Privacy policy

When you register and confirm your details we ask for:

• Your name, email address and optional phone number
• Your postcode, used to place you in a county and local community
• Your sex and month and year of birth
• Optional information you choose to add: military service, skills, experience, interests, languages and qualifications

When you pay for a membership, your card details are collected and processed by our payment provider, Stripe. We never see or store your full card number. We receive and store only the payment result: the amount, date, status and your membership plan.

We also keep records you create inside the member area, such as support requests, messages and the contact-sharing choice you make for your county group.

• To create and manage your account and membership
• To allocate you to your county and local community groups
• To take and manage membership payments and send receipts
• To send service emails, such as verification, welcome and account messages
• To respond to support requests and resolve payment queries
• To publish aggregate-only statistics (for example, how many members are in an area). These never identify you.

We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.

We share personal information only where needed to run the service:

• Stripe — processes membership card payments. Stripe receives the information needed to take payment and prevent fraud.
• Our email and hosting providers — deliver emails and operate the platform securely on our behalf.
• Other members of your county group — only where you have chosen to share your contact details, and only inside the secure member area. Your name may be shown to your county group; your email address and phone number are shown only if you opt in.

Member contact details are never included in emails we send. We may disclose information where the law requires it, but to no one else.

• All traffic to and from the site is encrypted in transit (HTTPS).
• Access to personal data is restricted by row-level security rules in our database, so members can only ever read the records they are entitled to see.
• Administrative access is limited to authorised administrators and is recorded in an audit log.
• Card payments are handled entirely by Stripe, which is certified to the payment industry's security standard (PCI DSS). Your card details never touch our servers.
• Passwords are stored only as secure hashes by our authentication provider.

We keep your account information while your account is active. Payment and transaction records are kept for the period required for accounting and tax purposes. If you close your account, we delete or anonymise your personal information except where we must keep it by law.

You can ask us at any time to:

• Provide a copy of the personal information we hold about you
• Correct information that is wrong
• Delete your account and personal information
• Stop non-essential emails (you can also do this yourself in your profile)

Email info@the-network-uk.org from the address on your account and we will action your request. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) if you are unhappy with how we handle your information.

We use the strictly necessary storage needed to keep you signed in and to remember your preferences. We record anonymous, aggregate usage events (such as which pages are visited) to improve the platform. These records do not contain your name, email or payment details.

If we change this policy we will update this page. Material changes will be flagged to members by email. This policy was last updated in September 2026.

Questions about privacy? Email info@the-network-uk.org or see our customer support page.