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Privacy Policy

Latest update: April 2026

Gary’s Economics AKA Understandable Economics Action Limited (company number 16199807) aims to respect any personal information you share with us, or that we receive from other organisations, and keep it safe. This Policy explains how we collect and use your personal information. For the purposes of the information you share with us, we are the data controller. In this policy we refer to Understandable Economics Action Limited as “the organisation”.

This Policy contains important information about your personal information and privacy. Please read it carefully. We have tried where possible to set out our approach to your privacy using language that is as clear as possible. You do not have to provide us with your personal information. However, you will need to provide some personal information if you would like to sign up to our newsletter.

If you sign up to our newsletter, you can unsubscribe at any time by  clicking the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of our emails, or by contacting us using the details below. If you’d like to opt-out of hearing from us, or have questions about this policy please contact garyseconomics@gmail.com.

How we collect your personal information

We collect information about you:

(1) When you give it to us DIRECTLY For example, you give us your personal information when you:

  • Sign up for our newsletter.
  • Share information about a campaign from our website on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Bluesky, Tiktok, Instagram, Patreon, Discord and/or via email.
  • Contact us by phone, email or post.
  • When you donate money to us.
  • If/when you apply for a job with us.

(2) When you give it to us INDIRECTLY  Here are links to the privacy policies of organisations who share data with us if you sign one our campaigns via their website

(3) When you give permission to OTHER ORGANISATIONS to share it or it is AVAILABLE PUBLICLY We may combine information you provide to us with information available from publicly available sources. Depending on your privacy settings for social media services, we may also access information from those accounts or services. We use this information to gain a better understanding of you and to improve our communications activities.

(4) When you visit our WEBSITE When you use our website, we collect your personal information using “cookies” and other tracking methods. Our website is hosted by WordPress.  WordPress provides us with the online platform that allows us to provide our website to you.  Your information, including Personal Information, may be stored through WordPress’s servers.

What personal information do we collect?

We may collect, store and use the following kinds of personal information:

(1) Your name and contact details, including address, telephone number, e-mail address, donation history, contact via email, and social media identity. We may ask for other information where it is appropriate and relevant, for example:

  • Details of why you have decided to contact us/support a campaign/apply for a role;
  • Details of your opinion on a particular issue or campaign;
  • Your bank details or debit/credit card details if you are making a donation;
  • Details of campaigns you have supported, details of topics/areas of interest to you, responses to surveys you have completed;

(2) information about your computer and about your visits to and use of this website including your IP address, geographical location, browser type, referral source, length of visit and number of page views;

(3) Any marketing and/or communication preferences you give; and/or

(4) any other information shared with us as per clause 1

Do we process sensitive personal information? ​The law recognises certain types of personal information as sensitive and requiring more protection, including health information, ethnicity and political opinions. This is known as ‘special category’ information.

We only collect this information for staff and directors. If you apply for a job with us we will collect this information anonymously. We destroy all information on job applicants six months after the post has been filled.

In limited cases, we may collect special category information about you because it is relevant to the particular campaign or survey in which you are participating.

We may use certain special category information you provide us in surveys, such as your ethnicity or political opinions, to understand demographic trends. For example, we may use this information to determine that certain groups are not being reached by our campaigns/ that our campaigns may not be relevant to particular groups – this information could help us to address our content and priorities so that they are more relevant to such groups, to address inequalities. We will generally seek your explicit consent before collecting this information for these purposes.

How and why will we use your personal data?

We use your personal information to:

  • Enable you to use and/or learn about all of the services we offer;
  • Send you information about our work, campaigns, organisations and any other information or services that we provide (this will not be done without your consent);
  • Send you stakeholder surveys including for the purpose of conducting research/insights;
  • Provide you with the services or information you have requested;
  • Improve your browsing experience by personalising your interaction with our website;
  • Handle the administration of any donation or other payment you make via credit/debit card, cheque, standing order or BACS transfer;
  • Collect payments from you and send statements and/or receipts to you;
  • Handle the administration of your employment, volunteering  or director application;
  • Conduct research into the impact of our campaigns;
  • Deal with enquiries and complaints made by or about you relating to the website or us in general;
  • Make campaign submissions to third parties, where you have signed the campaign and the third party is a target of the campaign;
  • Incorporate your personal data into our promotional activities but only with your consent; and/or
  • Generate reports on our work services and events
  • Conduct due diligence and ethical screening;
  • Identify potential supporters and donors,
  • Further the aims of the organisation.;
  • Audit and/or administer our accounts.

We may contact you to let you know about future activities which we think you may be interested in, unless you have specifically opted out of further contact.

