Children's Privacy Notice

This Privacy Statement tells you how the IET will use your personal information when you visit our websites, attend our events or enter our competitions or awards.

Who is the IET?

The IET, this is short for the Institution of Engineering and Technology. We are a professional engineering institution and charity inspiring the global engineering community to engineer a better world, and we have been doing for a long time, since 1871.

We are a UK company with offices in London and Birmingham, but our main office is Futures Place, Kings Way, Stevenage, SG1 2UA, and we have international offices in India, China, Hong Kong and USA.

What is personal data?

Personal data means any information that could be used to identify you. This could be your name and home address, or it could include a telephone number, email address, or a picture of you.

Sometimes people you don’t know can use your personal data to trick you or put you in uncomfortable situations. That is why it is so important to always keep your personal data safe, and never give it to anyone you don’t know. If you are unsure, always ask a parent, guardian, or carer for help.

Remember, your personal data should only be shared with people you know and trust!

What does the IET do?

We provide a big range of education resources and activities for teachers, parents, guardians and carers, teaching STEM to young people, like you, aged 4-18 years, including talent awards. We also run lots of events and competitions.

If you visit our websites or get involved in any of these activities we may collect your personal information but only if it is necessary. We want to let you know that your personal information is safe with us. We follow data protection law that means we must protect children’s personal information and keep it safe. We also follow The Children’s code standards to protect your personal information online.

What information do we collect about you?

We only collect your personal information with the agreement of your parent or guardian.

We may collect personal information about you if you attend our events or enter our competitions. This information may be:

• Your first name and last name
• The city or town or country you live
• Your age, date of birth or age range (for example, if you are between 7 and 11 years old)
• Your parent or guardians name and phone number
• Your parent or guardians email address
• Your school name.
• We may publish your name if you are a winner of our competition or awards.

Why do we collect this information?

We ask for this information so that we can provide you the services you are interested in, and we need a way to contact your parent, guardian, or carer if you’ve signed up to one of our events or competitions.

Other information we may collect:

Your social media handle/username (if you follow us, message us, or comment on our posts on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter etc). You need to be over the age of 13 to have these accounts.

We may collect information about your visit to our website, like which pages you visited, any searches you made on the site. Some of this information is provided by cookies (see below for an explanation on cookies).

What about photos and videos?

We may take photos and videos at our events or for competition winners to showcase your involvement and what you have achieved.

We always ask your guardian for their permission to take your photo, or video before the events, but if you decide that you don’t want to have your photo or video taken, you can speak to a trusted guardian. It is your choice whether you want to have your photo taken or be in our videos.

If we have your guardians consent your photo or video may be published in our magazines, websites, blogs, or social media (like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook) and shared with our sponsor or partner.

What are cookies and why do we use them on our websites?

Cookies, (not to be mistaken for a biscuit) are small information files that we send to the device you’re reading this on. They help make our websites work better and provide information to us the owners of the website.

The Cookies we use on our websites that are aimed at children like our Engineer a Better World website are only to make the website secure and work and we don’t collect any information about your visit.

For our other websites there are some cookies that we need to use in order to make our website work, and some that you will have the option to turn on. You can ask a parent or guardian to help you turn cookies on or off.

There are additional cookies that you have the option to switch on, that help us recognise you when you return to our website and can tell us whether you’ve visited before. This helps us tailor your experience on our websites, we also use it to assess how the website is being used, so that we can improve it.

How you can control what cookies we set

Check with a parent about accepting our cookies – make sure you call them over to help you. We have a quick and easy tool that allows you to choose which cookies are on and which are off.

Just click the ‘Cookie Consent’ button in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen when using our website, and it’ll let you choose whether or not to accept cookies.

What types of cookies do we use?

We use three different types of cookies on our website. These are:

• Strictly necessary cookies, which are required to make the website work.
• Statistics cookies, which help us see how people (who remain anonymous – so we don’t know who you are) are using our website. These cookies help us improve the website’s performance – they make sure that you easily search for things and speed up those searches.
• Marketing (analytical) cookies, which record information about links that you have followed from our website and pages you have visited. This allows us to target other information, like advertising, towards your interests.

You can find out more information about specific cookies, in the grown-ups’ Cookie Notice ask your grown up to help.

If you visit another website from a link on ours, that website might use its own cookies on your device too. We don’t control these websites and are not responsible for their cookies.

Do we share your information with anyone?

No. We don’t give your information to anyone else. The only time we would is if you, your parent, guardian, or carer tell us we can.

How long do we keep your personal information?

We keep it safe only as long as we need it, or as long as the law says we must keep it and then we securely delete it.

Finding out about the personal information we hold about you?

You have the same personal information rights as grown up’s. These include knowing what information we have about you, the right to correct anything that’s wrong and more.

You have the right to:

• Find out what information we hold about you
• Ask for copies of the information we hold about you
• Ask us to correct your information, if it is not accurate
• Object to us using it, limit how we use it, or ask us to erase it
• Change your mind about us using it.

If you want to know more about the personal information we have about you, make a request or if you have a question about your information, you can ask your parent, guardian, or carer to contact us.

You can email us at compliance@theiet.org.

If you are not happy about the way we have used your personal information you can complain to our person responsible for dealing with peoples personal information rights (our Data Protection Officer) at privacyoffice@theiet.org.

You can also complain to the organisation who protects your privacy rights. In the UK, this is the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) at Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

If you’re interested you can visit the grown up’s Privacy Statement.