact details or professional history/qualifications;
e) if you are a job applicant, we may contact your referees to provide information about you.
3.3.2 We might also receive information about you from third parties if you have indicated to such third party that you would like to hear from us.

4. How we use information about you and recipients of your information

4.1 We take your privacy very seriously and rigorously enforce our privacy policy to ensure your email remains free of unwanted junk mail. We will use your information for the purposes listed below either on the basis of:
4.1.1 performance of your contract with us and the provision of our services to you;
4.1.2 your consent (where we request it); or
4.1.3 our legitimate interests (see paragraph below).

4.2 We may use your information for the following purposes:
4.2.1 to keep in contact with you about our events (such as the Cardiorenal Forum meetings), news, CPD activities, new website features or services that we believe may interest you, provided that we have the requisite permission to do so, either on the basis of your consent where we have requested it, or our legitimate interests to provide you with marketing communications where we may lawfully do so;
4.2.2 to provide you with access to our website in a manner convenient and optimal and with personalised content relevant to you including sharing your information with our website hosts and developers (on the basis of our legitimate interest to ensure our website is presented in an effective and optimal manner);
4.2.3 to be served personalised content and/or advertising on the website or via our e-newsletters. These may occasionally include advertising on behalf of third parties;
4.2.4 to administer payment of honorarium and sharing your information with our payment service provider (on the basis of performing our contract with you);
4.2.5 to process any job applications you submit to us including sharing this with any third party recruitment agency, should we use one;
4.2.6 to provide customer service and support (on the basis of our contract with you), deal with enquiries or complaints about the website and share your information with our website developer, IT support provider, delivery service provider, payment services provider, as necessary, to provide customer support (on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing the correct products and services to our website users);
4.2.7 to carry out aggregated and anonymised research about general engagement with our website (on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing the right kinds of products and services to our website users);
4.2.8 to protect, investigate, and deter against fraudulent, unauthorised, or illegal activity, including without limitation plagiarism and identity fraud (on the basis of our legitimate interests to operate a safe and lawful business or where we have a legal obligation to do so); and
4.2.9 to enable us to comply with our policies and procedures and enforce our legal rights, or to protect the rights, property or safety of our employees and share your information with our technical and legal advisors (on the basis of our legitimate interests to operate a safe and lawful business or where we have a legal obligation to do so).

4.3 Where we refer to using your information on the basis of our “legitimate interests”, we mean our legitimate business interests in conducting and managing our business and our relationship with you, including the legitimate interest we have in:
4.3.1 personalising, enhancing, modifying or otherwise improving the services and/or communications that we provide to you;
4.3.2 detecting and preventing fraud and operating a safe and lawful business;
4.3.3 improving security and optimisation of our network, sites and services;
4.3.4 provision of CPD learning activities.

4.4 Where we use your information for our legitimate interests, we make sure that we take into account any potential impact that such use may have on you. Our legitimate interests don’t automatically override yours and we won’t use your information if we believe your interests should override ours unless we have other grounds to do so (such as your consent or a legal obligation). If you have any concerns about our processing please refer to details of “Your Rights” below.

5. Who we might share your information with

5.1 In connection with the purposes and on the lawful grounds described above and in addition to the recipients of your information as described above, we may share your personal information with third parties that we work with such as:
5.1.1 third parties such as Campaign Monitor, for the emailing of our newsletters, Google Analytics for the provision of website analytics, and others we work with to deliver our business (including for example, hosting or operating the website and our databases, site analytics, providing editorial production services, printers, providing technical assistance and support and providing fraud and plagiarism detection services;
5.1.2 any selected third party that you consent to our sharing your information with for marketing purposes;
5.1.3 any prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets, only in the event that we decide to sell or buy any business or assets; and
5.1.4 any other third parties (including legal or other advisors, regulatory authorities, courts and government agencies) where necessary to enable us to enforce our legal rights, or to protect the rights, property or safety of our employees or where such disclosure may be permitted or required by law.

5.2 We require third parties to maintain appropriate security to protect your information from unauthorised access or processing.

6. Cookies

6.1 We use various types of cookies. These small digital signature files are stored by your web browser to allow information such as your browsing preferences to be recorded when visiting the website. Also they may be used to track your return visits to the website. If you would prefer that this information is not gathered, you can alter your browser settings to refuse any cookie or to alert you to when a cookie is being sent. For further details of how to do this, visit: http://www.aboutcookies.org/. Refusing cookies may affect the functioning of the website, and also prevent you accessing certain features of the website.