From time to time we may contact you to ask you to complete surveys. These are anonymous, so the responses you provide will not be linked to your name, email or any other identifying information.  Your participation in surveys is entirely voluntary. We may ask you questions about your background, behaviours, and attitudes. But this will be anonymised. This includes improving our ability to send you more relevant communications.

We will take reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information remains accurate and up to date. We will never sell or rent your information to third parties for marketing purposes.

If you sign up for a campaign or for our updates

We will have access to:

  • your name, postcode and (if you have supplied it) your mobile phone number will be made available to the creator of the campaign;
  • we may ‘export’ the campaign, together with any information you have posted on our website in connection with the campaign (which could include your name, postcode, phone number and comments), and send it to the individual or organisation being petitioned and/or otherwise publish, broadcast, communicate and display publicly your involvement in the campaign;
  • If you submit a video in support of a campaign, and you give consent, we will share these with third parties relevant to the campaign (such as MPs), and we may also use your video for our own marketing purposes. When we refer to our own marketing purposes, we mean the use of your video to promote (i) a campaign that may be different to the one you have made a video to support, (ii) engagement in starting petitions generally, or (iii) our activities in general. You can always withdraw your consent to our use of your videos by contacting us using the details below.

If you have donated to Garys Economics 

When you make a donation we ask for some personal information. We will take reasonable steps thereafter to ensure that your personal information remains accurate and up to date.

If you have donated once, we may contact you again in future about new fundraising campaigns you may be interested in.  Our communications include information about our latest campaigns, activities and requests for donations or other support. Occasionally, we may include information from partner organisations or organisations who support us in these communications.  When you provide your details to us, you will be asked to opt-in or opt out of receiving marketing.

We may use the information we hold about you, for example, the record of your previous donations to and/or relationship with us, your location and demographics, as well as the type of activity you have been involved with, to tailor our communications with you about future activities.

If you’ve decided you don’t want to be contacted for marketing purposes, we may still need to contact you for administrative purposes. This may include where we are processing a donation you’ve made, thanking you for a donation or participation in an event, or keeping in touch about volunteering activities you are doing for us.

Using your data to build profiles of supporters and potential supporters

Our work is made possible thanks to the generosity of our supporters – so it’s vital that our fundraising efforts are as effective as they can be. By developing a better understanding of our supporters through researching them using publicly available sources we can tailor and target our fundraising communications to those most likely to be interested in them. This allows us to be more efficient and cost-effective with our resources and also reduces the risk of someone receiving information that they might find irrelevant, intrusive or even distressing.

We may also obtain information about potential donors or individuals who might want to support us by fundraising where these have been shared publicly, and where they have not previously provided us with information.

What information do we collect? We use the information we hold about our supporters and potential supporters to research their potential to be a significant donor and collect additional details relating to their employment and any philanthropic activity. We may also estimate their gift capacity, based on their visible assets, history of charitable giving and how connected they are to the organisation.

Which information do we use?

We use data which has been provided directly to the organisation and combine this with information from publicly available sources such as charity websites and annual reviews, corporate websites, public social media accounts, the electoral register and Companies House in order to create a fuller understanding of someone’s interests and support of the organisation.  We only use reputable sources, where someone would expect their information may be read by the public.  We avoid any data that we believe has not been lawfully or ethically obtained, and we do not use information sources which have not been made public.

We’re committed to putting you in control of your data and you’re free at any time to opt out from this activity.  To find out more, please contact garyseconomics@gmail.com

Donations and other payments

Financial transactions to us are currently made through Patreon. You should read Patreon’s privacy policy.

We will provide your personal information to payment processors only to the extent necessary to process payments.

Security of and access to your personal information

We aim to ensure that there are appropriate and proportionate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal information from loss, destruction, misuse, alteration, or unauthorised disclosure or access.

Your information is only accessible by appropriately trained staff.

We also use agencies and/or suppliers to process data on our behalf. We may merge or partner with other organisations. If this happens, we would ask your permission to,  transfer your personal information to a successor organisation.

Please note that some countries outside of the UK have a lower standard of protection for personal information, including lower security requirements and fewer rights for individuals. We may transfer and/or store your personal information to a destination outside the UK. If we transfer and/or store your personal information outside the UK which does not provide adequate protection we will take reasonable steps to ensure that the recipient implements appropriate measures to protect your personal information, such as requiring the recipient to enter into standard contracts approved by the UK Government for this purpose.

In addition to the disclosures reasonably necessary for the purposes identified elsewhere in this policy, we may disclose your information to regulatory and/or government bodies and/or law enforcement agencies. But only if we need to do so to satisfy a legal obligation.

