Privacy Policy – for teens

Menstrual Cycle Support has a responsibility to keep all of your personal information safe. This page explains how we handle your personal information. This information was updated on 14th March 2024.

This policy is made for young people, especially those taking our Menstrual Cycle Support course for teens (aged 13-17years)

Menstrual Cycle Support is registered under the Data Protection Act 2018 under number ZB433581 and for the purposes of this policy is the Data Controller. This means we decide what we do with your personal data and how we process it.

Our Company Number is. Our Data Protection Officer is our Founder, Kate Shepherd Cohen at Menstrual Cycle Support Ltd, Trecara, West Polberro, St Agnes, Cornwall, TR5 0ST

We take great care with your personal information. Sometimes the law means we will have to share your personal information. But this is always to protect you or other children. You can read more about this in our confidentiality promise. If you would like someone to explain these laws to you, please email Kate at info@menstrualcyclesupport.com

What is personal information?

Personal information is anything that can identify you in some way. It can include lots of things, like your name, your address, your date of birth and even a photo of you. It also includes your health, your sexuality and your computer’s IP address, and includes things you’ve told us about yourself like what you’ve done and how you’re feeling.

If you use Childline, we may collect the following information about you:

basic contact details, including your name, email address, age / date of birth, IP address.

Some of your personal information is more important, or special, because it is very sensitive. We will only collect this special information if we have an important reason and we will look after it as carefully as possible. We may collect the following special information:

health information, such as illnesses you may have or medicines that you might take – you are not obliged to share this information.
your sexuality
your ethnicity, religion or cultural background.

What do we use your personal information for?

We use your information to help us support you in the best way we can. We will use it for things like:

1. Sharing the information you provide in the before and after questionnaires, which are part of the Menstrual Cycle Support course for teens . Please note this information is only ever shared anonymously, which means your name will never be attached to the information you provide (your identity will be hidden). We collect the anonymous information you provide to understand the types of things affecting young people to help us improve our service, as well as inform wider menstrual health research.

2. If you report a Safeguarding Concern through Menstrual Cycle Support, we may share the information you provide with other people if you ask us to or we need to.

Our reason for using your information

When we use any of your personal information we need to have a legal reason for using it. The legal reason we have is called ‘public task’. This means that we will use your personal information to make sure we keep you safe and support you in the best way we can. If we use your information to look at the types of things young people talk to us about, this will be anonymous so your identity will be kept hidden. We may also use your personal information because a law tells us that we must (for example, a court officially ordered us to do so). This is called ‘legal obligation’.

For the ‘special’ information that we collect, we must have another legal reason as well as ‘public task’, or ‘legal obligation’. It is called a ‘condition’. If we don’t have another reason, or condition, we will not collect this special information from you.
These conditions are:

where you have told us we can collect this information (consent)
where we need to protect yours or someone else’s life (vital interest)
where you have made the information public
for health or social care reasons (i.e. if you have reported a safeguarding concern through Menstrual Cycle Support).

Sharing your information with other people

We will only ever share the information (from the before and after questionnaires) anonymously and only ever with you consent.

If you have reported a safeguarding concern through Menstrual Cycle Support we will only share the report with someone if:

you ask us to;
we believe your life or someone else’s life is in danger;
you’re being hurt by someone in a position of trust who has access to other children like a teacher or police officer;
you tell us that you’re seriously harming another person;
we’re told we have to by law, for example for a court case.

Keeping your records and information

We will look after your information carefully, to make sure that nobody can see it unless they have a genuine reason to see it. We store your information in this country, the UK. None of your information is stored in another country, but if we ever needed to store your information in another country, we would update this privacy policy to let you know and continue to look after your information carefully and make sure we store it legally.

We will do our very best to keep your information safe and secure. We’ll usually keep a record of your details for 25 years. However it’s important to know that at the moment there is a government investigation called IICSA (the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse) which means that we must not destroy any records which might contain information about the sexual abuse of children or child protection and care.

Course for teens – before and after questionnaires

Before and after you take the course we will ask you to fill in questionnaires online to help us improve Menstrual Cycle Support course and the website. Our questionnaires are always anonymous, which means that your identity will be kept hidden, but if you share anything that makes us worried about your safety we may need to tell someone.

