Privacy policy

INTRODUCTION

eyeWitness to Atrocities (“eyeWitness” or “we” or “us”) is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. Please read this Privacy Policy carefully to understand how we will treat your personal information, as well as other types of information. This Policy, together with our User Agreement, applies to your use of the eyeWitness to Atrocities App (the “App”).

eyeWitness reserves the right to change the Policy at any time by making an updated version of the App available for download and directing you to the new Policy. You are not obliged to download any updated App but, in some circumstances, you may not be able to continue using the App until you have downloaded the updated version.

Please submit any questions, concerns or comments you have about this Policy or any requests concerning your personal information by email at general@eyewitness.global or by telephone on +44 (0) 3300 240789.

INFORMATION ABOUT EYEWITNESS

eyeWitness is responsible for the treatment of your personal information while using the App and is a “data controller” under applicable data protection laws. eyeWitness is a company limited by guarantee incorporated in England and Wales (registration number 08703983) and a registered charity (registered number 1156242). Our registered office is:

4 Old Park Lane
London
W1K 1QW
United Kingdom

PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT

Personal information is any information about you from which you can be directly or indirectly identified. It therefore does not include information where your identity has been removed, i.e., anonymised information.

We may collect, share and use personal information about you, as well as other types of information, in connection with your use of the App. You can find a full description of the types of information eyeWitness collects in Schedule 1.

HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We may use your personal information and other information you provide to us through the App in the following ways:

USE OF INFORMATION	TYPE OF INFORMATION	LEGAL BASIS
To deliver the services and information offered through the App	Submitted information Device information Location and other validation information	Necessary for performance of our contract with you to provide our services
To audit data showing the number of Users that have downloaded the App and how they are using it	Submitted information Device information Location and other validation information	To further our legitimate interest in improving our services and the App
To develop and improve the App	Submitted information Device information Aggregated data	To further our legitimate interest in improving our services and the App
To investigate, validate and corroborate submitted content	Submitted information Information from other sources Device information Location and other validation information Aggregated data	To further our and others’ legitimate interest in holding the perpetrators of atrocities to account, as well as the public interest in the administration of justice
To bring images, footage or supporting information to the attention of enforcement authorities or agencies	Submitted information Information from other sources Device information Location and other validation information Aggregated data	To further our and others’ legitimate interest in holding the perpetrators of atrocities to account, as well as the public interest in the administration of justice
To bring images, footage or supporting information to the attention of the media	Submitted information	To further our and others’ legitimate interest in holding the perpetrators of atrocities to account, as well as the public interest in the administration of justice
To contact you directly about your footage to (i) carry out further verification checks, or (ii) to interview you in your capacity as a witness for evidential purposes	Submitted information	Consent

INFORMATION SHARING

We may share your personal information with the following third parties:

IT Service Providers:
To provide the App it is necessary for us to engage external IT service providers to help administer the App and host our servers. Your information will be transferred to the external IT service providers who will handle the information only as necessary to perform technical services.
International Organisations and Law Enforcement:
We share the information you provide through the App with international organisations and law enforcement agencies, including enforcement, criminal and other investigative bodies, to help bring legal proceedings against individuals who commit atrocities. We share information with these bodies as necessary to pursue our and others’ legitimate interest in holding the perpetrators of atrocities to account, as well as the public interest in the administration of justice. Where you have chosen to provide your name, alias, or email address, we may share this information with those organisations so that they can independently verify your content with you.
Legal Professionals and Defendants:
In the event that your footage results in legal action, we may have a legal obligation to disclose your personal information to legal professionals, such as prosecutors and defence counsel, courts and tribunals, as well as to the defendant(s) in such proceedings. Such disclosures may include all the content you make available, and may also include other information you have provided to us such as your name or alias and location. To clarify, only identifying information that you have provided us with, and that we have collected with your knowledge, may be shared in a legal disclosure. Depending on the circumstances, such sharing takes place in order for us to comply with our legal obligations, or as necessary to pursue our and others’ legitimate interest in holding the perpetrators of atrocities to account, as well as the public interest in the administration of justice.
The Media:
We and others have a legitimate interest in sharing information you provide through the App with media organisations in order to bring attention to the atrocities being committed. We only share photos/videos with the media in very narrow circumstances. If you have not provided us with an email address then we will be unable to notify you of any specific media uses. We will not provide the media with your name, alias or email address (where provided) unless you expressly consent to the sharing of such personal information.

STORAGE AND SECURITY

Once we have received your information, we use strict procedures and security features to seek to control access to the information and to reduce the risks of loss, misuse or unauthorised access to this information.

The App employs a number of security features to ensure it remains private and secure. You will be given guidelines on these features via the instructions made available after downloading the App. It is important that you fully understand and utilise these features in order to prevent unauthorised access to your account, and to help protect the content you generate and importantly your security and safety as a user. You should seek, where possible, to limit access to your device and browser and close the App whenever it is not in use.

