Privacy Policy

Last updated: 7 March 2023

Longview Philanthropy is a project of the Effective Ventures group, the umbrella term for Effective Ventures Foundation (England and Wales registered charity number 1149828, registered company number 07962181, and also a Netherlands registered tax-deductible entity ANBI 825776867) and Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Inc. (a section 501(c)(3) public charity in the USA, EIN 47-1988398).

Effective Ventures USA (“EV USA”) and Effective Ventures UK (“EV UK”) are separate, but affiliated, organisations that cooperate to meet our common goals. Because of this affiliation, and to reinforce our commitment to protecting the privacy and security of the personal information we process, EV USA and EV UK have cooperatively adopted the following Privacy Notice.

What does this notice cover?

This Privacy Notice describes how EV USA, EV UK, and our affiliated organisations (collectively, “EV”, “we,” “us,” or “our”) collect, use, and share your personal information when you:

(1) visit any websites operated by us, including https://ev.org/ and any other sites or applications containing a link to this Privacy Notice (collectively “Websites”); or

(2) interact with us offline (for example, when you apply for a role within our organisations or volunteer at one of our events).

As this notice covers the activity of EV USA and EV UK, it contains additional details about some activities that other projects carry out but Longview Philanthropy does not.

It also provides additional details regarding how we process the personal information of individuals in the United Kingdom (“UK”), including a description of rights you may have over your personal information under applicable UK law.

EV may have other unique privacy notices that apply to specific situations. To the extent you were provided with different privacy notices that are applicable, those notices will govern our interactions with you, not this one.

If you provide us with personal information of anyone other than yourself (such as a friend or family member), please note that you are responsible for complying with all applicable privacy and data protection laws prior to providing that information to EV (including obtaining consent, if required).

If you have any questions, please contact us using the details in the “Who we are and how you can get in touch” section below.

What personal information do we collect?

When we refer to “personal information,” we mean information that can be used to identify a person or can be linked directly to an individual. We may collect and process your personal information:

(a) directly from you (including through online forms or in conversation with staff during the course of service delivery),

(b) from the device(s) you use to access the Websites,

(d) from public sources (such as LinkedIn).

Personal Information we collect from you directly:

Identity and contact data such as your name, profession, date of birth, mailing address, email address, and phone number. We may request additional information to verify your identity when you make a donation or pledge, or contribute to our funds.
Account data including username and password.
Transaction data including billing address, bank, and payment card information when used to make a donation. For residents of the UK, we ask for UK taxpayer status for Gift Aid purposes.
Marketing preferences including any consents you have given us.
The content of your communications or any other personal information you provide to us directly, such as information provided voluntarily in relation to your profession, your salary after tax, and your date of birth.
Career information including that regarding your career interests, goals, and plans as well as your professional experience and qualifications, right to work status, and other CV information.
Involvement in effective altruism such as cause area interests or participation in EA group.
Demographic information such as country of residence, gender, and age
Service engagement with the Effective Ventures Foundation such as your attendance at relevant events or activities on the Websites.

When we need your information to collect a donation, to open an account, and to review you for some service, we will not be able to do so if you do not provide us with it.

Personal Information we collect from your device(s):

We may collect information from the device(s) you use to access the Websites such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address; device type; dates and times you visit and use the Websites; activity on the Websites and referring websites or applications; Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs (i.e., website addresses) visited prior to arriving and after leaving our Websites; and approximate geolocation. We typically collect this information through the use of cookies and similar technologies. For more information on how we use cookies, please see our Cookie Notice.

When you sign up for our newsletters that we run through Mailchimp, we may track when you open emails and click links in our email campaigns through Mailchimp. We will not be able to provide you with our newsletter service if you do not provide us with this information.

Personal Information we collect from third parties:

We may collect your personal information from third parties, including the following:

Effective Altruism groups

Effective Altruism groups (such as university, city, or national EA groups) may pass on data about their group members to EV so that we can better understand community engagement and provide better resources and opportunities to those community members. This information may include:

name, email address, and phone number;
study or employment information; and
involvement in effective altruism (e.g., cause area interests or participation in EA groups).

Other organisations and industry experts

We work closely with organisations and industry experts in identifying and filling opportunities. Those opportunities may include jobs, grants, volunteer roles, scholarships, conferences and fellowships related to these problem areas and/or career options. Those organisations and industry experts may pass on data to us about individuals they interact with such as job applicants, employees, or volunteers so that we can assess them as potential recipients of our services, provide services to them, or consider them for a role.

