Consent for photographs and audiovisual recordings
We (the British Council) would like to collect some of your personal data; this could be either photos, written notes, visual or audio recordings we take of you, so we can use them, free of charge, including your name, for our promotional materials and for any programmes, paper or electronic publications, websites, and social media services worldwide produced by, or on behalf of, the British Council.
The British Council complies with UK data protection law and equivalent laws in other countries. You have rights over how we use your personal information. For example, you can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct any inaccuracies or complain to a privacy regulator. For more information about your rights, please visit the privacy section of our website at www.britishcouncil.org/privacy-cookies/data-protection.
We may use facial recognition software to help us identify photos that best showcase our work and that of our partners, and to help manage data removal requests more efficiently. To locate images of a specific individual, whenever required, we manually tag one of their photos, then use the software to find others. We will only do this where we consider this is necessary, and we will delete the facial recognition data as soon as images have been identified. As the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities, we have a responsibility to support the UK government’s work overseas. This gives us a lawful basis – known as “substantial public interest” in the UK Data Protection Act 2018 – to process biometric data in limited cases like this.
To process your information for all the above purposes, we may share it with our contracted suppliers acting on our behalf, and with social media platforms or other websites operating under their own terms.
Our retention period is five years for images of adults and three years for images of people under the age of 18. In some cases, we may keep them longer – for example, if they are the only record of an activity or help us show the impact or history of our work. These images are kept only as long as they serve a clear purpose and are deleted when no longer needed.
We will rely on your consent and use this form to confirm you agree to our use of your personal information. You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting igdisclosures@britishcouncil.org.
Data Protection and copyright consent
By choosing ‘I consent’ when you register for our events, you consent to the British Council photographing and/or recording you or collecting your written contributions for the purposes stated above. This includes sharing these materials, along with your name, with external press and media agencies, publishers, broadcasters, and the British Council’s partners and other third parties worldwide, for these purposes.
You also give the British Council permission to use, free of charge, transcriptions of things you have said, and any images or other materials you include in the photographs or recordings taken of you. You confirm that any materials you include, whether created by yourself or other people, do not infringe copyright and that you have the right to allow their use by the British Council for the purposes set out above.