The myRICS Community is a communication platform operated by The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). RICS is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We will only process your personal information where we have a lawful basis to do so which in most cases will be to fulfil our contractual obligation to you (i.e. to set you up and manage your access to the platform) or because you have given us consent (e.g. where you have updated your privacy and email settings). Further information is detailed below.
Why we process your personal information
When you join the myRICS community, your personal information will be used to set up your profile and to support your use of the platform, for example where you want share a post, join a group and receive updates on posts and groups that you are interested in.
Whilst there is some basic information we need to collect in order to set you up as a user such as
- First name
- Last name
- Email address
it is up to you to decide what other information, if any, you would like to add to your profile. You can also choose who can see this information and what details you want people to see when you make or comment on a post. You can update and change your profile and your privacy settings at any time.
We will send messages to your community inbox, for example where people comment on your post, where new posts are made in a group you have joined, or if we have messages which we think may be of interest to you such as new groups, events, activities. You can also choose to have these emailed to your personal email address if you prefer, by updating your email settings. You can change these settings at any time.
Posts made and comments added, will be monitored by RICS and/or group administrators and moderators to ensure they comply with the myRICS Community acceptable use terms and conditions and actions may be taken where required. Please see our terms and conditions for further details.
We will also monitor and analyse your usage of, and participation in the platform to help us identify how it is being used and whether there are any improvements we can implement to make it more effective. This profiling activity will not be used to make any automated decisions about you, or decisions which have any legal or significant effects on you.
Who your information will be shared with
Your information will be shared with others on myRICS community in accordance with the privacy settings you choose. If you join one or more groups, the administrator and moderator of those groups will be able to identify you, regardless of your privacy settings, as they will need to manage your membership of that group and ensure you are complying with/enforce our acceptable use terms and conditions. If these groups are set up by third parties, for example our partner charity Lionheart, this means your information will be accessible to those third parties. However, they are also bound by the acceptable use terms and conditions and can only use your information for the purposes of managing the group and communicating to you via myRICS community.
How long will your information be retained
Your personal information and any posts or comments you make will be retained for as long as you have an account on myRICS Community. You can close your account at any time and ask us to delete the personal information we hold about you.
We may keep posts and comments indefinitely if they are deemed to still be of relevance, importance or interest to the wider Community membership. However, you can ask us to delete these at any time. If we are unable to do so, we can delete or anonymise your personal information so that the comments and/or posts are no longer attributable to you.
The RICS Privacy Policy provides full details of who we are, why we process personal information and your legal rights.
Cookies
Cookies are small files which get saved onto your computer or other device and store pieces of information about your use of online services. They are used for lots of different things, such as tracking how individuals use our websites, helping us to understand user behaviours, identify improvements and target our marketing activities to be of more relevance to you. You can read out about how RICS uses cookies across all of our websites, and how to update your cookie settings, in our Cookie Policy.
If you have any questions about how your data is used on the myRICS Community site, please contact privacy@rics.org or myricscommunity@rics.org.