Privacy

At Club Soda we believe in the potential of shared experiences to change your drinking habits. Because this may involve you sharing sensitive information about your life and health, we also believe in the importance of clear and transparent privacy guidelines. As a user it’s important that you know how we use and share your data, and how you can control what happens to information you share in Club Soda.

Here’s our privacy statement, and a guide for our members.

1. Sharing and controlling information

What is Club Soda?

Club Soda is a social business. Our mission is to create a world where nobody feels out of place not drinking alcohol. See our Terms and Conditions for the full legal information.

In this statement, we will use the shorthand “the Site” to mean all digital content at the joinclubsoda.com website, its subdomains, and mobile applications.

Why does Club Soda store my personal information?

Club Soda will record and store your personal information (name, email address and so on) since we have a “legitimate interest” to do so: to provide you with our services. This is our legal justification for processing your personal data. We will try to minimise the amount of data we collect, and many details are optional – you don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to.

Who can see my personal information?

None of your personally identifiable information (for example email address, postcode/zip code, date of birth) is ever visible to other users or third parties without your explicit consent.

Who can see my posts?

Posts and comments on our online community and your user profile are only visible to registered and logged-in users. If there is anything that you are not comfortable sharing with the Club Soda community, you should not include it in your profile page, posts, questions, comments, answers and so on.

2. Who can access my information and how?

By using the Site, you agree to your data collected by Club Soda being used for service evaluation and research by Club Soda and third parties, at Club Soda’s discretion, as detailed in this section.

Club Soda use of data

We will use the data from the Site to improve our services. This includes usage statistics, and analysis and evaluations of how our members use the Site and how they benefit from it. The results and findings from these may be shared internally at Club Soda, with our funders and other stakeholders, or with the general public. None of your identifiable personal information will ever be shared without your prior written consent.

Partner organisations

We may share with our partner organisations, academic researchers, and others anonymised and aggregated data from the Site about users. Such partners will always be required to abide by the same data protection measures as Club Soda does. Just to be clear: you will never be identified in research undertaken by Club Soda or anyone else.

You can always control whether your information is used in this way by following the instructions below.

Can I control who sees my informsation?

You can change your data sharing settings at any time, and stop sharing your information with our partner organisations, by letting us know. You will still be able to use our site.

Payments and financial data

Club Soda does not store any of your financial details, such as bank account or credit card numbers. Any payments to Club Soda are made via third parties who do not share your financial details with us. Please note that these online payment providers (currently PayPal and Stripe) have their own terms and conditions and privacy policies.

3. The Club Soda business model

Much of what Club Soda provides is free. We will charge for additional services, our socials, workshops, events, and online programmes. This is always made clear to you.

Third-party service providers and online shops (for example Amazon) may pay us an affiliate fee if you click on a link to their website and use their services. We do not sell any of your personal data to third parties.

4. Privacy and security

Club Soda applies industry-standard IT security features. Our Site is hosted on third-party servers, and we have contracts in place with our service providers which require them to implement security measures to protect the data they hold. Our Site is hosted in a protected IT environment with regular backups to keep our (and your!) information safe and secure.

Cookies and other tracker technologies

Our Site puts small files (known as ‘cookies’) onto your computer to collect information about how you browse the site.

Cookies are used to:

• measure how you use the website so it can be updated and improved based on your needs
• remember when you are logged into our system.

You’ll normally see a message on the Site before we store a cookie on your computer. Find out more about how to manage cookies here. You can also opt out of Google Analytics cookies which we use on our Site. You can block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. If you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our Site or some functionality on them.

Please note that third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.

Cookies used on the www.joinclubsoda.com website:

Data retention

The basic principle of data retention for Club Soda is that we only retain personal data for as long as we need it: to provide our services to our members and other customers, and to enable us to operate as a social business. If possible, we will anonymise data that we store (for example for impact evaluation purposes it is not necessary to identify people).

Most of Club Soda databases are “live”, i.e. they are in constant use and updated as and when new information arises (including deletion of records that are known to be no longer accurate, or where their deletion has been requested by a customer). These databases are therefore retained indefinitely.

Sometimes it is necessary for business purposes to create new files, documents, or databases using information in one of the “live” databases. Such files etc should only be retained for as long as they are required. A regular review of all folders should be conducted to (i) identify and (ii) either anonymise or delete any files etc that hold personal data.

It is prudent to keep backup copies of some data (in case of technical problems or malicious attacks). Club Soda does create such copies of our user data on our websites – these are stored at the same location as the live websites, and are only retained for a maximum of one month.

6. Communications with you

By becoming a Club Soda member, i.e. by joining our email list or by registering as a user on our online community, you agree that we may provide you with information about our services (whether by email or any other medium) that we consider appropriate. You may opt out of receiving these materials and notifications by writing to or emailing us to inform us that you wish to be removed from our email contact list.

If you need more information

How do I make a subject access request?

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you and to have any inaccuracies in your information corrected. If you wish to make a subject access request we will ask you to:

• Email us at jussi@joinclubsoda.co.uk
• Provide proof of identity including your name and any other personal information you have shared with us.

For your security we will only send a response to a subject access request to you to the email address you have used to register with us. You should also note that if we are unable to verify your identity, it may not be possible to provide you with the information requested. For further information please email jussi@joinclubsoda.co.uk.

I want to make a complaint about a privacy or information matter

If you want to make a complaint related to privacy or our use of information, please email us at jussi@joinclubsoda.co.uk.

Last modified: 28/09/2021
Last reviewed: 28/09/2021