Privacy Policy & Cookies

This policy was last updated in August 2024.

This privacy notice sets out the standards you can expect from Hong Kong Family Law Association (“HKFLA”) when we process personal information (‘personal data’) about you.

In this Privacy Policy, “We” and “Us” means HKFLA. “You” means the person visiting our website.  This Privacy Policy will help you understand how we collect, use and safeguard your personal data in our interactions with you. It also describes your data protection rights, including a right to object to some of the processing which we carry out.

This Privacy Policy also serves as our Personal Information Collection Statement. If you as a visitor choose to register or submit information to us via this website, you agree to the use of your personal data in accordance with this document.

Data Collection

We collect and process personal data from and about you when you: access and/or visit our website and/or register to the website; make use our services; join as a member; attend a function or event and/or when you provide us with your personal data via  Wi-Fi, mobile devices, social media platforms/networks or telephone enquiries, your application for or use of our services; and/or when you use a third-party service offered by service providers such as analytics companies, advertising networks and cooperatives, demographic companies, and any other third party service providers that we choose to collaborate or work with, and we obtain your personal data from those third parties.  We also collect personal information when you visit the HKFLA website, from public available sources (e.g. networking events, social media, internet services etc.) This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. We are required under data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice.

We will only ever collect the information we need – including data that will be useful to help improve our services. We collect the following information

1. Members – In order to administer your membership and provide you with your member benefits, we need to process the following personal data about you:
   • Personal information including first and last name, date of birth, occupation, years of practice in your field.*
   • Contact information including current professional address, primary email address, billing address and primary phone number.*
   • Information obtained through our correspondence with you about your membership or products or services you have purchased from us.*
   • Financial data including bank account and payment card details.*
   • Usage data including information about how you use our website, the products and services we offer.*
   • Transaction data including details about payments to and from you and other details of products and services you have purchased from us.*
   • We may also collect information about training courses you have completed, accreditation you have been awarded, and other information about your professional activities.*
   • *mandatory personal data
2. If you do not provide us with mandatory personal data, you may not be able to register your account on the website, and we may not be able to communicate with you or respond to you.
3. If you contact us with an enquiry, we will process the correspondence about the enquiry and the contact details you have used to make that enquiry for the purpose of answering that enquiry.
4. All other personal data collected when you attend a function or event or as a visitor or a guest is limited to the data we need for your visit.
5. Any processing activities we undertake are fully compliant with the date protection laws of the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong.
6. The personal data collected is needed in order to:
   
   • Carry out our obligations arising from any agreements entered between you and us such as membership, training or event attendance
   • Fulfil your requests – e.g., questions or guidance.
   • Look into, and respond to, complaints, incidents or any other issues.
   • Provide a personalised service to you when you visit our website – this could include customising the content and/or layout of our website and webpages for individual users.
   • Prevent or detect fraud or abuses of our websites and enable third parties to carry out technical, logistical or other functions on our behalf.

For purposes which are required by law:

In response to requests by government or law enforcement authorities conducting an investigation as may be required from time to time.

In this Privacy Policy, your personal data means: your name, email address, contact number, MAC address, IP address, credit/debit card and other payment information, gender, date of birth, age, interests, geographical location, website usage (including browsing behaviour / activities), shopping and purchasing behaviour, security CCTV from events, professional credentials and information you provide us and other personal data you provide.

When Do We Disclose Your Personal Information?

We may share your personal information with our Committee Members and other parties who require such information to assist us with managing the services and website we provide to you.

Also, your personal information may be disclosed:

• as permitted or required by applicable law or regulatory requirements;
• to comply with valid legal processes such as search warrants, subpoenas or Court orders;
• as part of HKFLA regular reporting activities;
• to protect our rights and property;
• during emergency situations or where necessary to protect the safety of a person or group of persons;
• where the personal information is publicly available; or
• with your consent where such consent is required by law.

In any such a case, we will not disclose more personal information than is required in the circumstances and, except under compulsion of law.

Personal data will also be shared with third party service providers, who will process it on our behalf for the purposes identified in above. In particular, we use the following third-party providers:

• Courier services;
• Data storage and cloud service providers (for storage of your personal data and hosting of applications that process your personal data for the purposes identified in this policy);
• Data analytics service providers and agencies in which only anonymised data will be sent to service providers for those purposes identified above.

Our Legal Basis to Process

The legal basis for this processing is for the purpose of delivering our contract with you and, outside of this, our legitimate interest in providing you with products and services which may be of a professional interest to you.

We will use your contact details to provide you with news from our sector; professional development opportunities; information and support to help you in your daily work life; opportunities to get involved within the HKFLA community, our campaigns, and other information that may be of benefit to you professionally.

We may contact you for marketing purposes based on our legitimate interest of providing services to our members. You have the right at any time to let us know that you no longer wish to receive marketing communications from us.

We may also process your data with your consent such as publishing your personal data on our website so that members of the public can contact you if they wish to use your services.

 We may use your personal data without your knowledge or consent for other purposes arising from an exemption under the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (Cap. 486) (“PDPO”) or otherwise in accordance with applicable law and regulation.

Where your consent is required this will be requested and recorded in a clear unambiguous way. Where your consent is required for our collection, use or disclosure of your personal information, you may, at any time, subject to legal or contractual restrictions and to reasonable notice, withdraw your consent. All communications with respect to such withdrawal or variation of consent should be in writing and addressed to: The Secretary, c/o Hong Kong Family Law Association, G.P.O. Box 11417, Hong Kong.

HKFLA is committed to keeping personal information secure to protect it from being inappropriately or accidentally accessed, used, shared or destroyed, and against it being lost.

