Privacy notice

1. The short version

We hold information about you so that we can consider your application, confirm your honorary doctorate with the University that awarded it, and run a network in which Fellows can find and contact one another.

We do not sell your information and we do not share it for advertising.

Your name and profile are visible to other admitted members. Nothing about you appears on the public website unless you switch that on yourself.

Your email address and mobile number stay hidden until you accept a connection with someone, and then only that person sees them.

You can change what you share, ask for a copy of what we hold, or close your account, at any time.

The rest of this notice sets that out in full.

2. Who we are

The Society of Honorary Doctors is a new initiative, developed and operated by Space Network Ltd, a company registered in Scotland with company number SC656651, whose registered office is Clyde Offices, 48 West George Street, Suite 2/3, Glasgow G2 1BP.

In this notice, "the Society", "we" and "us" mean Space Network Ltd, operating as the Society of Honorary Doctors. "You" means anyone whose information we hold, including applicants, Fellows, University staff and people who contact us.

We are the data controller for the information described here. That means we decide why it is held and how it is used, and we are answerable for it.

Our registration with the Information Commissioner's Office is ZC085395.

For anything to do with your information, write to info@societyofhonorarydoctors.org.

3. What this notice covers

This notice covers:

• the public website at societyofhonorarydoctors.org
• the member platform you reach after you are admitted
• the emails we send you
• the correspondence we have with Universities to confirm an award
• enquiries and messages sent to us by anyone

4. The information we hold

4.1 When you apply for Fellowship

You give us:

• your first name and last name
• your email address
• your mobile number
• the country you are based in
• a headline describing your position and employer
• the University that awarded your honorary doctorate, the award and the year
• a short biography, your areas of expertise, and what you are willing to offer
• a link to your LinkedIn profile, if you choose to give one
• a photograph, if you choose to upload one

Every field on the application form other than the optional ones above is required, because an application we cannot check is an application we cannot approve.

We also record the date you accepted these terms and the choices you made about what is shared.

4.2 When we confirm your award

We record that we asked your awarding University to confirm the award, the date we asked, the name and role of the person we asked, the answer we received, and the date it arrived. Where we confirm an award from a published list instead, we record where we found it.

4.3 When you use the platform

We hold:

• your profile as you edit it, and your photograph
• the connection requests you send and receive, and whether they were accepted
• what you post and reply in the Common Room, and the posts you star
• articles and submissions you send to The Honorand, the Society's e-zine, which is published openly on the website
• events you register for
• challenges you raise or respond to, where your chapter is running them
• any flag you raise about a post or a person, and any flag raised about you
• your account settings and email preferences

We also hold your date of birth. We use it to apply the reduced Fellowship rate for members over 70, and, together with the year of your award, to understand and report on the age profile of honorary doctorate holders and how old people are when they are honoured. Age is only ever reported as totals, ranges and averages. Your date of birth is not part of your profile, it is never shown to other members, and it does not appear on the public website.

4.4 When you help with our research

The Society holds the only record of its kind of who Universities choose to honour. To describe that population properly we ask Fellows a short set of optional questions about their background, their education before the award, and their relationship with the University that honoured them.

Answering is entirely optional. You may answer some questions and not others, change your answers at any time from Edit profile, or withdraw altogether. Withdrawing removes your answers from our records.

Your answers are never shown on your profile. They are never visible to other Fellows, to University staff, or to anyone outside the Society. We publish findings only as totals and percentages of those who answered, alongside the response rate, and we never publish a figure where the number of people behind it is small enough to identify anybody.

Two of the questions, about ethnicity and about disability or long-term health conditions, are special category data under Article 9 of the UK GDPR. We ask for your explicit consent to those two questions separately from the rest, and you can withdraw that consent on its own without withdrawing from the research altogether.

If you close your account, your research answers are deleted with it.

4.5 When you contact us

We keep your message and our reply, together with your name and contact details, for as long as we need them to deal with the matter and to keep a record of what was said.

4.6 Technical information

Our website and platform record ordinary technical information such as your browser type, your device, your approximate location from your IP address, and the pages you visited. We use this to keep the service working and secure. The cookie notice explains what is set in your browser and what you can turn off.