We may also ask trusted informal advisors in their relevant areas to get advice, such as help assessing a grant application or to get formal or informal references in recruiting.

Publicly available sources

We may collect personal information about you from publicly available sources, including social media sites (e.g., LinkedIn) or news articles. Such information may include (as relevant) your education, employment history, and credentials.

We may do this, for example, when you apply for a role within our organisation, as part of headhunting work, or when conducting donor due diligence.

How do we use your personal information?

We use your personal information for the following purposes:

to solicit and collect donations, assess grant requests, conduct due diligence, and process grants including making donations and communicating with donors and grantees;
to assess your suitability for services, events, funding, collaborations, roles, or other opportunities at EV or at organisations EV is assisting, and to suggest you for, or contact you about, any of these things;
to conduct research, support discussion of ideas and research, and publish related content;
to run conferences, fellowship schemes, reading groups, retreats, or other types of events.
to carry out community health work for the effective altruism community;
to assess the impact of our work, and to promote our work and values through, for example, case studies and blogs;
to create any accounts you request and maintain or moderate platforms we run;
to communicate with you, including to notify you about changes to our terms and asking you to contribute to online discussions, undertake surveys and give feedback, process your concerns and queries, and provide you with information we think may be useful to you;
to use data analytics to improve our website, services, online forums or sites, marketing efforts, and user experience;
to carry out proper governance on our funding and make public reports about donations (such reports will not directly identify you, but we will use your personal information when creating them);
to administer and protect EV, our initiatives, our people, and our websites; and
to generally protect our legal rights and comply with law and regulation.

How do we share your personal information?

EV USA and EV UK are separate, but affiliated, entities that share common goals and certain resources. As such, your personal information may be shared amongst these two entities and our other affiliated organisations.

Please note that, in many cases, the personal information collected by a specific EV project to deliver their services, will remain within, and only accessible to, the EV project that originally collected it, rather than shared with staff of other EV projects.

We may share your personal information with third parties as follows:

Donations through our platforms

If you make a donation to one of our partner charities using the Giving What We Can platform, EA Funds platform, or another donations platform operated and/or owned by the Effective Ventures Foundation, we will ask you if you would like to disclose your name and email address to the charity. Charities find it helpful to know where the donations they receive come from to allow them to:

reconcile donor lists with their own records;
track conversions, etc.; and
send you details of their work and appeals for donations.

We will only send this information if you give your explicit consent for us to do so. Whilst we make every effort to ensure that the charities we deal with do not use your personal information in a way that you would not expect, we will not be able to control what the charity does with it or who it is further disclosed to.

We will ask you every time you make a donation, but be aware that if your personal information is disclosed to a charity once, we will not be able to force them to delete it. They may not know that any subsequent donations you make to them have come from you, but they will still have your personal information on file from the first time you donated and agreed that we could pass it on. If you do not wish to pass your personal information on to the charity, we will still make the donation on your behalf and you will still be eligible for Gift Aid.

Grant recipients

For EA Funds, if you are a grantee, we may share your email address with other grantees as part of an email chain so that you can communicate with and support each other, but we will only do so with your explicit consent.

Recruiting and 80,000 Hours’ one-one-one service

If you apply for 80,000 Hours’ advising service, you can request by email that your personal information (or certain parts of your information) be kept strictly confidential between you and your advisor rather than shared with the team at 80,000 Hours or EV. We will attempt to accommodate reasonable privacy requests, but there may be circumstances in which we will need to share information, for example when we have a legal obligation to do so, or when it is necessary for safeguarding purposes.

If either you use 80,000 Hours’ one-on-one advising service, or you apply for a role at EV and your application is not successful, we may share your contact details and relevant information with a contact at another organisation or with an industry expert to suggest you for an opportunity you might be a good fit for. We err on the side of caution and avoid sharing sensitive or unnecessary information. We may alternatively contact you to suggest you apply for the opportunity.

We will only ever share your information with trusted organisations and individuals, and will ask them to respect the security of your information. We will ask them only to let you know about opportunities for which you are specifically well-suited and to not add you to any mass mailing lists. We will never receive payment for sharing your information. We will only do this with your explicit consent.

