Privacy policy

Published October 2026. To be reviewed by the Committee at its next meeting.

Who we are

Sutton Mariners Sailing Club is a members’ club based in Sutton, south London, affiliated to the Royal Yachting Association. This policy explains what personal information we hold, why we hold it, and what you can ask us to do about it. The club is the data controller for the information described here.

For anything to do with your personal information, the person to contact is the Hon. Secretary, at secretary@suttonmariners.org.uk.

What we collect, and why

When you apply for membership

Our membership form asks for your name, email address, telephone number and postal address, together with your previous boating experience, any qualifications you hold, the type of membership you want, and how you heard about us.

We need your name and contact details to process the application, to let you know the Committee’s decision, and to administer your membership afterwards — subscription reminders, notices of meetings, and the weekly programme.

Your experience and qualifications are used for one purpose only: so that skippers can put together a sensible crew for a rally, pairing people who are learning with people who have done it before.

When you write to us

If you email the Hon. Secretary or another officer of the club, we keep the correspondence for as long as it is useful, and no longer.

When you use the members’ area

The members’ area is protected by a shared password. We do not record who has used it, or when.

Our legal basis

We hold and use members’ details because it is necessary to perform the contract of membership between you and the club, and because the club has a legitimate interest in running itself — keeping a membership roll, convening meetings, and organising the sailing programme.

Where we rely on your consent, such as the tick box on the membership form, you can withdraw it at any time by telling the Hon. Secretary.

Who sees it

Your details are seen by the Hon. Secretary, and by other members of the Committee where they need them in order to do their job — the Hon. Treasurer for subscriptions, the Rear Commodore when placing crew on rallies.

We do not sell, rent, trade or otherwise pass your details to anyone outside the club for their own purposes. Nor do we share them with the Royal Yachting Association.

Where it is kept, and for how long

Membership applications submitted through this website are stored in the website’s own database, hosted by Hostinger, and are also emailed to the Hon. Secretary, who keeps the membership roll separately.

We keep the records of people who leave the club until the end of the membership year following the one in which they leave, after which the record is deleted, except for anything the club is required to keep for its accounts.

Services we use

This website uses a small number of outside services. None of them are advertising or analytics services.

• Hostinger hosts the website and its database.
• Cloudflare Turnstile checks that the membership form is being filled in by a person rather than an automated script. It receives your IP address and some technical information about your browser in order to do that.
• Akismet screens form submissions for spam, which involves sending the submission to Automattic for checking.
• Google Fonts supplies the typefaces this site uses, which means your IP address is sent to Google when a page loads.

We do not use Google Analytics, advertising trackers, or social media tracking pixels. We do not profile visitors, and we do not build a picture of what you look at.

Cookies

This site sets no tracking or advertising cookies. The only cookies it uses are functional ones: a cookie to remember that you have entered the members’ area password, and, for Committee members, the ordinary WordPress login cookie.

Photographs

The club publishes photographs of members on this website — rally write-ups, the gallery of members’ boats, and the annual photographic competition. Some are captioned with names.

We do this because it is a sailing club and the photographs are rather the point. But if there is a photograph of you on the site that you would rather was not there, tell the Hon. Secretary and we will take it down. You do not have to give a reason.

Your rights

You have the right to ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, to have it corrected if it is wrong, to have it deleted, and to object to the way we are using it. Write to the Hon. Secretary at secretary@suttonmariners.org.uk and we will respond within one month.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, or by telephone on 0303 123 1113.

Changes to this policy

The current version of this policy is always the one published on this page. Where a change is significant, we will say so in the club’s notices.