6.2 Third party cookies may also be set through our website from links to third party websites, such as from advertisers, institutions, other journals. To find out about their privacy and cookie policy you must consult the individual websites.

7. How we look after your information

7.1 Concise Clinical Consulting Ltd takes your privacy very seriously and rigorously enforces its privacy policy to ensure your email remains free of unwanted junk mail.

7.2 You have the right at any time to opt out of Concise Clinical Consulting Ltd contacting you by unsubscribing using a link within the email that you receive. You may also contact us to request to opt-out of receiving our communications by emailing info@cardiorenalforum.com from the email account you would like to have removed from our list.

7.3 We operate a policy of “privacy by design” by looking for opportunities to minimise the amount of personal information we hold about you. We use appropriate technological and operational security measures to protect your information against any unauthorised access or unlawful use, such as:
7.3.1 ensuring the physical security of our offices, warehouses or other sites;
7.3.2 ensuring the physical and digital security of our equipment and devices by using appropriate password protection (and encryption);
7.3.3 maintaining a data protection policy for, and delivering data protection training to, our employees;

7.4 Limiting access to your personal information to those in our company who need to use it in the course of their work.

7.5 We will retain your information for as long as is necessary to provide you with the services that you have requested from us or for as long as we reasonably require to retain the information for our lawful business purposes, such as for the purposes of exercising our legal rights or where we are permitted to do so for purposes of academic, literary expression and research purposes. We operate a data retention policy and look to find ways to reduce the amount of information we hold about you and the length of time that we need to keep it. For example,
7.5.1 we archive our email and paper correspondence regularly
7.5.2 we retain information relating orders, refunds and customer queries
7.5.3 we maintain a suppression list of email addresses of individuals who no longer wish to be contacted by us. So that we can comply with their wishes we must store this information permanently.

8. Your rights to the information we hold about you

8.1 You have certain rights in respect of the information that we hold about you, including:
8.1.1 the right to opt out of us contacting you with our newsletter services;
8.1.2 the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes;
8.1.3 the right to request access to the information that we hold about you; and
8.1.4 in certain circumstances, the right to ask us to stop processing information about you.

8.2 You may exercise your rights above by contacting us using the contact details above in this Privacy Notice and by using the unsubscribe link in any of the newsletters you may receive.

8.3 Please note that we may need to retain certain information for our own record-keeping and research purposes. We may also need to send you service-related communications relating to your website user account even when you have requested not to receive marketing communications. If you have unsubscribed to any of our newsletter services, your name will be kept on a suppression list to ensure we do not send any further newsletters in the category you have unsubscribed from.

8.4 Note that if you make a request to access information that we hold about you in accordance with paragraph 8.1. In certain circumstances we may need to charge you a small fee to assist us with the administration of your request.

8.5 From 25 May 2018, in accordance with new data protection laws which will be in force from that date, you will have certain additional rights in respect of the information that we hold about you, including:
8.5.1 the right to lodge a complaint about us to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (https://ico.org.uk/) or the relevant authority in your country of work or residence;
8.5.2 the right to withdraw your consent for our use of your information in reliance of your consent (refer to paragraph 4 to see when we are relying on your consent), which you can do by contacting us using any of the details at the top of this Privacy Notice;
8.5.3 the right to object to our using your information on the basis of our legitimate interests (refer to paragraph 4 above to see when we are relying on our legitimate interests); and
8.5.4 the right to receive a copy of any information we hold about you in connection with the performance of our contract with you or on the basis of your consent (or request that we transfer this to another service provider) in a structured, commonly-used, machine readable format; and
8.5.5 the right to ask us to limit or cease processing or erase information we hold about you in certain circumstances.

8.6 You may contact us with the details at the top of this Privacy Notice if you wish to action any of these additional rights and we will comply with your requests unless we have a lawful reason not to do so.

9. Changes to this privacy notice

9.1 We may make changes to this Privacy Notice from time to time. We will post any changes to our site, or notify you of any material changes by e-mail. We may ask our registered users to periodically update their account settings.

9.2 If you have any questions about the privacy and cookies policy – or any other aspect of the Concise Clinical Consulting Ltd service – please use the contact details above.

This Privacy Notice was updated on August 18th 2022