Your rights

If we rely on your consent to use your personal information for a specific purpose, you can withdraw that consent at any time. This includes the right to ask us to stop using your personal information for direct marketing purposes or to be unsubscribed from our email list at any time. You also have the following rights:

  1. To access your personal information – you can write to us to ask for confirmation of what information we hold on you and to request a copy of that information. Provided we are satisfied that you are entitled to see the information requested and we have successfully confirmed your identity, we will usually have one month to comply.
  2. Erasure of your personal information – you can ask us for your personal information to be deleted from our records. In many cases, we would propose suppressing further communications with you, rather than delete it.
  3. To correct your personal information – if you believe our records of your personal information are inaccurate, you have the right to ask for those records to be updated.
  4. To ask us to restrict our use of your personal information  – you have the right to ask for processing of your personal information to be restricted if there is disagreement about its accuracy or legitimate usage.
  5. To have your data ‘ported’ – to the extent required by applicable laws, where we are processing your personal information (i) under your consent, (ii) to perform a contract with you and (iii) by automated means, you may ask us to provide it to you – or another service provider – in a machine-readable format.

To exercise these rights, please send a description of the personal information in question to garyseconomics@gmail.com. We might need to ask for (i) personal identification and/or (ii) further information before we can respond to your request. Please note that some of these rights only apply in limited circumstances.

You can also make a complaint about us or the way we have processed your personal information to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The contact details of the ICO can be found here.

Our lawful basis

We are required to have one or more lawful grounds to process your personal information. The following are most relevant to us:

  1. Consent: We will ask for your consent to use your information to send you electronic communications such as newsletters and marketing and fundraising emails.
  2. Contractual relationships: Sometimes it will be necessary to use personal information so that we can enter contractual relationships with people. For example, if you apply for employment with us.
  3. Legal obligations: Sometimes we will be obliged to process your personal information due to legal obligations which are binding on us. We will only ever do so when necessary.
  4. Legitimate interests: The law allows organisations to use personal information if it is reasonably necessary for legitimate activities, and as long as its use is fair, balanced and does not unduly impact individuals’ rights. We will rely on this ground to process your personal data when it is not practical or appropriate to ask for consent.

Our legitimate interests are as follows:

  1. Achieving our purposes: These include (but are not limited to) promoting any philanthropic or benevolent purpose including: Garys Economics is a campaigning and advocacy organisation. We want to ensure that wealth inequality decreases in the UK.
  2. Governance: Internal and external audits for financial or regulatory compliance purposes; Statutory reporting.
  3. Publicity and income generation: Conventional direct marketing and other forms of marketing, publicity or advertising; Unsolicited commercial or non-commercial messages not sent electronically, including campaigns, newsletters, income generation or charitable fundraising; Analysis, targeting and segmentation to develop and promote or strategy and improve communication efficiency; Personalisation used to tailor and enhance your experience of our communications
  4. Operational Management: Recording and monitoring of applicants for employed and volunteer positions  for recruitment purposes; Physical security, IT and network security; Processing for historical, scientific or statistical purposes
  5. Purely administrative purposes: Responding to enquiries; Delivery of requested products or information; Communications designed to administer existing services including administration of campaigns and financial transactions; Thank you communications and receipts; Maintaining a supporter database and opt-out lists
  6. Financial Management and Control: Processing financial transactions and maintaining financial controls; Prevention of fraud, misuse of services, or money laundering; Enforcement of legal claims; Reporting criminal acts and compliance with law enforcement agencies.

When we use your personal information, we will consider if it is fair and balanced to do so and if it is within your reasonable expectations. We will balance your rights and our legitimate interests to ensure that we use your personal information in ways that are not unduly intrusive or unfair in other ways.

Special category data

In addition to having to have a lawful basis, where we are processing special category data we are also required to meet one of the special conditions as follows:

(1) Legitimate activities As a non-profit body, we may process special category data which you provide to us in order to achieve our goals and purposes, where this is allowed under data privacy law.

(2) Explicit Consent Where we have obtained your consent in order to use your special category data for specified purposes, for example, where you provide this type of information when completing a survey.

How long we keep your personal information

In general, unless still required in connection with the purpose(s) for which it was collected and/or is processed, we remove your personal information from our records six years after the date it was collected. However, if before that date (i) your personal information is no longer required in connection with such purpose(s), (ii) we are no longer lawfully entitled to process it, or (iii) you validly exercise your right of erasure, we will remove it from our records at the relevant time.

