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Coronavirus Contact Tracing Privacy Notice

Coronavirus Contact Tracing Privacy Notice

King’s College London respects the privacy of all in our community and is committed to protecting your personal data.

How we manage your data

Data protection legislation (the General Data Protection Regulation, better known as the GDPR) determines that King’s College London is the ‘controller’ of your personal data for the purposes of data protection law.

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. We are allowed to process and share your data in the following ways because of our legal duty to protect the health and wellbeing of our community and to support public health efforts in tackling the spread of novel coronavirus (COVID-19):

Where strictly necessary for contact tracing purposes, if you receive a positive test for COVID-19, we may:

  • use our staff and student databases, access control system database (the ID card system), visitor lists, and any other sources of location data held by King’s to establish your movements around our campuses, identify and notify individuals who may have been in close contact with you, and offer support to you if you are self-isolating;
  • share your personal data with King’s College London Students’ Union as per our joint Memorandum of Understanding and data sharing agreement;
  • share your personal data with Public Health England to assist with NHS Test and Trace; and
  • share your personal data with clinical placement providers where a placed student has tested positive.

Within King’s, access to your personal information is limited to staff who have a legitimate need to see it for the purpose of carrying out their job. We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed.

We have considered very carefully the balance between the wider benefit for the health and safety of all at King’s and the wider public, and your right to individual privacy. For this reason and to protect you:

  • Your personal data collected for contact tracing will only be held for 21 days, in accordance with NHS guidelines.
  • We will only share the personal data we have collected about you for contact tracing purposes when we deem it absolutely necessary in order to mitigate the transmission of coronavirus.
  • We will not use your personal data for any other purposes beyond contact tracing and the reason for which it was originally collected.

To find out more about how we manage and safeguard your personal data, including your rights and who to contact if you have a concern, please see the university’s core privacy notice.

NHS Test and Trace privacy information can be found at online.

This privacy notice may be updated from time to time to reflect changes in the way King’s deals with contact tracing and developments in government and regulatory guidance. Please visit this page periodically in order to keep up to date with any changes.

This privacy notice was last updated on 3rd November 2020.