MAHARISHI FOUNDATION PRIVACY NOTICE

Maharishi Foundation® is committed to protecting your privacy when you use our services. The Privacy Notice below explains how we use information about you, and the ways in which we protect your privacy.

Your personal data – what is it?

Personal data relates to a living individual who can be identified from that data. Identification can be by the information alone or in conjunction with any other information in the data controller's possession or likely to come into such possession. The processing of personal data is governed by the General Data Protection Regulation (the "GDPR").

Who are we?

Maharishi Foundation is the data controller. This means it decides how your personal data is processed and for what purposes. Maharishi Foundation is a registered educational charity (Registered with the Charity Commission in England & Wales (number 270157), Northern Ireland (XR20456), and Scotland (SC041919). Our registered office is 6 Gardenia Close, Rendlesham, Suffolk IP12 2GX.

Maharishi Foundation also acts as data processor for all non-routine mailings and complies with the same regulations in such cases.

How do we process your personal data?

Maharishi Foundation complies with its obligations under the GDPR by keeping personal data up to date; by storing and destroying it securely; by not collecting or retaining excessive amounts of data; by protecting personal data from loss, misuse, unauthorised access and disclosure and by ensuring that appropriate technical measures are in place to protect personal data. Our national database and mailing lists are held by specialist third party hosting services meeting GDPR standards.

We use your personal data for the following purposes:

  • To enable us to confirm details of event bookings you make.
  • To respond to your enquiries.
  • To send you occasional information about the service you approached us about, until and unless you unsubscribe.
  • To help ensure out accredited instructors deliver our personal development programmes to you as effectively and appropriately as possible.
  • To inform you of further services of a similar nature offered by Maharishi Foundation, until and unless you unsubscribe.
  • To maintain a record of your course credentials, which qualify you for further such courses.
  • To manage our employees.
  • To maintain our own accounts and records.
  • To inform you of news, events, activities and services relevant to personal development programmes offered by Maharishi Foundation.

See also Tracking Technologies below.

What is the legal basis for processing your personal data?

  • Legitimate interest when you make an enquiry or an event booking
  • Soft opt-in and legitimate interest upon enrolment on a Maharishi Foundation course so that we can provide the necessary ongoing support required for full benefit, and also to keep you informed about news, events, activities and closely related services. You can adjust your communication preferences or opt out of communications at any time.
  • GDPR Special Category Data to process health-related data necessary for the provision of certain services such as Transcendental Meditation instruction. (GDPR article 9, point d).
  • Contract with our database hosting, digital marketing, SMS and mailing service providers. Only anonymised data is used for reporting and monitoring.
  • Legal obligation for complying with employment, health and safety, social security or social protection law. Such protection and justification for processing applies to employees and contracted consultants to Maharishi Foundation.

Where personal data is collected relating to any other short-term project, only data that is needed will be collected, and the other considerations made clear elsewhere in this policy will apply.

Sharing your personal data

Your personal data will be treated as strictly confidential and will not be shared except where specifically required by contractual agreements. We will not share your data with third parties outside Maharishi Foundation. Any such cases where partnership working agreements require data sharing, specific consent will be obtained.

How long do we keep your personal data?

We keep data in accordance with the GDPR, and with our retention schedule. Such personal data is timestamped in our database, and we have systems in place to ensure that personal data is not retained indefinitely without the relevant consent or another relevant legal basis for processing. Course credentials are held permanently to verify eligibility for further courses.

Your rights and your personal data

Unless subject to an exemption under the GDPR, you have the following rights with respect to your personal data:

  • The right to request a copy of your personal data which we hold about you.
  • The right to request that we correct any personal data if it is found to be inaccurate or out of date.
  • The right to request your personal data is erased where it is no longer necessary for us to retain such data. Please see contact details at the foot of this page.
  • The right to opt out of the processing of your data at any time.
  • The right to request that Maharishi Foundation provide you with your personal data.
  • The right, where there is a dispute in relation to the accuracy or processing of your personal data, to request a restriction is placed on further processing.
  • The right to object to the processing of personal data.
  • The right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office.

Please see Maharishi Foundation's contact details at the foot of this page.

Further processing

If we wish to use your personal data for a new purpose, not covered by this Data Protection Notice, then we will publish a new notice explaining this new use prior to commencing the processing and setting out the relevant purposes and processing conditions. Where and whenever necessary, we will seek your prior consent to the new processing.

Cookies and tracking technologies

Cookies are text files placed on your computer to collect standard Internet log information and visitor behaviour information. This information is used to track visitor use of the website and to compile statistical reports on website activity. For further information visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.

Maharishi Foundation UK and our analytics partners, use technologies such as cookies, beacons, tags, and scripts to enable tracking on our websites and the mechanism by which you arrived there, either through Internet search or in response to an advertisement through third party providers such as Facebook or Google. These third parties may use technologies such as cookies to gather information about your activities within a website to deliver advertising to you, such as retargeting ads. We currently do not respond to do-not-track signals. For more information about interest-based ads, including how to opt-out of having your web-browsing information used for behavioural advertising purposes, please visit www.aboutads.info/choices. Please note that this does not opt you out of being served ads. You may continue to receive generic ads on these third-party platforms. You may also opt out of receiving ads across devices by adjusting your ad preference in your Google account.

Maharishi Foundation websites use Google Analytics code to gather statistical information. Google Analytics sets cookies to help us accurately estimate the number of visitors to the Website and the volumes of usage of the websites. This is done to ensure that the websites are available when you want them and are fast. For more information on how Google Analytics processes this information, visit www.google.com/analytics.

The above technologies ensure that content provided by Maharishi Foundation websites are presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer or other device. They allow you to participate in interactive features of the websites, when you choose to do so, such as finding our local representative. They also allow us to serve our advertisements to you through third party platforms, such as Facebook or Google, on other sites and apps, or across your devices.

Details are collected of your visits to and interactions with Maharishi Foundation websites including, but not limited to, traffic data, location data, weblogs and other communication data, whether for our own billing purposes or otherwise.

We do not disclose information about identifiable individuals to companies that host advertisements on our behalf, but we may provide them with aggregate information about our users (for example, we may inform them that 500 men aged under 30 have clicked on their advertisement on any given day). We may also use such aggregate information to help advertisers reach the kind of audience they want to target.

Our websites also include social media features, such as the Facebook "Like" button, and widgets, such as the "Share This" button, or interactive mini-programs. These features may collect your Internet Protocol (IP) address and which page you are visiting on our website, and may set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Social media features and widgets hosted by a third party or directly on our website are governed by the privacy statement of the company providing it.

Unless the law allows us to, we do not:

  • share any of the information we collect about you with others.
  • use this information to identify individuals.

Other websites

Our website contains links to other websites. This privacy policy only applies to our organisation so when you link to other websites you should read their own privacy policies.

Changes to our privacy policy

We keep our privacy policy under regular review and we will place any updates on our website.

How to contact us

Please contact us if you have any questions about our privacy policy or information we hold about you:
Email:info@maharishifoundation.org.uk.
Tel: 01695 51213
Or write to us at 6 Gardenia Close, Rendlesham, Suffolk IP12 2GX.

You can contact the Information Commissioners Office on 0303 123 1113 or via email https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/email/ or at the Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire. SK9 5AF.