Access to your personal information is limited to those the HKFLA committee and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

Access to your personal information is only allowed when required by law or is required as part our fulfilling our service obligations.

We do make use of carefully selected third-party service providers to help us fulfil our services and where we do the third party is required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and we only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

Updating Your Personal Information

It is important that the information contained in our records is both accurate and current. If your personal information happens to change during the course of your relationship with us, please keep us informed of such changes.

You have a right to have your personal information corrected if it is inaccurate and to have incomplete personal information completed. In some circumstances we may decide to update our record of your personal information by appending additional text without deleting the original record.

Right of Access to Your Personal Information

Where permitted by law, you have the right to ask us for a copy of your personal data; to correct  your personal data; and to obtain the personal data you provide to us in a structured, machine readable format.

These rights may be limited, for example if fulfilling your request would reveal personal data about another person, where they would infringe the rights of a third party (including our rights) or if you ask us to delete information which we are required by law to keep or have compelling legitimate interests in keeping. Relevant exemptions are available under applicable laws. We will inform you of relevant exemptions we rely upon when responding to any request you make.

To exercise any of these rights, or to obtain other information, such as a copy of a legitimate interests assessment, you can get in touch with us using the details set out herein above or through our Contact page in our website.

The retention of your personal information will be for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

In general terms we will retain:

• Membership data for the duration of your membership. Once you have ceased to be a member, we will retain the data for a further five years. On some areas we will continue to hold the details after 5 years where for example the training you have completed and accreditation you have been awarded, as you may wish to check this with us in the future
• If you have made an enquiry, we will retain your contact details for three years.
• If you have subscribed to our bulletins, we will retain your contact details for the duration of your subscription.

Use of Personal Data for Direct Marketing

We may use your personal data in direct marketing. However, we will not use your personal data for such purpose unless we have received your consent.

• full legal name
• email address
• mobile phone number
• residential/correspondence address

The direct marketing activities we intend to conduct using your personal data are:

• To provide you with direct marketing communications in relation to HKFLA products, services, events, offers or promotions under the categories stated below, provided by:
  • us or our related speakers,
  • other relevant organisations, individuals, and/or companies, and
  • other third party providers. Such marketing communications may be in various forms, and may include advertisements, special events notifications or newsletters, and delivered via various methods in accordance with the personal data that you provide to us, such as by email, SMS, WhatsApp or WeChat messages, smartphone app push notifications, notifications on your social media pages, in–app messaging or postal mail.
  • Such marketing communications may market or offer products or services (including special events and promotions) in the following categories: HKFLA talks, events, services, discussion panels, conferences, and other products and/or services related to any of the foregoing, which we think may be relevant to you based on information you provide to us (for instance, via your participation in our surveys); and
• To allow you to register for and participate in our events and/or other professional activities, including verifying your identity at those events and promotions as the case may be from time to time.

We may transfer your personal data for direct marketing purposes (for gain or not) to the following:

• E-mail/SMS/WhatsApp/marketing and marketing automation services;
• Google and other social networks (for matching of your personal data with their database in order to send you our direct marketing materials through Google and/or other networks;
• Marketing (including digital marketing) and website analytic agencies (for display of advertising materials on our website and other websites that you may visit, and analysis of your online behaviour and usage of our website – these agencies use cookies; and

You may in future withdraw your consent to the use and provision of your personal data for direct marketing. If you wish to withdraw your consent, please send a request to us at admin.hkfla@gmail.com, or by replying with the heading “unsubscribe” to any direct marketing communication from us.

We will, without charge, ensure that you are not included in future direct marketing activities.

Cookies

Our website makes use of Cookie technology which captures data using Cookies (small text files) to your device when you access and/or use the website.  Please review your settings here: Privacy Preferences

Our website uses cookies and other tracking and monitoring software to:

• distinguish our users from one another;
• collect standard Internet log information; and
• to collect visitor behaviour information.

We use the following cookies:

Strictly necessary cookies: These are cookies that are required for the operation of a website.

Analytical/performance cookies: These allow us to measure the number of visitors to our site and to see how visitors move around the pages when they are using it. These cookies collect information in an anonymous form.

Functionality cookies: These are used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise our content for you.  

You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them in the table below:

The information is used to track user interactions with the website and allows us to provide you with a good experience when you access the website, helps us to improve our website, and allows us to compile statistical reports on website visitors and website activity.

HKFLA makes use of Google Analytics to collect standard internet log information and details about your behaviour patterns. This allows us to find out the number of visitors we have to each part of the site so we can improve it as needed. This information is anonymised therefore you cannot be identified as an individual. We do not attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website.

Should we wish to collect your personal information through our website, we will clearly state this and explain what we will use your data for.

We may disclose aggregated, anonymous information (i.e., information from which you cannot be personally identified), or insights based on such anonymous information, to selected third parties, including analytics and search engine providers to assist us in the improvement and optimisation of the website. We do not disclose any information which can identify you personally.

You can set your system not to accept cookies if you wish (for example by changing your browser settings so cookies are not accepted). However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our website.

For further general information about cookies please visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

Other websites

This privacy statement does not cover the links to other websites. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on the each of the other websites you visit.

Changes to our Privacy Policy and Personal Information Collection Statement

We keep this policy and the Personal Information Collection Statement under regular review and may change them from time to time. If we change this policy and the Personal Information Collection Statement, we will post the changes on this page, and place notices on other pages of the website as applicable. You are responsible for ensuring you are aware of the most recent version this policy and the Personal Information Collection Statement.