Reporting a Safeguarding Concern through Menstrual Cycle Support website

If you share anything that makes us worried about your safety we may need to tell someone.(See ‘Sharing your information with other people’ above)

Using your information for marketing purposes

We may also use your information for marketing purposes. This may be on the basis of your
express consent or on our legitimate interests, and may include:
 Providing you with information, suggestions and recommendations about other courses we
offer that are similar to one that you have already taken or enquired about (unless you have
opted out);
 To measure or understand the effectiveness of advertising we serve to you and others, and
to deliver relevant advertising to you, which may be based on your activity on our website(s)
or third parties’ websites (the information we use for this purpose is collected using cookies
and you can adjust your cookie settings by clicking on cookie settings on our website);
 To send you our newsletter after you have signed up for it;
 To contact you after you have signed up to a webinar or event.

Links to other websites

The Menstrual Cycle Support course for teens and website includes links to other sites that Menstrual Cycle Support doesn’t own or manage. We do our best to make sure these links are safe but we can’t control how the sites collect information or what they do with it.

Because of that we can’t be held responsible for these websites. If you’re not sure what data a site collects you can read its privacy policy. If you click on a link and go to another website, please be careful because we do not control what they do with your information.

How do we collect and use the information you give us?

We will collect your information directly from you in the following ways:

● During the sign up process;
● During the initial survey, on completion of the sign-up process;
● During a survey upon completion of the course.
All the personal information we process is provided to us directly by you for the following reason:
● To assist in providing a tailored course and appropriate materials;
We use the information that you have given us in order to:
● Provide you with a tailored course and appropriate materials;
● Provide you with updates about your progress in the course;
● Provide you with surveys to assess your circumstances before and after completing the course;
● Provide you with a report on completion of the course showing your responses to the surveys, to
enable you to assess the benefits of the course to you;
● Conduct research to assess the efficacy of the course content in providing helpful menstrual
cycle information;

Asking for a copy of your records

If you have an account with Menstrual Cycle Support, you can ask for a copy of any personal information we have about you. This is called a ‘Subject Access Request’.

Accessing the Menstrual Cycle Support course for teens is confidential. This means we can only give out records and personal details if you give us information that helps us find the right notes, like your Menstrual Cycle Support username or password.

It’s also important to think about whether asking to see your records is the right decision for you. And to get support if you do decide to read your notes. No-one is allowed to make you ask for a copy of your information. It must be your choice.

Whenever you feel ready to ask for your records, we will respond to you as soon as possible and always within a month. The best way to ask for your records is to send an email to info@menstrualcyclesupport.com

Sometimes we will need to talk to you about ways that you can confirm who you are.

You also have the right to:

Ask us to change information you think is wrong, for example if you need to update your email address.
Ask us to delete any of your personal information we have if we don’t have a reason to keep it. If we need to keep some information about you, we will explain why.
Ask us to move your information to you or to another organisation in an easy to read format. This might be if we had collected your information because you gave us your consent.
Ask us to stop using your information, or ask us to only use it in a certain way.

How do we use cookies?

Cookies are small files stored on your computers’ or mobile devices’ web browser. Our site uses these cookies to keep you logged in as you move around the site, to provide some of our content, and to monitor the websites’ performance. This helps us make the website better for you and for others.

Some of this information is shared with other companies, you can find out more about how we use cookies and the types of cookies that we use on our cookies page. This page also provides information on how you can prevent or control the cookies that are stored on your computer or device web browser, as well as remove them completely.

Changes to our privacy policy for teens

If we make any changes to this policy we’ll update the text at the top of this page to let you know.

What Day am I? Calculator

We don’t collect, process, or store any of the information that you enter while using this tool. All calculations are done exclusively in your browser, and we don’t have access to the results. All data will be permanently erased after leaving or closing the page.

How to contact us

If you have any questions about how we use your personal data, you can email our team at info@menstrualcyclesupport.com

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) regulates Data Protection in the UK. You have a right to contact them directly via their website www.ico.org.uk or 0303 123 1113.