Talk London Privacy Policy

This page was updated on: 14 April 2025

Please take the time to review this page carefully as it sets out how your personal data will be processed when you sign-up to join the Talk London community in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). By joining and using the Talk London website, you are accepting that your personal data will be processed as set out in this privacy notice.

Talk London wants to offer you the best possible online community experience. Additional functions, features, products or services are added to Talk London from time to time and this, along with our commitment to protecting the privacy of your personal information, may result in periodic changes to this privacy policy.

Any changes to these privacy pages will apply to you and your data immediately, so please check back here regularly. Your continued use of the site will mean that you accept any revisions. If these changes directly affect how your personal data is processed, we will take reasonable steps to let you know.

Read more about Your Privacy Rights under the current data protection legislation, or contact our Data Protection Officer if you have any questions about this privacy policy.

What information does Talk London collect?

Talk London collects and processes a range of information about you.

You can create an account with us and have your say right-away.

Alternatively, you can sign up to our mailing list to receive our updates. You can create an account any time to join in and have your say.

Your account

Community members are required to provide their name and email address, and to set a unique password for their account. This is so we can create and administer your Talk London account. This information is stored privately in your Talk London profile and won’t be displayed on the site itself.

Full profiles

Complete your profile with the demographic details set out below, and you’ll also be able to:

Comment in our discussions
Take our surveys
Add your ideas

Usernames

Users are also required to set a username for their full Talk London account.

Please do not use your own name as a username. Your username will appear alongside any comments you post and we strongly recommend you do not choose a username that identifies you. You are unable to register with an email address as your username.

Email and notification preferences

We will use your email address to notify you about new opportunities to participate - such as consultations, surveys, discussions, focus groups and to share feedback when it is available. You can change some email and notification preferences in the My Account page or you can unsubscribe from these emails at any time. We will not use or share your email address for any other purpose unless you have given us your consent to do so - for example, signing up to receive a separate newsletter.

Avatars

Community members can select an avatar to add to their profile.

Your information

Community members with a full profile are also asked to provide the following information about themselves for their account profile:

the first part of your postcode
the month and year of your date of birth
your gender
the London borough you live in
your work status,
your ethnicity
your housing tenure

Talk London collects this personal information:

to identify you internally and help administer your community membership and use of the platform; and
to weight the results of our surveys, and identify sample groups for certain consultations. We aim to ensure that the views of all sections of the community population are given proper representation in the final aggregated results.

To be clear: while authorised administrators at Talk London will, in certain limited cases (depending on the nature of the survey and your express preferences) retain the ability to link feedback and survey answers to specific users, no contributions, feedback and results from consultations, surveys, discussions and focus groups will be published or shared with third parties by reference to your name or any of your identifying details unless you explicitly consent to this.

Although not itself a member of the Market Research Society (MRS), Talk London has adopted the MRS Code of Conduct as the best practice standard for ensuring its research is carried out in compliance with appropriate privacy and ethical safeguards.

Content you post

By using the services available through Talk London, community members will have the opportunity to share personal information with other community members by, for example, posting comments in existing discussions or creating a new discussion.

Any additional information, content and material you choose to voluntarily post will be visible to all other community members of Talk London, staff at the GLA, and anyone who views the site. It will not be publicly linked to your email address or private profile information on the site.

Any information you post in these areas can be seen by others and you should always be careful when deciding to disclose personal information in this manner. Talk London may typically retain all such posts as archive material, but please visit our Your Privacy Rights page if you have any specific queries or concerns about what Talk London retain and why.

Community members under 18

Community members aged 16-17 will not have their status as children visible to other community members, although moderators and administrators for Talk London will be able to identify such users. Talk London aims to maintain an active moderator presence in discussions.

Additional information

We may ask for further information about you if you choose to take part in certain surveys, consultations or other research through Talk London. These questions, for additional profile information, are optional. Some of them will ask for information that is classed as ‘special category data’ under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK GDPR. They may ask you to provide information about:

your political opinions
your religious beliefs
your physical or mental health
your sexual orientation

Again, we collect this “special category” personal data in order to weight the results of our surveys and identify sample groups. We aim to ensure that the views of all sections of the community population are given proper representation in final aggregated results.

Again, while authorised administrators at Talk London will, in certain limited cases (depending on the nature of the survey and your express preferences) retain the ability to link feedback and survey answers to specific individuals, no contributions, feedback and results from consultations, surveys, discussions and focus groups will be published or shared with third parties by reference to your name or any of your identifying details unless you explicitly consent to this.

What is our legal basis for processing your information?