TRANSFER OF PERSONAL INFORMATION TO OUTSIDE THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA (“EEA”) OR TO INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS

Some of the third parties listed in section 5 may be located in jurisdictions outside of the EEA, and we may transfer your personal information to them. In such cases, these jurisdictions or recipients may be less protective of your personal information than the applicable laws in the EEA require.

We will make these transfers on the basis that either:

the European Commission has made an ‘adequacy decision’ in relation to the jurisdiction where the recipient is located;
we have implemented ‘appropriate safeguards’, for example, the European Commission approved Standard Contractual Clauses with the recipient or the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework; or
in the absence of an adequacy decision and where it is not possible to implement appropriate safeguards, that the transfer is necessary for reasons of important public interest in combatting atrocities or otherwise necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.

Should you require further information about any such transfers, please contact us by email at general@eyewitness.global or by telephone on +44 (0) 3300 240789.

YOUR RIGHTS

Users of the App have certain rights in relation to the personal information we hold about them. Depending on the circumstances, these may include the right to:

request access to your personal information and obtain a copy of the information we hold about you;
correct your personal information that we hold where it is incomplete or inaccurate;
have your personal information erased where there is no good reason for us continuing to use or retain it;
request that your personal information is used only for restricted purposes;
object to your personal information being processed if the lawful basis for processing your personal information is either our or a third party’s legitimate interests, or in the public interest;
require certain of your personal information to be transferred to you or a third party;
at any time withdraw your consent to us processing your personal information where we rely on it as the legal basis for doing so; and
lodge a complaint with the relevant data protection authority in your jurisdiction (for example, the Information Commissioner’s Office in the United Kingdom).

If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact us via email at general@eyewitness.global or by telephone on +44 (0) 3300 240789.

CHILD SAFETY

When using online services, it is very important to us to protect the safety of children. We do not knowingly collect information from children.

DATA RETENTION

We keep your personal information only for so long as is necessary for the purposes for which we collected it. When assessing what retention period is appropriate for your personal data, we take into consideration:

the requirements of our business and the services provided;
any statutory or legal obligations;
the purposes for which we originally collected the personal data;
the lawful grounds on which we based our processing;
the types of personal data we have collected;
the amount and categories of your personal data; and
whether the purpose of the processing could reasonably be fulfilled by other means.

For more information regarding how long we retain your data please contact us using the details at the start of this policy.

SCHEDULE 1

We may collect, store and use the following categories of personal information about you:

Information You Submit

We may process information provided by you:

at the time of registering for and using the App, including information that you provide by filling in forms on the App such as your name or alias, and email address (if submitted);
when securing or uploading content via the App, including any notes added to the images you upload via the App; and
when providing feedback to us or requesting further services.

Please note that you are under no obligation to provide an email address. If you wish to directly associate your identity with content you submit to us, this will be very helpful for any investigations that your content is used in. Please see section 5 above for details on when personal information may be passed on to third parties.

You will not be able to access metadata regarding the content you capture using the App via the App itself; we deliberately strip out this metadata to ensure it cannot be inadvertently transmitted by you to anyone else other than eyeWitness and cause a risk to their safety. You will be able to view the images you capture in the App’s gallery in order to add notes, but you will not be able to modify the content itself until after it has been uploaded via the App.

When adding notes to any images submitted, you should read the in-App safety guidance to ensure that your use of this tool does not compromise the rights, interests and safety of other people who may appear in the content.

Information from other sources

We may combine the information you provide with information from other sources, such as publicly available information obtained from the internet and from human rights reports, in order to corroborate it. However, we will not seek to combine information in a way that would enable users to be identified where they have chosen to remain anonymous.

Device information

We may collect and process information about the mobile phone or other device you use to register for or access the App, including the device make, model, name, and product type.

Location and other validation information

When you use the App, we will collect, process and use information about the location of your mobile device. This information is embedded and encrypted as part of the metadata in the image or footage you take. This data is derived from:

geolocation coordinates;
nearby mobile cell tower IDs;
WiFi networks or crowd-sourced WiFi hotspots in range (where Wi-Fi is enabled);
any bluetooth addresses that are in range (where bluetooth is enabled); and
data derived from sensors in your device relating to your movement.

This information is not combined with device identifiers such as IMSI, and no user IP address is collected.

We collect location and other validation information only from the point in time when you activate the camera on your device; collection is disabled after use. You can turn off this functionality at any time by switching off the location services settings for the App on your mobile device.

Aggregated data

In order to understand and better serve users of the App, we compile aggregated statistics on the usage of the App. This information does not identify users and we may share these statistics when describing the App and the service to other third parties.

Tracking Technologies

In order to provide a confidential and safer user experience the App does not make use of cookies, web beacons, analytics tools or unique device or in-App identifiers.