Privacy Policy

Privacy and Cookies

The Ombudsman for Children’s Office fully respects your right to privacy, and will not collect any personal information about you on our Beyond Limits website without your clear permission.

Our Role

The Ombudsman for Children’s Office (OCO) is an independent statutory body, which was established in 2004 under the Ombudsman for Children Act 2002. Under the 2002 Act (as amended), the Ombudsman for Children has two core statutory functions:

to examine and investigate complaints made by or for children about the administrative actions, or inactions, of public bodies

to promote the rights and welfare of children up to the age of 18.

This website has been created by the OCO to promote Beyond Limits; an event for children and young people with disabilities. This website will provide information for those attending and exhibiting at Beyond Limits.

Purpose of Beyond Limits’ Privacy Statement

The OCO needs personal data to fulfil its roles and to meet its legal obligations. The OCO processes (including collecting, storing and sharing) personal data about staff and about individuals who contact the OCO, take part in the OCO’s work to promote children’s rights and welfare or are involved in the OCO’s examination or investigation of complaints.

This privacy statement sets out how the OCO uses and protects your personal data, including data collected by us from your use of our websites.

Information about the OCO as Data Controller

The OCO is the Data Controller for personal data. The OCO has divided our data processing into categories so that we can give you more information about our processing. The categories are:

children

individuals involved in the examination or investigation of complaints

promoting the rights and welfare of children

promoting the work of the OCO

website visitors

social media

press/media and OCO followers mailing lists

event & workshops

photographs and audio recordings

CCTV

staff and job applicants

More information about our data processing for each category is available below.

 

Our Data Protection Commission registration number is 7901/A. You can view the Data Protection Commission register here.

We do not trade personal data for commercial purposes and will only disclose personal data if required by law, if it is necessary to arrange your event attendance, or if it is with your consent. OCO uses providers based in the European Economic Area to process data.

This policy was updated in May 2018 to show that we are adhering to the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force on25 May 2018.

Please Contact Us for any data protection queries you have.

Children

For the purpose of creating Beyond Limits; an event for children and young people with disabilities, we may need to know personal information about you. Examples of personal information we might need are your name, date of birth, address, who your parents or guardians are, if you have a disability, what your disability is, what kind of supports you require. We will ask your parent’s permission if we are able to take photos of you so we can raise awareness of the work we do. We will also ask for your permission that we can do this. See more about this in the Photographs and Audio Recording section.

We only use this information to help us understand how we can help you and to do our job. We keep this information safe in our office and only share it with the people who need to know. If we don’t get all the information we need, then we may not be able to do our jobs.

We keep the personal information for no more than three years after we finish the work that we need this information for. 

You have rights over your personal information. You have the right to:

make sure the personal information we have about you is correct

ask us to delete your personal information

object to how we use your personal information

get a copy of your personal information from us

complain to the Data Protection Commission if you think we have not kept and used your personal information correctly.

Promoting Children’s rights and welfare

The OCO has a statutory obligation to promote the rights and welfare of children. The OCO’s duties to promote children’s rights and welfare include:

finding out what children and young people are concerned about and highlighting their views to the Government and other people who make decisions that affect children and young people

supporting people, including children and young people, to find out about children’s rights and how those rights can be respected, protected and made real

carrying out research to better understand issues that are important in children and young people’s lives.

giving advice to the Ministers of Government and others to help make sure that laws and plans affecting children and young people respect children’s rights

encouraging public organisations to work in ways that promote children’s rights and welfare 

carrying out research to better understand issues that are important in children and young people’s lives.

The OCO engages with children, young people, professionals and members of the public to achieve these tasks. We collect personal data about people as necessary and appropriate. The personal information may include: name, address, age, personal circumstances, including special categories of personal data such as health, sexual orientation, religion and relevant medical information such as allergies if we provide food at consultations. We aim to minimise the personal data we collect and to anonymise it shortly after it has been collected where necessary and possible. Where the personal data is not anonymised, we retain it for a maximum of 3 years before it is destroying or deleting it.

 

We may contract with a research body to do primary research for us about subjects we want to learn more about. Usually, the research body is the data controller and they are responsible for how they process any personal data involved. The OCO receives an anonymised report at the end of the research.

 

Promoting the work of the OCO

We promote awareness of our work on children’s rights in a number of ways. These include through our websites, OCO and ItsYourRight, social media, publications, including our Annual Report, Press/Media and OCO Followers Mailing Lists, public speaking, events and workshops at our offices and other locations.

Website visitors

We use Google Analytics (GA) to track site user interaction on our websites. We have a GA code installed on our sites which creates one or more text files on your computer (called a “cookie”). The cookies contain an ID number, which is used to uniquely identify your browser and track each site you visit that has GA enabled.

We use this data to find out the number of people using our sites and to better understand how they find and use our web pages. With this information, we can continually improve the information that we provide on our sites and the processes for actions such as contacting us. We can also use it to increase the number of new people finding our sites.