Under the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018, the GLA is only allowed to use personal information if we have a proper reason or 'legal basis' to do so. In the case of Talk London, these legal grounds are:

where you have given your consent, for example, you have asked to sign-up to a specific newsletter or where you have posted your own information in a comment, blog or forum on Talk London
where it is necessary for our performance or enforcement of a contract entered into with you, for example under Talk London’s Community Guidelines
where it forms part of a public task carried out in the public interest - Talk London allows you to have your say on London's big issues and gather your opinions to help steer the GLA’s policy decisions. The Greater London Authority Act provides a legal basis for Talk London and it is necessary for us to process certain personal data to perform this public interest task. Talk London collects this personal data to weight the results of our surveys to ensure that the views of all sections of the community population are given proper representation in the final aggregated results

Where we ask you to provide 'special category (sensitive) personal data', the GLA must rely on an additional ‘legal basis’ for the processing of that data, which will be:

where you have given your explicit consent, for example, where we have chosen to provide specific and optional information about yourself (such your ethnicity or racial origin, your political opinions, your religious beliefs, your physical or mental health, or your sexual orientation), when you choose to take part in certain surveys, consultations or other research through Talk London
where necessary for equality of opportunity or treatment, for example, so we can ensure that the views of all sections of the community population are given proper representation in the final aggregated results
where you have chosen to make such personal data public, notwithstanding [our firm recommendation / site rule] not to do so using the Talk London platform
where necessary and proportionate for archiving purposes in the public interest, historical research purposes or statistical purposes, but subject to the safeguards set out in this notice (or in any specific survey, feedback or consultation request notified to you) concerning the protection and de-identification of such personal information.

Our mailing list

If you sign up to our mailing list, you give us permission to email you with our updates. You’ll only receive information about Talk London, including opportunities to have your say and updates on past surveys and discussions.

To have your say, you can create a Talk London account any time.

To stop receiving our emails, you can simply unsubscribe from the link at the bottom of our emails. This will remove your email address from our mailing list. Alternatively, you can email us at [email protected] with any questions.

To make it easier to register for an account on Talk London, you can choose to register with your social account. This currently includes:

Google

If you use a third-party service to register for an account, you authorise that third party to share certain personal data with us.

If available, this personal data will then automatically pull through in your Talk London registration form. This includes:

Your first name

Your last name

Your month and year of birth

Your email address

Once authorised, you can remove third-party access at any time by logging into your Talk London account. In your dashboard, you can see and remove the third-party services you’ve authorised.

You can also email [email protected] for support.

Cookies and IP addresses

When you visit our Talk London, our web-servers automatically log your IP address (the unique address which identifies your computer on the internet) so we can identify and prevent attacks or malicious activity on our website.

Cookies are small pieces of data that are downloaded to your computer or mobile device when you visit a website or application. Cookies are generally used to monitor how a website is used and improve your online experience. They do not give us access to the rest of your computer and are not used to identify you personally.

Talk London uses cookies which are required to operate our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into the website and ensure that you do not need to re-enter your details every time you visit a new page, or to help us remember your preferred settings, such as font size and screen width. They also track where new members come from, when they create an account, so that we know if new members are signing up because of our promotional campaigns.

We also use statistical cookies, which allow us to use analytics tools in order to better understand the experience of using the website, as well as carry out A/B test improvements to the website.

Third party sites

We use a third-party provider of software, Alchemer (formerly known as Survey Gizmo), to carry out some additional surveys. We don’t collect, share or process any of your identifiable data within Alchemer. Read their standard terms of use.

We use a third-party provider of software, Mailchimp (part of Intuit), to send out emails. Your Talk London profile and activity data are stored within Mailchimp so that we can segment and personalise our emails to you. None of your data is shared with Mailchimp, nor can they access it.

Your views (what you told us in surveys and discussions) are not stored in Mailchimp.

Mailchimp has certified its compliance to both the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework and the Swiss-US Privacy Shield Framework since 2016. Read their global privacy statement.

The password page on Talk London uses the ‘Have I Been Pwned’ website to check if the password you're trying to update to has previously been exposed in a data breach or leak. If it has, a message will display on the reset password page. In this case, you'll need to come up with a new password.

Keeping your data accurate

You can use the ‘Your Talk London’ feature on Talk London to review or change your account settings, communication preferences, or the details you have supplied to us at any time. It is important that you provide accurate information to Talk London, including (but not limited to) your age. If you have another query relating to the accuracy of your information, have a look at our Your Privacy Rights page.

Deleting your data

Unsubscribing from our emails does not equal deleting your Talk London account and contributions.

To update or delete your Talk London account, please log on and visit the ‘Your Talk London’ section. Alternatively, you can contact us on [email protected] with your request.

We may delete your account and your personal data when you’ve unsubscribed or emails sent to your account have bounced, and you have been inactive for an extended amount of time. We will then keep any contributions you made on Talk London, but your username will be displayed as ‘Anonymous – this account is deleted’.

After that time and should you wish to take part in Talk London’s activities again, you will need to create a new account.

Security

Your data is held on servers owned by the GLA, held in the UK. We have implemented technology and policies to help safeguard your privacy from unauthorised access and improper use. We will continue to update these measures as new technology becomes available.

Contacting us

If you would like to contact us with your views about our privacy practices, or with any enquiry relating to your personal information, email [email protected]. Please see our Your Privacy Rights page for more information.

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