If you ask us to stop sending you direct marketing/fundraising/other electronic communications, we will keep your name on our internal suppression list to ensure you are not contacted again.

Additionally, if you donate to us,  your personal information may be retained by the provider we use, eg. Patreon.

Sharing your information

We use third-party service providers to assist us in delivering our services. This might include sharing your data with third-party providers in order for them to conduct research on supporters and prospective supporters on our behalf.

Where necessary, we will share your personal information with those service providers. This will always be governed by a contract with the relevant service provider, which prevents them from using your information in any way which goes beyond our purposes, as stated in this Privacy Policy. We share that information based on our legitimate interests in delivering our services to members.

We may also share your personal information with third parties, such as public authorities, where we have a legal obligation to do so or where it is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest, such as the prevention or detection of a crime.

Where you have consented, we may also share your personal information for the purposes of making campaign submissions to third parties or for the purposes of our promotional activities.

By submitting your details you agree we may share limited personal information with decision-makers on a campaign; for example, when handing in petitions, we share names and postcodes and may share your comments with the decision-maker.

Changes to this policy

We keep this Policy under regular review and will sometimes update it by posting an updated version on our website, to reflect changes in the law or in our practices. We recommend that you check this Policy occasionally to ensure you remain happy with it. Where reasonably possible, we will notify you of significant changes to our privacy policy by email.

Contact us

For queries relating to how we use your data, you can contact garyseconomics@gmail.com

or by writing to us at the following address:

Data Protection Officer, Understandable Economics Action Ltd C/O 6-8 Stuart Street, Luton, England, LU1 2SJ

Cookies Policy 

In accordance with common website practice, we will receive information about the type of device you’re using to access our website or apps and the settings on that device may provide us with information about your device, including what type of device it is, what specific device you have, what operating system you’re using, what your device settings are, and why a crash has happened. Your device manufacturer or operating system provider will have more details about what information your device makes available to us. We track information using cookies, or small text files which include an anonymous unique identifier. Cookies are sent to a user’s browser from our servers and are stored on the user’s computer hard drive. Sending a cookie to a user’s browser enables us to collect Non-Personal Information about that user and keep a record of the user’s preferences when utilising our services, both on an individual and aggregate basis.

Similar tracking technologies 

Cookies are not the only way to recognise or track visitors to a website. We may use other similar technologies from time to time, like web beacons (sometimes called “tracking pixels” or “clear gifs”) or tags. These are small graphics files that contain a unique identifier that enable us to recognise when someone has visited our website or opened an e-mail that we have sent them. This allows us, for example, to monitor the traffic patterns of users from one page within our website to another, to deliver or communicate with cookies, to improve site performance, and to measure the success of e-mail marketing campaigns, and to understand whether you have come to our website from an online advertisement displayed on a third party website.

We use the reCAPTCHA service provided by Google. This allows us to verify that a user is a person rather than a machine in order to prevent forms on our website (such as petitions) from being (ab)used by spam bots (a bot is a computer programme that can interact with systems and can simulate human activity). When you fill in forms on our website, reCAPTCHA will collect information about your use of the website page, including clicks, mouse movements and your IP address, so that it can determine whether you are a person and not a bot. This information is collected by Google who only provide us with confirmation of whether the user is a real person (but does not identify a user to us). For more information about Google’s use of information gathered through reCAPTCHA please read their privacy notice here.

We work with Google Analytics to bring you targeted advertising about our work and to improve your experience on our website. To do this we upload information about you to Google Analytics, for example, your age and gender. We use technical and organisational measures that are recognised by the Information Commissioner’s Office to ensure the safeguarding of this information. We will only upload information about people who have signed up to one of our campaigns or signed up for our newsletter.  We will never use information that can identify you directly, for instance, your name or address.  Google Analytics act as our processor, this means that they are not legally allowed to do anything further with the information we upload, other than provide you with targeted advertising about our work. We believe we have a legitimate interest in bringing you targeting advertising about our work and to try and improve your experience on our website.

For the purpose of this cookies policy, we’ll refer to cookies and similar tracking technologies that store information on your device or gain access to information on your device collectively, as “Cookies”.

Managing your Cookies

Some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of our website to work properly. These are called strictly necessary cookies.

For all non-essential cookies, you can choose whether we use them or not. We might use both persistent and session cookies. Or you can change your cookie settings in your web browser. If you choose to disable cookies, some areas of our service may not work properly.

You can find out more through the Cookies pop up menu on our website.

Changes to this policy

We may update how we use cookies (and this policy) from time to time. So please check regularly to keep up to date with any changes.