Your privacy

The Aura website and online chat has been designed to be able to be used completely anonymously and we operate on a data minimisation principle in line with GDPR.

You do not need to register, give a name, email or telephone number to access either the website or the online chat functions and support.

Online Chat

The live chat function has been designed to collect no identifiable information. When you use the online chat you will be automatically assigned an anonymous user ID. This will be randomly assigned each time you use the chat.

One-to-one Referral Form

The referral contact form has been designed to collect only essential information about you to be able to make a referral for one-to-one support.

Referrals to external organisations

If you request a referral to be made on your behalf to an external organisation, we will take only essential information about you to be able to make this referral. This information will be stored in accordance with the GDPR Regulations and destroyed within 3 months from the date of the referral.

No. We will never ask you for personal details on the online chat. It has been designed so you can use it completely anonymously. You don’t need to register or give us a name, email address or phone number to access it. When you use the online chat you will be automatically assigned an anonymous user ID.

At no point do you need to give us any personal information at all if you don’t want to.

If you would like us to make a referral on your behalf on the online chat we would need to take some details then but only required information would be taken in order to make the referral and this is entirely voluntary (see Data Protection and Information Sharing below for more information).

Personal Information

Personal information collected to make referrals on your behalf will be used for this sole purpose and will never be passed to any external or third party organisations outside of the Aura service without your consent.

The only time we would share personal information is:

• If you give us permission to speak to another service e.g. to make a referral on your behalf
• If we have concerns that someone is at risk of serious harm

The website collects anonymised Google analytics data regarding website and app use for monitoring and evaluation purposes (for more info see ‘Cookies’ below).

Referral Form

Aura provides one-to-one personalised support. For this purpose a referral made to Aura (e.g. through the website form) will be assigned to the next available Worker.

Our website and online chat are hosted in the UK and so no data will ever be transferred outside of the European Economic Area (“the EEA”). The server location includes firewall protection and secure monitoring software which generates alerts in the event of a hack attempt or the detection of malware.

Online Chat

No record of the online chat transcripts are ever saved. As soon as an online chat has been finished and the window is closed it is immediately deleted from the servers.

One-to-one Referral Form

Personal information collected to make an internal referral to a Worker will be stored in accordance with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

Referrals to external organisations

Any personal information collected to make external referrals on your behalf is stored in accordance with GDPR Regulations and destroyed within 3 months from the date of the referral.

Information sharing

If you do voluntarily share personal information with us, we will not share this information with any other service outside of Aura. The only time we would share personal information is:

• If you give us permission to speak to another service e.g. to make a referral on your behalf
• If we have concerns that someone is at risk of serious or imminent harm – in these circumstances we will only take action if we have all the necessary information

If we have to break confidentiality due to concerns about risk of harm we will always try to discuss this with you first but please feel free to ask us if you have any questions or concerns.

Access to your information

You have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you or request that any information about you is destroyed. If you would like a copy of some, or all of your personal information or would like us to destroy any information we have, please email us at aura@sacro.org.uk

Cookies

Cookies are small text files, stored on your computer to help us remember things like your preferences or to help us find out how many people are accessing our site. This information is really important to us.

If you're concerned about cookies, we recommend that you change your browser settings to disable them - either for this site or for everything. But you should be aware that this means many functions of sites, such as online shops or most sites where you log in, won't work anymore. You can find out how to turn off cookies at allaboutcookies.org.

We also use Google's Analytics service to collect really important information on how many of you are visiting our site. If you don't want this information to be passed on, you can opt out of Google Analytics.