Autism Central is a programme hosted by The National Autistic Society (NAS) and is not an official legal entity in its own right. 

At Autism Central and the National Autistic Society, we are committed to protecting your privacy. This policy has been written in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018. If you have any questions regarding our management of your personal data, or wish to lodge a complaint about how we use your personal data, please contact: 

Data Protection Officer 
The National Autistic Society 
393 City Road 
London EC1V 1NG 
Please reference the Autism Central in your communication. 

Email: dataprotection@nas.org.uk 
Phone: 020 7833 2299 

You can read the National Autistic Society Privacy Notice on their website.  

How do we collect information? 

• When you interact with us. We collect personal information from you when you submit a form, register with our website, or otherwise provide us with personal information, whether online, on the phone or in person. 
• When you interact with third parties. We may also receive information about you from third parties, for example when you attend Autism Central training through our training hub providers. Where we obtain your details from a third party, we will process the data to the same standards set out in this policy. 
• When you visit our website. We may gather information to help us improve your online experience. This includes learning about what pages and topics you are interested in. Like most websites, we use cookies to help us do these activities, but wherever possible, we use aggregated or anonymous information that does not identify individuals. To find out more information about the cookies we use or how to opt-out of tracking, please see our cookies policy, below. 

What information do we collect? 

The information you give us may include: 

• Contact information, such as your name, username, country you live in, postcode, email address and phone numbers. 
• Details about you and your connection to autism to support equality of opportunity and monitoring the effectiveness of the programme, these are voluntary questions you can chose not to answer by selecting 'prefer not to say'.

The information we collect may include:

• Details of any contact we have had with you, such as any complaints or incidents. 
• Information about how you use our products and services. 
• Information about how you use our website, apps or other technology, including IP addresses or other device information (please see our Cookies policy below for more details). 

How do we use this information? 

We will use your personal information to provide you with the services, products or information you have requested, for administration and evaluation purposes or to let you know about new resources and services. 

To enable us to communicate with you effectively, we may sometimes use your data or contact you for the purposes of analysis, based on information that you have provided to us. We only ever share your data for these purposes with trusted, contracted suppliers, Autism Central partner training hub providers and NHS England (who provide the Autism Central with funding). The data is shared securely and subject to safe disposal agreements. This type of activity is solely designed to help us provide you with the best programmes possible. 

We will not use your personal data for any other purpose without your consent and we will contact you according to your stated preferences. We hold your data on a secure database and in usable format only for as long as is required, and determined by the recency of your interactions with us, or for as long as we are required to do so by law. 

We only use your personal information for direct marketing purposes if we have your consent. If you no longer want to hear from us, please let us know by emailing information@autismcentral.org.uk  

Your rights 

You have the right to access your information and to ask us to correct any mistakes and delete and restrict the use of your information. You also have the right to object to us using your information, to ask us to transfer information you have provided, to withdraw permission you have given us to use your information and to ask us not to use automated decision-making which will affect you. For more information, see below. 

• Right of access: you have the right to make a request for details of your personal information and a copy of that personal information. 
• Right to rectification: you have the right to have inaccurate information about you corrected or removed. 
• Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’): you have the right to have certain personal information about you deleted from our records. 
• Right to restriction of processing: you have the right to ask us to use your personal information for restricted purposes only 
• Right to object: you have the right to object to us processing (including profiling) your personal information in cases where our processing is based on a task carried out in the public interest or where we have let you know it is necessary to process your information for our or a third party’s legitimate interests. You can object to us using your information for direct marketing and profiling purposes in relation to direct marketing. 
• Right to data portability: you have the right to ask us to transfer the personal information you have given us to you or to someone else in a format that can be read by computer. 
• Right to withdraw consent: you have the right to withdraw any permission you have given us to handle your personal information. If you withdraw your permission, this will not affect the lawfulness of how we used your personal information before you withdrew permission, and we will let you know if we will no longer be able to provide you with your chosen product or service. 
• Right in relation to automated decisions: you have the right not to have a decision which produces legal effects which concern you or which have a significant effect on you based only on automated processing, unless this is necessary for entering into a contract with you, it is authorised by law or you have given your permission for this. We will let you know if we make automated decisions, our legal reasons for doing this and the rights you have. 

Please note: other than your right to object to us using your information for direct marketing (and profiling for the purposes of direct marketing), your rights are not absolute. This means they do not always apply in all cases, and we will let you know in our correspondence with you how we will be able to meet your request relating to your rights. 

If you make a request, we will ask you to confirm your identity if we need to, and to provide information that helps us to understand your request better. We have 21 days to respond to requests relating to automated decisions. For all other requests we have one month from receiving your request to tell you what action we have taken. 

In order to exercise your rights, please email us at dataprotection@nas.org.uk. 

Changes to personal details 

If your personal details change, please help us to keep your information up to date by notifying us. You can do this by: 

Emailing information@autismcentral.org.uk posting your changes to our charity’s Data Protection Officer (see the address at top of this page). Please reference Autism Central in your communication. 

If you are subscribed to any of the independent regional hubs delivering Autism Central services in their regions, please contact the relevant hub directly if you would like to be removed from their mailing lists. You can find hub contact details on this page. 

Please be advised that whilst we work in partnership with the independent regional hubs, we are not responsible for how they manage your data. We strongly recommend that you read their Privacy Statement for more information on how they process your data and their processes for removing you from their mailing lists. 

We reserve the right to amend this privacy statement so please do check back from time to time. If we do so, we will post notice of the change on our website and make every effort to inform you of any material changes to the policy. This policy will have been provided to you – either in full or via hyperlink – at the time your data was submitted to us. 

What are ‘cookies’? 

A cookie is a small text file deposited on your computer’s hard drive, that allows your choices and information to be remembered between one page and the next. In general, the function of a cookie is to recognise you as you request successive pages; this then makes it possible for the site to access information about you that it has already stored in its own databases, from your previous page requests and forms. Cookies themselves often contain little more than a long string of letters and numbers that identify your visit to our sites, so that the site can look up this information. Your browser may give you tools to allow you to view the contents of the cookies that have been set by the sites that you have visited. 

Each website can only access those cookies that it has created. We do not have access to the cookies from websites belonging to other organisations, and in turn other websites do not have access to cookies used by our websites. 

We only use basic cookies often called “essential” cookies on the Autism Central site. We collect two cookies: 

• For google analytics 
• To enable the site to function  

More information 

The Information Commissioner also has a page of information about cookies, including links to instructions on how you can use settings in your browser to control them, or to remove them yourself.