How we use your data
If you make a data protection request to the Council, including a request for subject access, we’ll keep all information about your request in an electronic case file. We don’t use your personal data for any other purpose than to process and correspond with you about your request. We don’t share your data with anyone else.
How long we keep your information for
Normally, we’ll keep the request case file for the current year, plus three years from the date your request is closed. If you’ve appealed our handling of your request to the Information Commissioner’s Office, we will keep the case file for the current year plus six years.
If you have a case file with our Social Work service, we’ll also keep a copy of our response in your case file, or within the file of the person whose information you requested. How long we keep this will vary depending on how you or they are known to us, as the response documentation will be held for the lifetime of your case file to ensure that if you ever wish to access the contents of your file it would be clear that you previously had access.
- Looked after child – 100 years from date of birth.
- Short-term social work contact – 5 years plus current year from the date of complaint.
- Foster carer – 25 years from date of approval.
- Adoptive parents – 100 years from the date of birth of adopted child.
- Staff members – 25 years.
- Child on Child Protection Register – 48 years.
- Individual deemed to be a Schedule One Offender – 50 years.
We also keep a register of all data protection requests we receive for a longer period of time, so we can understand what the trends are in the numbers of requests, and monitor our compliance with our data protection responsibilities, but this is kept in anonymised form (your data isn’t kept).
Your rights
You have rights in relation to your data, including the right to ask for a copy of it. See more information about the all the rights you have, as well as the contact details for the Council’s Data Protection Officer. You also have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office if you think we haven’t handled your data properly.
Our legal basis
Aberdeen City Council is the Data Controller for your data we hold as part of receiving and responding to your request. Responding to data protection requests is something that the Council must do to comply with data protection law. This means that we understand our legal basis for processing your data as Article 6(1)(c) of the General Data Protection Regulation.