Charities and privacy
Who doesn't know it now? Someone is at the door taking up a collection for a good cause. You want to give some, but turn out not to have any cash in the house. At first, you want to cooperate. But soon all sorts of things are asked or noted about you or you are asked to scan a QR code. Often, the option to debit periodically is offered and personal details are entered for this too. Because you often already give out of sympathy for this charity or the person coming to collect, you find yourself in two minds. To do or not to do? Someone who is aware of his or her privacy rights soon gives up ("Too bad for the charity then", or "Sorry, it's not up to you" for that boy or girl). But the naive resident who just likes to give, usually gives away more of himself or herself than he or she knows.
Donor Interests Foundation
Jordan van Bergen of Donor Interests Foundation stands up for the interests of donors. He approached Privacy First Foundation to look with us from our mission and vision. Privacy First agrees with the clear views of Stichting Donateursbelangen. Their website clearly states what things you should pay attention to as a donor. For instance, donors are not always aware that the data you provide to a charity is often also processed elsewhere and that you do not know where it stops in the chain. Nor do you know whether your information is shared with other, related charities, for example if you receive a call from a call centre. You also do not know if a personal analysis of you is made on the basis of additional data, just to mention certain hypothetical, yet not to be excluded, possibilities. Stichting Donateursbelangen also provides some tips on what you can do if you have been harmed by a breach of privacy. But you can read about that here: Privacy violation by charities? (donorinterests.co.uk)
Donate anonymously
The position of both Privacy First and Stichting Donateursbelangen is that people should be able to donate anonymously, especially for one-off donations. Privacy First keeps as little donor data as possible, does not provide its donors' personal data to third parties, we have no cookies or trackers on our website and work as much as possible with privacy-friendly parties such as Greenhost, Simple Analytics (instead of Google Analytics) and LaPosta (for our mailings and newsletters). We hope other charities will follow suit.