Some members are concerned that, as we store personal information, we need to comply with the General Data Protection Regulations – GDPR. Our view is that we are not an organisation in the sense intended by this new regulation:
- We have no formal structure, capital, address, revenue or any other attribute that defines an organisation in the sense of the regulation. We are not even a society in terms of the Swiss Civil Code.
- We are just a group of friends who wish to maintain contact in order to organise social activities amongst ourselves only.
However it is still worthwhile documenting what information we store and how it’s used.
Everybody must have an email address to become a member, without this it would not be possible to sign you up to the web site.
The only personal member information that we store, apart from your email address, is information that you chose to enter such as your phone numbers and physical address. These were mainly entered when you were initially signed into the web site. Existing members, if they don’t like having this information displayed, are perfectly at liberty to erase it, see details in the How To page. New members are set up without any of this information entered and can enter and edit it themselves, again see How To.
However you may not be easily contactable for last minute changes of plan if you don’t enter your phone number, ideally also a mobile number. Most members are perfectly happy to enter their house and mobile phone numbers plus their physical address.
All this information can be seen in the section “Member Details” in the web site. This is important so that we all know how to contact each other. No other personal data is stored other than what you can see on the “Member Details” page.
We don’t password protect any of this information but the web site is not easy to find without the link that is provided to all members. I deliberately set it up without the option to make it easy for search engines to find it. If you wish to test this try deleting your browsing history then searching for “GIN” or “Gentlemen in Nyon” or anything like that. Let me know if you find the site, I would be surprised. If you search without first deleting you browsing history you will certainly find the site because your browser will have a record from the last time you accessed it.
You must log in if you want to modify any of your own information in the system. This will use a password you create, or the one that WordPress supplied for you. Your password does not need to be too complicated as you can only change your own data. If you wish you can use the complicated password that WordPress suggests and have your browser remember it. This is what I do. If your password gets “forgotten” you can easily ask the system to send you a new one via email. NOBODY can see your password in the system, it is stored in an encrypted form that is essentially impossible to unencrypt.
If any member has a problem with the information that is stored and displayed they should contact Mark Watts.