iForge Makerspace Privacy Policy

This privacy notice tells you what to expect us to do with your personal information.

Contact details

Email

iforge@sheffield.ac.uk

What information we collect, use, and why

We collect or use the following information for user education and welfare:

Names and contact details for users
Personal pronouns
Payment details and financial information including transactions
Photographs
Sign in data
Exclusion/suspension information

We collect or use the following information for disciplinary investigations or to prevent, detect, investigate or prosecute crimes:

Names and contact details for users
Personal pronouns
Sign in data
Records and reports

We collect or use the following personal information for dealing with queries, complaints or claims:

Names and contact details
Personal pronouns
Account login or user information
Purchase history
Correspondence
Sign in data
User sessions and other website usage

We collect or use the following information for information updates or marketing purposes:

Names and contact details
Marketing preferences
Records of consent, where appropriate

We collect or use the following information for recruitment purposes:

Contact details (e.g. name, degree, year of study and personal email address)

Lawful bases and data protection rights

Under UK data protection law, we must have a “lawful basis” for collecting and using your personal information. There is a list of possible lawful bases in the UK GDPR. You can find out more about lawful bases on the ICO's website.

Which lawful basis we rely on may affect your data protection rights which are set out in brief below. You can find out more about your data protection rights and the exemptions which may apply on the ICO's website:

Your right of access - You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information. You can request other information such as details about where we get personal information from and who we share personal information with. There are some exemptions which means you may not receive all the information you ask for. Read more about the right of access.
Your right to rectification - You have the right to ask us to correct or delete personal information you think is inaccurate or incomplete. Read more about the right to rectification.
Your right to erasure - You have the right to ask us to delete your personal information. Read more about the right to erasure.
Your right to restriction of processing - You have the right to ask us to limit how we can use your personal information. Read more about the right to restriction of processing.
Your right to object to processing - You have the right to object to the processing of your personal data. Read more about the right to object to processing.
Your right to data portability - You have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you. Read more about the right to data portability.
Your right to withdraw consent - When we use consent as our lawful basis you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. Read more about the right to withdraw consent.

If you make a request, we must respond to you without undue delay and in any event within one month.

To make a data protection rights request, please contact us using the contact details at the top of this privacy notice.

Our lawful bases for the collection and use of your data

Our lawful bases for collecting or using personal information for user education and welfare are:

Consent - we have permission from you after we gave you all the relevant information. All your data protection rights may apply, except the right to object. To be clear, you do have the right to withdraw your consent at any time.
Legitimate interests - we're collecting or using your information because it benefits you, our organisation or someone else, without causing an undue risk of harm to anyone. All your data protection rights may apply, except the right to portability. Our legitimate interests are:
- We need data to prove that the iForge is being used otherwise it may have its resources cut. If the iForge were to be shutdown members of the university would be worse off.

For more information on our use of legitimate interests as a lawful basis you can contact us using the contact details set out above.

Our lawful bases for collecting or using personal information for disciplinary investigations or to prevent, detect, investigate or prosecute crimes are:

Consent - we have permission from you after we gave you all the relevant information. All your data protection rights may apply, except the right to object. To be clear, you do have the right to withdraw your consent at any time.
Legal obligation - we must collect or use your information so we can comply with the law. All your data protection rights may apply, except the right to erasure, the right to object and the right to data portability.

Our lawful bases for collecting or using personal information for dealing with queries, complaints or claims are:

Consent - we have permission from you after we gave you all the relevant information. All your data protection rights may apply, except the right to object. To be clear, you do have the right to withdraw your consent at any time.
Legitimate interests - we're collecting or using your information because it benefits you, our organisation or someone else, without causing an undue risk of harm to anyone. All your data protection rights may apply, except the right to portability. Our legitimate interests are:
- We need user session information (User IDs, Browser information, Device details, User actions that led to errors, URL parameters, Stack traces (which might contain user inputs)) to debug problems with the website. We use Sentry.io for this it is the industry standard for tracking problems we avoid transferring any personally identifiable information to our Sentry hosted sever located in the EU. Sentry's security & compliance can be found at https://sentry.io/security/#data-security-and-privacy, we have agreed to their Data Processing Addendum.

Our lawful bases for collecting or using personal information for information updates or marketing purposes are:

Consent - we have permission from you after we gave you all the relevant information. All of your data protection rights may apply, except the right to object. To be clear, you do have the right to withdraw your consent at any time.

Our lawful bases for collecting or using personal information for recruitment purposes are:

Our lawful bases for collecting or using personal information to comply with legal requirements are:

Consent - we have permission from you after we gave you all the relevant information. All of your data protection rights may apply, except the right to object. To be clear, you do have the right to withdraw your consent at any time.
Legal obligation - we have to collect or use your information so we can comply with the law. All of your data protection rights may apply, except the right to erasure, the right to object and the right to data portability.

Where we get personal information from

Directly from you
From the University's records

How long we keep information

Data is retained until graduation and then anonymised or after 7 days of request. iForge usage data is anonymised whilst retaining the department after graduation/deletion to allow for historic statistics.

For more information on how long we store your personal information or the criteria we use to determine this please contact us using the details provided above.

Our publicity team can display photos on our website, social media or other marketing and information media. We will never display personal information on our social media channels without prior consent. Please let us know if you do not wish to participate in photos.

Others we share personal information with

Multidisciplinary Engineering Education department and the Faculty of Engineering inside the University

How to complain

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal data, you can make a complaint to us using the contact details at the top of this privacy notice.

Last updated

August 31, 2025

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