Personal information is anything that can identify you in some way. It can include lots of things, like your name, your address, your date of birth and even a photo of you. It also includes your health, your sexuality and your computer's IP address, and includes things you've told us about yourself like what you've done and how you're feeling.

If you use Childline, we may collect the following information about you:

• basic contact details, including your name, email address, postal address, telephone or mobile number and date of birth
• IP address
• photos, videos or audio recordings where necessary.

Some of your personal information is more important, or special, because it is very sensitive. We will only collect this special information if we have an important reason and we will look after it as carefully as possible.  We may collect the following special information:

• health information, such as illnesses you may have or medicines that you might take
• your sexuality
• your ethnicity, religion or cultural background.

We use your information to help us support you in the best way we can. We will use it for things like:

• Keeping notes of our conversations in 1-2-1 chats, over the phone, messages to Childline or things that you post on the message boards.
• Referring to these notes when you contact us again to make sure we can give you the best help.
• Looking at the quality of the conversations with you for training our staff and volunteers.
• Understanding the types of things affecting young people to help us improve our service.
• Sharing your information with other people if you ask us to or we need to.

When we use any of your personal information we need to have a legal reason for using it. The legal reason we have for talking to you at Childline is called ‘public task’. This means that we will use your personal information to make sure we keep you safe and support you in the best way we can. If we use your information to look at the types of things young people talk to us about, the legal reason we have to do this is called 'legitimate interest' and your information will ultimately be anonymised as part of this process so that your identity will be kept hidden. We may also use your personal information because a law tells us that we must (for example, a court officially ordered us to do so). This is called ‘legal obligation’.

For the ‘special’ information that we collect, we must have another legal reason as well as ‘public task’, or ‘legal obligation’. It is called a ‘condition’. If we don’t have another reason, or condition, we will not collect this special information from you.
These conditions are:

• where you have told us we can collect this information (consent)
• where we need to protect yours or someone else’s life (vital interest)
• where you have made the information public
• for health or social care reasons.

Whenever you talk to Childline it's confidential. This means that we will not tell anyone outside of Childline. But sometimes we will need to tell someone. This would be if:

• you ask us to;
• we believe your life or someone else's life is in danger;
• you're being hurt by someone in a position of trust who has access to other children like a teacher or police officer;
• you tell us that you're seriously harming another person;
• we're told we have to by law, for example for a court case.

Find out more about our confidentiality promise.

We will look after your information carefully, to make sure that nobody can see it unless they have a genuine reason to see it. We store your information in this country, the UK. None of your information is stored in another country, but if we ever needed to store your information in another country, we would update this privacy policy to let you know and continue to look after your information carefully and make sure we store it legally.

We will do our very best to keep your information safe and secure. We’ll usually keep a record of your Childline contact for 25 years, but if you tell us you’ve been in care we will keep this record for 75 years. This is because other laws tell us that we must keep your information for this long. 

Sometimes we will ask you to fill in questionnaires or surveys online to help us improve Childline and the website. Our surveys are normally anonymous, which means that your identity will be kept hidden, but if you share anything that makes us worried about your safety we may need to tell someone.

The Childline message boards and image gallery are public. We may sometimes want to use posts from the message boards or images on the Childline website to help other children and young people. We’ll let you know if we want to use an image or post you’ve shared and ask if it's okay.

The Childline website includes links to other sites that Childline doesn't own or manage. We do our best to make sure these links are safe but we can't control how the sites collect information or what they do with it.

Because of that we can't be held responsible for these websites. If you're not sure what data a site collects you can read its privacy policy. If you click on a link and go to another website, please be careful because we do not control what they do with your information.

If you've ever contacted Childline, you can ask for a copy of any personal information we have about you. This is called a ‘Subject Access Request’.

Contacting Childline is confidential. This means we can only give out records and personal details if you give us information that helps us find the right notes, like your Childline username or the answer to your secret question.

It’s also important to think about whether asking to see your records is the right decision for you. And to get support if you do decide to read your notes. No-one is allowed to make you ask for a copy of your information. It must be your choice. Reading over a conversation you had with a counsellor in the past could be upsetting and might bring up things you’d rather forget.

Whenever you feel ready to ask for your records, we will respond to you as soon as possible and always within a month. The best way to ask for your records is to send an email to [email protected]

Emailing is usually quickest but if you’re worried you can also:

• phone us on: 0203 772 9512 during office hours (9am to 5pm)
• write to us at: Data Protection Officer, NSPCC, 42 Curtain Road, London, EC2A 3NH.

We’ll need to know some details about you. If you haven’t contacted us online, it helps if you can remember:

• how you contacted us
• when you contacted us
• if you gave us your full name, just your first name or a nickname.

After you’ve asked for your records, please don’t change your nickname. This could make it harder to find your records.

Sometimes we will need to talk to you about ways that you can confirm who you are.

You also have the right to:

• Ask us to change information you think is wrong, for example if you need to update your email address.
• Ask us to delete any of your personal information we have if we don’t have a reason to keep it. If we need to keep some information about you, we will explain why.
• Ask us to move your information to you or to another organisation in an easy to read format. This might be if we had collected your information because you gave us your consent or it was part of a contract, and because we collected it in an automated way, for example using our Chatbot.
• Ask us to stop using your information, or ask us to only use it in a certain way.

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Some of this information is shared with other companies, you can find out more about how we use cookies and the types of cookies that we use on our cookies page. This page also provides information on how you can prevent or control the cookies that are stored on your computer or device web browser, as well as remove them completely.

If we make any changes to this policy we’ll update the text at the top of this page to let you know.