RICS Privacy Policy (“Policy”) provides information on how the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and any of its subsidiaries, or their subsidiaries, overseas companies, branches or representative offices (“RICS”) and any third party providers collect, use, secure, transfer and share your information. We comply with relevant data protection legislation where our members are located.
This Policy does not cover any links to external, third-party websites. Please consult the privacy notices on the external websites for more information.
We use your information, to manage your membership, investigate member conduct, assess and process your complaints against our members and/or regulated firms, respond to your queries, provide you with relevant information, provide service, administer our relationship with you, and as set out in our cookies notice on the website.
Your information is collected from:
a) any information entered on our websites, including RICS products’ websites
b) email, post, fax and mail correspondence with RICS
c) contact via phone
d) RICS social media channels
e) application and request forms by post
f) in-person contacts with RICS employees, members, affiliates
g) information we gathered via events, and
h) Information we receive from external 3rd parties.
If you are an RICS member, APC candidate, past member (including expelled or resigned), we will use your information to:
a) administer your membership as set out in your membership agreement, including sending you subscription renewals;
b) regulate, including publishing panel hearing decisions by RICS Regulation, as set out in Conduct Rules;
c) maintain relevant contact, including, but not limited to: sending you practice and guidance notes, AGM information, CPD reminders;
d) maintain the accuracy of your information and communicate with you for any other reasons related to your membership;
e) maintain the member directory;
f) provide our partners (including Benefits Plus) to give you information according to your instruction;
g) share with other organisations our members belong to in order to maintain RICS professional standards, and to detect and prevent fraud;
h) share with other regulatory authorities who may be investigating the same complaint made against you;
i) share with your employer information relating to CPD, training, regulation and professional standards;
j) share with any other party when sharing of information is required by law.
For all other non-members who have contacted RICS, we will respond to your queries and investigate your concerns against our staff, members and regulated firms via email, phone and/or post. If you do not wish to be contacted by RICS by any particular means, please contact us to change your preferences. We will use your information to:
a) administer and develop our relationship with you, provide services and respond to your queries;
b) investigate the issue/complainant against our regulated firms and members;
c) help to protect members of the public against fraud and unethical conduct committed by our regulated firms and members; and
d) contact you for any further information in relation to your queries and complaints as required, and keep you informed.
We will stop sending you promotional messages as soon as you have indicated your decision to not receive them.
If you no longer wish to receive promotional materials from RICS, please follow the “unsubscribe” instructions from the latest message you had received or write to privacy@rics.org to be removed from our mailing list.
We will keep your information for a reasonable amount of time in order to perform the purposes listed above.
We use cookies on our websites to manage the operation and performance of our sites.
This site (and all websites which covered by this Policy) incorporates the use of cookies. Cookies are small data text files that are placed on your computer when you visit a website. Cookies help to make websites work efficiently and provide us with information about how our website is used.
When you visit www.rics.org and other RICS websites linked to this Policy, we use cookies to enable us to collect standard internet log information and visit behavioural patterns. Cookies automatically identify your browser whenever you interact with our site. This helps us to make our site more responsive to your needs and to track and manage information relevant to your specific interests. In this way we can tailor our site to you, deliver a better and more personalised service and track the pages on our site that you are interested in.
Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how you can manage or delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.
You can opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites by visiting https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
This website uses the Google AdWords remarketing service to advertise on third party websites (including Google) to previous visitors to our site. It could mean that we advertise to previous visitors who haven’t completed a task on our site, for example using the contact form to make an enquiry. This could be in the form of an advertisement on the Google search results page, or a site in the Google Display Network. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on someone’s past visits to the RICS.org website. Of course, any data collected will be used in accordance with our own privacy policy and Google’s privacy policy.
You can set preferences for how Google advertises to you using the Google Ad Preferences page, and if you want to you can opt out of interest-based advertising entirely by cookie settings or permanently using a browser plugin.
You should note that if you do not accept the cookies or subsequently choose to disable cookies, you may not be able to access all the services on our site. We also note that one of the cookies we use is essential for parts of the site to operate and has already been set.
We share your information internally within RICS all around the world to maintain our professional standards internationally.
Your information will be transferred to countries the European Commission does not deem to provide adequate level of data protection, or by your country of origin, including the US. You can find a list of RICS offices here. We have relevant data transfer agreements with oversea offices, and your information will be secured to the standard as it is in the EU.
We share your information with third-parties and data processors who may need to access your information for performing the purposes specified above.
We sometimes outsource some of the services set out above, to reputable third parties, including for the purpose of ensuring the security of your data. We have data protection compliant agreements in place with all such service providers so they would only use your information according to our instructions.
We take reasonable organisational and technical measures to protect your information.
We take reasonable steps to protect your information against unauthorised access, modification or misuse. We use services provided reputable security providers and your information is accessed by our employees, agents and third-party partners on a needs-only basis.
We will provide you access to the information we hold about you as provided by law, upon request.
Under the UK Data Protection Act 1998, you have the right to access the information we hold about you. This may be provided by providing you with:
• a description of the information we hold about you;
• the reason we hold the information;
• who the information may be disclosed to; and/or
• a copy of the information in an intelligible form
If you would like to access the personal information we hold about you, please contact the Data Protection Officer (contact details available below) and provide us with the following:
• RICS member – your membership number;
• Non-RICS member – a copy of your photo id;
• The department you were in contact with where you would like to obtain your information from;
• Description of the information you are planning to access (e.g. information concerning the complaint you made; correspondence between a period of time)
• £10 cheque for the processing fee
We may contact you using any contact details you have provided to obtain more information and assure your identity if needed in order to process your request.
If you are not located in the UK, your right of access to your information will be assessed and administered according to local legislation.
Review of RICS Privacy Policy
This Policy was last reviewed in September 2016. The content of the policy may be reviewed and changed without prior notice, please visit the policy for any changes.
Please write to the Data Protection Officer if you:
a) have any questions about how RICS collects and uses your information;
b) want to access the information RICS hold about you;
c) address any concerns about the information you have provided RICS; or
d) have any complaints about how RICS uses your information.
Contact us
John Sheehan
Information Governance and Data Protection Officer
RICS
e jsheehan@rics.org
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