Your Privacy

In Short

• Cambridge Local Community — the volunteer organisers of Yarım Hurma — is the data controller. It decides how your information is used.
• We collect only what we need to arrange volunteering and the help people ask for.
• Volunteers see a person’s details step by step: the street or venue first, the door number once confirmed, the phone number on the day only. Then access closes.
• No live location, no advertising, no selling of data, no public rankings.
• Records of people who ask for help are anonymised 24 months after our last contact. Volunteers can delete their account in the app at any time.
• This website uses no cookies and no analytics or tracking. It remembers your language choice in your own browser only.

Who We Are

Yarım Hurma is a volunteer coordination service for charitable activities in Cambridge: small tasks, like help with shopping or a computer, and larger ones, like a charity bazaar or a breakfast for students. It is a Cambridge Local Community initiative.

The data controller is Cambridge Local Community — the volunteer organisers of Yarım Hurma. The organisers appoint the volunteer coordinators, decide which kinds of activities and help are offered, and answer for how your information is handled.

The service is built and run for the organisers by our technical provider, which acts as a data processor under a data processing agreement: it may use the information only on the organisers’ instructions, and it hosts the service in the UK or the European Economic Area.

For any question about your information, contact the coordinators as described under Contact and complaints.

What We Collect

If you ask for help or suggest an activity

• Your name (a first name is fine) and phone number.
• The address or venue: the house or door number (optional for a venue), the street or the name of the venue, and the postcode, so that help reaches the right place.
• How you would like us to contact you (phone, WhatsApp or text message) and your preferred language.
• What it is about, in your own words, and when suits you.
• If someone asks on another person’s or a group’s behalf: their name and phone number, and the name of the person or group if they give it.
• Short notes a coordinator makes after talking with you, for example "please knock loudly" or "the hall key is with the caretaker". If you tell us something about your health that a volunteer needs to know, we record only that, and only with your permission.
• Whether you agreed to one short question afterwards about how it went, and your answer.

If you volunteer

• Your phone number, used to sign in with a one-time code. An email address only if you choose to sign in by email.
• Your name, photo, postcode (turned into an approximate area, never your exact home), the languages you speak, your skills (for example cooking, teaching or design), anything else you tell us you would like to help with, whether you have a vehicle, the times you are usually free, and your notification settings.
• For indoor tasks: that you hold an Enhanced DBS check, the date it was checked, and any reference. If you upload a photo of a certificate, only coordinators can see it.
• The tasks you offer to do, take part in and finish, the times you check in and out (a timestamp only, no location), and the feedback you give after a task.
• Your "dates": private points for finished tasks, visible only to you and the coordinators.
• If you install the app: a device token so we can send you notifications.

If you coordinate

• Your name, phone number, role, and a log of the records you open or change.

If you visit this website

• Our server briefly records technical details of each request, such as your IP address, to keep the service secure and to limit misuse of the request form.
• No cookies, no analytics, no advertising trackers. Our fonts are served from our own server, so no third party learns that you visited.
• If you choose English or Turkish, that choice is kept in your own browser’s storage so the next page opens in the same language. It is never sent to us.
• The request form keeps nothing in your browser. Your answers are only sent when you press "Send my request".

Why We Use It, and Our Lawful Basis

• To arrange the help or the activity you asked about: your consent (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(a)), given on the form or by phone. You can withdraw it at any time.
• To organise volunteering safely, match tasks to volunteers and keep a record of who went where and when: the organisers’ legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) in running a safe volunteer service for Cambridge.
• Health information you choose to share: your explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a)).
• Faith-based activities. Some activities are faith-based, for example teaching Quran to children. Choosing them may reveal your religious beliefs. We use this only to arrange those activities, keep it to the coordinators, and rely on your explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a)), which you give when you choose such a task and can withdraw at any time.
• DBS checks for indoor tasks: the safeguarding condition in Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 2018. We record that a check was done and when, not its contents.
• Where the law requires it, for example a safeguarding referral or a request from the police: legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c)) or vital interests (Article 6(1)(d)).

