Home Affairs Privacy Notice

Our Privacy Promise

We promise that:

We will tell you how we use your data
We will use it to manage our services on behalf of the residents of the Isle of Man
We will make sure we collect and store your data securely.

Safety is our number one priority

If you are in touch with the department, we will have to collect and keep information about you, like your name, email address, and other relevant information to deal with the reason you contacted us.

Sometimes we also have to share your data with our trusted partners, like colleagues in other government Departments or people who provide services on our behalf. This is to help them help us keep the Island, and its community, safe.

We promise to collect, process, and store and share your data safely and securely. We will also make sure that the other businesses we work with are just as careful with your data.

We use data to make our Island safe

We can use the details you share with us to help us plan services for the future and identify areas of specific risk. By listening to what our stakeholders tell us, we can make changes, to make things easier and safer where we can.

We use data to plan our services to make them efficient and economic

We use the data we collect to inform planned developments in respect of community safety and safeguarding Island residents. We use this in partnership with others to help us keep the cost of community safety as affordable as possible.

You're in control of your data

If the information we hold on you is wrong, you can email us at DPO-DHA@gov.im to let us know what needs updating and we will correct it.

Who is responsible for your data

The Department is made up of 5 services:

The Central Service team
The Prison and Probation Service
The Fire and Rescue Service
The Communications Service
Emergency Planning and Civil Defence Service

Please note that for data protection and Freedom of Information requests the Isle of Man Constabulary is independent from this Department, and you should direct your enquiries to the Isle of Man Constabulary DPO-Police@gov.im if this is what your enquiry relates to.

Depending on the nature of your contact with the service your data may be held by one of more of these services and each who does will have a responsibility for its process and security.

Services within the Department have Law enforcement responsibilities and are competent authorities to process data for these purposes, that is to prevent, investigate, prosecute or punish criminal acts.

Personal data we collect about you

It is usual that we will collect personal information about you so that we can contact you in future. This is likely to be name address and depending on the nature of your contact with the department it may also include date of Birth, National Insurance number and other identifiers. However we will only collect data that is pertinent to the service you are seeking and nothing else.

Under data protection law in the Isle of Man, certain types of data are identified as special categories of data, these are sensitive categories such as genetic, biometric, racial and ethnic data or trade union membership and political and religious views.

We would only process data in these categories in the following circumstances:

You have given explicit consent
It is necessary for carrying out our obligations in the field of employment, social security and social protection law
Necessary in respect of vital interests - where you are unable to give explicit consent
Necessary for the purposes of occupational medicine
Necessary for the reason of public health

How we use your personal data

We will use your information:

to deal with questions inquiries or complaints that you refer to the Department
to inform you of events developments or service provision which may be of interest to you
to deal with applications submitted to the department for licences and other authorities that are legal obligation of the department

Requesting access to your personal data

You have a right to request all data we hold about you and this can be done by submitting a Subject Access Request. Requests should be emailed to GeneralEnquiries.DHA@gov.im or delivered in hard copy to:

The Department of Home Affairs HQ
Tromode Road
Douglas
IM2 5PA

In response, in addition to providing the information we hold in respect of you in line with the Isle of Man Legislation we will also provide the following information:

The purpose of processing
The categories of data held
Identity of any organisations who will receive the information
The period that the information will be held for
Your rights for us to delete or correct, or limit access to your information
Your right to lodge a complaint to the Information Commissioners Office
Information about where the information came from, if this was not from you
Details of any automated decision making about you that the Department might undertake and what this means for you

Retention of personal data

We will only hold your personal data for as long as we need to. Depending on why the information is held the time we hold it for differs. The details of this are included in our retention policy which can be provided to you on request.

Security of your personal data

We are committed to taking positive steps to make sure that we use technology, or procedures in our Department which protect your personal information. We protect the information against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage to that information.

Government Technology Services (a division of the Cabinet Office of Isle of Man Government) provide standards and procedures for IT and digital security for our electronic records, and where the Department needs to disclose your personal data to a third party for a legal reason, we require that third party to have appropriate technical and organisational security measures in place to protect your personal information too.