AWMH friends will comply with GDPR regulations and maintain personal data security and privacy using the following meausures.

Who we are

Suggested text: Our website address is: https://awmh.uk.

Personal Information

Miminum required for membership

Your given and second name, given name, preferred form of address and email address as a minimum in order for us to administer friends business.

Your name and general area of residence, e.g. ‘Edinburgh’ to be published in a private (full members only) list on this web-site.

Your name will be circulated to other members as part of internal communications. e.g. meeting attendance minutes.

Information which you may consent to being published

Public publication on this website

Your name and general area of residence, e.g. ‘Edinburgh’

Your photograph to be publicly published.

Shared with full (paid) membership

Your email address being available to members only.

Your wish to join a friends ‘WhatsApp‘ group. By the nature of WhatsApp your mobile telephone number will become available to other members.

AWMH friends will not hold telephone number records on their database

Consent management

As part of your application for membership the above consent choices will be recorded within our database.

Data retention

Once membership has ceased your records will be removed from our database.

Data security and management

Names and email addresses together with membership status, privacy choices and subscription records will be held on a database hosted on UK based servers by Krystal Hosting Ltd, 124 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX

https://krystal.io/legal/privacy-policy

Database access will be limited to friends officals necessary for effective management.

Communication methods

Officials MUST use email accounts and addresses hosted by Krystal for all communication with members relating to friends business.

e.g. friends@awmh.uk, admin@awmh.uk.

General communication will be by grou email in order to preserve email address privacy.

Officials will be permitted to connect their personal computers and devices using email clients such as MS Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird to friends email servers in order to conduct friends business.

Online meetings will, at present of neccessity, be arranged using a personal MS teams account.

Forum, comments and interaction with this website.

Comments

Suggested text: When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

Suggested text: If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. This is to prevent visitors to the website downloading and extracting location data from images.

Cookies

Suggested text: If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Suggested text: Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

How long we retain your data

Suggested text: If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

Suggested text: If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where your data is sent

Suggested text: Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

More about information management

It is a misconception that storing data in a database is less secure than sending it via email. In most cases, the security level of email implementation isn’t that good. Do you know exactly who can access the email? Are you sure that the email recipients don’t forward messages to other parties who you don’t know? What if personal computers are not maintained securely and malware is installed? Do you know in which country mail servers exist?

Things are much clearer if, as we will do your personal information is managed in a database.

first draft 02.04.2026 AH