5. Why we hold it, and our legal basis

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether our interest is outweighed by your rights. You can ask us for that assessment, and you can object. Section "Your rights" explains how.

6. Confirming your award with your University

This section matters, so it has its own place.

When you apply, we contact the University that awarded your honorary doctorate and ask it to confirm the award. We tell them your name, the award and the year, and that you have applied to join the Society. We do not send them your biography, your contact details or anything else from your application.

They can answer in one of three ways. They can confirm the award. They can tell us they are not able to confirm it, which we treat as a request to check the public record rather than as a refusal. Or they may not reply at all.

Where the answer does not settle the question, we look at the University's own published list of honorary graduates and at other public records. There are ordinary reasons an award is hard to confirm: records are often not held centrally, names change, departments move and institutions merge. If we still cannot settle it, we tell you plainly where it stands and what would help.

7. What other people can see

Society administration can see everything a member can see, and the records needed to run the Society. Society administration does not make connections with members and does not receive members' contact details through the connection route.

You can change any of these settings yourself from your account, and a change takes effect at once. If you withdraw consent to appear on the public website, the copy of your photograph held for the public site is deleted with it.

8. Who we share it with

We share your information with the organisations that run the service for us. They act on our instructions, they are bound by contract, and they do not use your information for their own purposes. Annex A lists them.

We also share:

• your name, award and year with the University that awarded your honorary doctorate, for confirmation, as described above
• your name and role with your chapter's University staff, where you are a member of that chapter
• information with our professional advisers, such as accountants and lawyers, where they need it
• information with a regulator, a court or the police where the law requires it

If the Society transfers this activity to a new legal entity, which we expect to do as the Society is established in its own right, member information moves with it. We will tell you before that happens and the protections in this notice continue to apply.

We do not sell your information. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not use it to train artificial intelligence models, and our service providers are instructed not to.

9. Where your information is held

The member database and file storage are hosted in the United Kingdom, in the London region of our hosting provider.

Some of our service providers are based in the United States or process information there. Where information leaves the United Kingdom, we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, or on the United Kingdom's adequacy regulations where they apply. Annex A says where each provider sits.

10. How long we keep it

11. Your rights

You have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the information we hold about you. You can download most of it yourself from your account at any time
• correct it if it is wrong. Most of it you can edit yourself
• ask us to delete it, which for a member means closing the account
• object to our using it where we rely on legitimate interests
• restrict what we do with it while a question about it is being settled
• withdraw consent at any time, for the public website, for Society news, or for a connection you have accepted. Withdrawing consent does not undo anything done before you withdrew it
• ask for it in a portable form so that you can take it elsewhere

Write to info@societyofhonorarydoctors.org and we will answer within one month. If a request is complicated we may take up to two further months, and we will tell you if that happens and why.

There is no charge.

12. Automated decisions

We do not make decisions about you by automated means. An application is read and decided by a person.

13. Keeping it secure

Access to the platform is controlled by sign-in, and every table in our database carries rules that decide what each account can read and write. Member photographs are held in private storage. Contact details sit in a separate table from the rest of a profile, so that showing somebody a profile does not show them an email address.

We keep an audit trail of administrative actions. We review who has administrative access.

No system is perfect. If a breach happens that is likely to put your rights at risk, we will tell you and the Information Commissioner's Office, within the time the law allows.

14. Children

The Society is for people who hold an honorary doctorate, and for staff at the Universities that award them. The platform is not intended for anyone under 18 and we do not knowingly collect information about children.

15. Changes to this notice

We will update this notice as the Society develops. The version and date are at the top. If a change affects you materially, we will tell you by email before it takes effect.

16. Complaints

Tell us first, at info@societyofhonorarydoctors.org. We would rather put something right than have you take it elsewhere.

You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, which regulates this in the United Kingdom.

Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF. Telephone 0303 123 1113. ico.org.uk

17. Annex A: the organisations that process information for us

We take no payments at present and we hold no payment details. When Fellowship carries a fee, the payment provider will be named here before the first payment is taken.

We will keep this list current. Ask us and we will tell you who holds what.