Google analytics stores the following data:

Time of visit, pages visited, and time spent on each page of the webpages

Interactions with site-specific widgets

Referring site details (such as the URL a user came through to arrive at our sites)

Type of web browser

Type of operating system (OS)

Flash version, JavaScript support, screen resolution, and screen color processing ability

Network location and IP address

Document downloads

Clicks on links leading to external websites

Errors when users fill out forms

Clicks on videos

Scroll depth

Google also collects information about you from its Doubleclick tracking and profiling service, from ad-supported apps on your Android or iOS device, from your YouTube and Gmail activity and from your Google account. This data is put together and used to make inferences about your age, gender, interests, hobbies, shopping habits and living circumstances.

Your rights

If you already have GA cookies, they will be updated with the latest information about your visit to our sites.

As we cannot access any personal data about you ourselves, we are not the Data Controller for your Google Analytics or Doubleclick profile data. You would need to contact Google directly for this information.

You have the right to object to this tracking and to stop it happening. See the next section.

If you would like more information about the methods used by us, please contact us at oco@oco.ie.

How do I prevent being tracked by Google Analytics?

If you are uncomfortable with this tracking, you can take the following actions:

– Use a tracking-blocker

– Clear cookies after every browsing session

– Install the Google Analytics opt-out extension

Website Contact Form Users

If you get in touch with us through the contact form on our Beyond Limits website, we save the details you share with us on our database. The OCO uses the data that you give to work out how we can answer the query or concern that you have raised with us. We also use the data to send our response to you. This way, if we get in touch with you in future, we can refer to our previous conversations. We will not contact you or share your details without asking for your consent. We keep the personal information obtained in this way for a maximum of three years, after which we keep an anonymised version.

 

Social Media

You may come across the OCO on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo and AudioBoom through your own networks or by linking to them from the OCO or ItsYourRight websites. We use these platforms to inform, educate and engage people about the rights of children and our work.

The OCO does not process personal data from social media platforms.

We use social media platforms because they are a valuable tool for us to raise awareness of the work we do with different audiences. The companies who own these social media platforms are commercial entities. We want to remind you that information shared by you on our timelines, on pages or in private messages on our social media may be used or sold by these companies for commercial purposes. 

Press/Media and OCO Followers Mailing Lists

OCO uses a media partner, MediaHQ, to publish news and information about the OCO. Our media partner builds its contact list from registrations to their website. We are not responsible for their activities and you should contact our partner for further information and to invoke your data rights.

OCO maintains a list of OCO Followers with whom we share news about the OCO. This is done in our legitimate interests of promoting the rights and welfare of children.

You can change your email preferences at any time, by clicking ‘unsubscribe’ on any of our emails or by contacting oco@oco.ie

OCO Events and Workshops

When you attend an OCO event such as Beyond Limits, we may need your name and contact details. These are needed so that we can contact you about the event. We also collect dietary information where we are providing food. We process this information in our legitimate interests. Where we collect special categories of data, then we will require your consent.

The OCO will retain this information for a maximum of 3 years after the event.

If you are a speaker at an OCO event, we will publicly promote your involvement via social media platforms and communication with press/media and to our followers. This data may continue to be processed by those platform providers after the event has ended. We will only do this if we have obtained your consent for this processing. If you are under the age of 18 then we will need the consent of your parents/guardians as well as your own consent to use your personal data for promotion of the event.

Photographs and Audio Recordings

When you attend an Beyond Limits, please be aware that we may use your group or crowd images from the event in our annual report, other OCO publications, on our websites and in social media. This is done in our legitimate interests to promote the OCO’s work.

We may also take photographs, video or audio recordings that identify individuals. We will process these photographs, video and audio recordings that identify only where you have given your consent for the use of such photographs, video and audio recordings.

 

Where we have your consent, then names, photos/images, video/audio may be disclosed to printers, website design/management partners, and social media platforms and through corresponding OCO publications, websites and social media accounts.

The OCO will retain these photographs, images, videos and audio recordings for 3 years.

Your Data Rights

As an individual whose personal data is processed by OCO, you have the following rights:

the right to be informed, which is what this privacy statement is for

the right to access the personal data we hold about you, subject to lawful restrictions

the right to object to direct marketing, (either use the ‘unsubscribe’ button on our emails or contact us directly)

the right to object to processing carried out on the basis of legitimate interests

the right to erasure (in some circumstances)

the right of data portability

the right to have your personal data rectified if it is inaccurate

the right to have your personal data restricted or blocked from processing

To exercise any of these rights, please  Contact Us on the form below. 

If you are not happy with the way we have handled your personal data, and are unable to resolve the issue with us personally, you can complain to the Data Protection Commission.

How to contact the OCO

You can write to us at:

Ombudsman for Children’s Office

Millennium House

52-56 Great Strand Street

Dublin 1, D01 F5P8 

You can ring us on:

(01) 865 6800

You can contact our Data Protection Officer:

by writing, to the address above

by telephoning, on the number above

by email, at dataprotection@oco.ie or beyondlimits@oco.ie