Consultations Privacy Notice

Food Standards Scotland (FSS) is known as the ‘Controller’ of the personal information provided to us.

What we will do with the information that you provide

The information you provide to our consultations including surveys may be subject to publication or release to other parties or to disclosure in accordance with the provisions of Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, the Data Protection Act 2018 (the DPA), Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004. If you consider that some of the information provided in your response should not be disclosed, you should indicate the information concerned, request that it is not disclosed and explain what harm you consider would result from disclosure.

FSS has the final decision on whether the information should be withheld in accordance with  the  statutory Code of Practice Under FOISA that public authorities must comply to and which deals, amongst other things, with obligations for the confidentiality of  information. We cannot give an assurance that confidentiality can be maintained in all circumstances, but we will take into account your views when making this decision. 

Why we collect your personal data

We need to collect this information to allow us to effectively carry out our official duties of policy development and for the purposes of record keeping and statistics.  We do this in line with the performance of our official duties under the DPA, in the exercise of the official authority vested in us and in the public interest. i.e. a consultation.  We will not collect any personal data from you which we do not need.

We retain personal information only for as long as necessary to carry out these functions, and in line with our retention policy.  This means that this information will be retained for a minimum of 5 years from receipt.

FSS has put in place appropriate and adequate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal information.  Personal information is stored on servers within the European Union and cloud based services have been procured and assessed against the national cyber security centre cloud security principles.

We want to assure you that the personal information you provide through this consultation will not be used for any purpose other than in relation to consultations. No third parties have access to your personal information unless the Law allows them to do so. For example, the information may be shared with other government departments, public bodies, and organisations which perform public functions to assist them in the performance of their statutory duties or when it is in the public interest.

Your rights

You have a right to see the information we hold on you by making a request in writing to the email addresses below.  If at any point you believe the information we process on you is incorrect you can request to have it corrected.  If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your information, you can contact our Data Protection Officer who will investigate the matter.

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are not processing your information in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) or via their telephone helpline (0303 123 1113).

Our Data Protection Officer at Food Standards Scotland is the Interim Director of Policy, Science, Finance and HR who can be contacted at dataprotection@fss.scot.