We never use your information for marketing or fundraising, or to send religious or political material, and we never ask for money.

Who Sees What, and When

We keep personal details to the fewest people for the shortest time. The service enforces these steps itself; they do not rely on anyone’s good memory.

1. A task is postedVolunteers see the kind of task, the street or venue and the approximate area. Never a person’s name, door number or phone number.
2. A volunteer is confirmedThat volunteer sees how you like to be addressed (for example "Mrs H."), the door number and the coordinator’s note.
3. On the day of the taskYour phone number appears to the confirmed volunteer for that day only, so they can find you or let you know they are on the way.
4. After the task is checkedThe volunteer’s access to your details closes for good.

Before a home visit, you are told the volunteer’s first name, shown their photo and given their Yarım Hurma volunteer ID. Coordinators can see full records, and every time anyone opens a person’s contact details it is written to an audit log. Volunteers never see each other’s dates, and there are no public rankings or badges.

Who We Share It With

We do not sell or rent personal information, and we do not share it with other organisations for their own purposes. We use a small number of service providers who act on our instructions:

• Our technical and hosting provider, which stores the data on servers in the UK or the European Economic Area under a data processing agreement.
• A text-message provider (Twilio) and an email provider, only to send sign-in codes and messages about tasks.
• postcodes.io, a public postcode lookup: only the postcode is sent, to find its approximate area.
• Apple and Google push notification services, when volunteers turn on app notifications.
• WhatsApp (Meta), only if you choose to talk to us on WhatsApp. Messages there are also covered by WhatsApp’s own terms.

Some of these providers may process data outside the UK. Where they do, they are covered by UK adequacy regulations or the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum.

When a task is part of an activity run by another organiser, for example a school or a charity holding a bazaar, we may tell that organiser the first names of the volunteers who are coming, so they can welcome and supervise them on the day.

We may share information with safeguarding services, the police or emergency services if someone is at risk of harm, or where the law requires it.

How Long We Keep It

Safeguarding records may need to be kept longer where the law or statutory guidance requires it.

Your Rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the information we hold about you;
• ask us to correct anything that is wrong or incomplete;
• ask us to delete your information;
• ask us to limit how we use it, or object to how we use it;
• receive information you gave us in a format you can take elsewhere;
• withdraw your consent at any time, without affecting what was done before.

To use any of these rights, contact us (see below). We will reply within one month. We may need to check who you are first, usually by sending a code to the phone number we hold.

Deleting Your Data

Volunteers can delete their account in the app: open Profile, go to Privacy and your data and tap Delete my account. We ask you to confirm before anything is deleted. Your personal details are removed at once; the tasks you did remain only as anonymous totals. Step-by-step instructions, and how to ask without the app, are on the help page.

People who asked for help can ask us to delete their record at any time, by phone or WhatsApp.

Keeping It Safe

• Everything is sent over encrypted connections (HTTPS).
• Sign-in uses one-time codes. Coordinator sessions end after 12 hours.
• Access rules are checked by the server on every request, and each opening of a person’s contact details is logged.
• No live location is ever collected. Checking in records only the time.
• Daily backups, kept for 30 days, in the UK or the European Economic Area.

Children

The volunteer app is for adults aged 18 or over. A parent, carer or organiser may ask for help on behalf of a family or a group; we do not knowingly collect information directly from children. Children’s activities are run and supervised by their organisers, and volunteers are never left alone with children.

Changes to This Notice

If we change how we use personal information, we will update this page and the date at the top. Volunteers will be told in the app about important changes.

Contact and Complaints

For any question about your information, or to use your rights, contact the Yarım Hurma coordinators:

• Phone and WhatsApp: our number is coming soon.
• Our Help and support page, which always shows our current contact details.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first so that we can put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO): ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, telephone 0303 123 1113.