If you apply for 80,000 Hours’ advising service after being referred to our service by a third party, we may let this third party know whether your advising application was successful. This feedback helps our supporters refer appropriate candidates to the service. If you do not want us to share the result of your application with your referrer, please state this on your application.

Other times we may share your data:

In exceptional circumstances, we reserve the right to pass on your personal information when there is a legal or “duty of care” imperative (for example if we need to safeguard other individuals).

We may share your personal information with our affiliate companies and organisations for the purposes set out in this notice.

We may also share your personal information with third-party service providers, who will process it on our behalf for the purposes identified above. We use third-party providers of certain services such as but not exclusively website hosting, website analytics, behavioural remarketing services, marketing automation, payment processing, IT maintenance, and identity checking. We also pass information to our payment processing partner when you make a payment such as a donation—we do not generally store your card details when doing so.

Other than that, we may share your personal information:

with government authorities and/or law enforcement officials if required for the purposes above, if required by law, or if required to protect our legitimate interests (e.g. with HMRC for tax regulation purposes in the UK);
with funders and investors to help our organisation grow;
if all or part of our organisation is closed, combined with another organisation, or becomes its own organisation (for example, when an initiative is no longer hosted by EV), we will share your personal information with external advisers (such as lawyers, accountants, or financial advisers) who are helping us with this process and the owners of the new organisation; and
in connection with any legal process or potential legal process.

How do we secure your personal information?

We put in place organisational and technical measures to protect your personal information. These measures include taking all steps reasonably necessary to ensure our IT systems are secure and putting in place procedures to deal with suspected data breaches. In the unlikely event of a data breach, we will take steps to minimise the loss or destruction of data and, if required by law, will notify you. We have implemented data security policies and procedures, and relevant staff receive data security training.

Our security measures include:

sending the most sensitive information over encrypted channels (SSL/TLS);
using slow password hashing algorithms (such as Bcrypt);
taking reasonable steps towards the physical security of where we host our data (such as using reasonable third-party providers); and
using PCI Compliant payment processors to avoid storing your payment details (e.g. credit card numbers).

Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password that enables you to access certain parts of our Websites, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share a password with anyone.

Although we use reasonable security measures once we have received your personal data, the transmission of data over the internet (including by email) is never completely secure. We work to protect personal information, but we cannot guarantee the security of information transmitted to or by us.

How long do we keep your personal information?

We will only keep your personal information for as long as we need it to achieve the purposes for which we collected it, to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations, to exercise our legal rights, and to protect ourselves from legal claims.

If we no longer need this personal information for the purposes set out in this notice, we will delete it or anonymise it so that nobody can identify you from the information.

Updates to this Privacy Notice

We reserve the right to change this Privacy Notice from time to time. We will alert you when changes have been made by indicating the date this Privacy Notice was last updated or as otherwise may be required by law. It is recommended that you periodically revisit this Privacy Notice to learn of any changes.

Who we are and how you can get in touch

EV USA is a registered Section 501(c)(3) public charity in the United States (EIN 47-1988398). EV USA’s registered office is at 820 Bear Tavern Road, West Trenton, New Jersey 08628.

EV UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (no. 1149828). Like most charities, EV UK operates through a company limited by guarantee, the registration number of which is 07962181. EV UK’s registered office is at Trajan House, Mill Street, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX2 0DJ. If you have questions in relation to this Privacy Notice or on how we use your personal information, please contact us at: info@ev.org.

Additional information for the United Kingdom

The UK General Data Protection Regulation (“UK GDPR”) requires us to provide additional information about how we handle the personal information of individuals subject to those laws. If you are a UK resident, or are otherwise within the scope of the UK GDPR, the following sections apply to our processing of your personal information.

Our role

For the purposes of the UK GDPR, EV UK and EV USA are “controllers” of your personal information as it is described in this Privacy Notice. This means we make decisions about how and why your information is used, and have a responsibility to make sure that your rights are protected when we do so.

Legal bases for processing your personal information

We will process your personal information only where we have a legal basis for doing so, including:

when we need it to perform a contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you;
when it is necessary for our “legitimate interests” (or those of a third party) and your interests and rights do not override our interests;
when you have given us your consent; and
when we need to comply with the law.

When we refer to our “legitimate interests,” we mean:

to improve our programs;
to keep our records updated and to study how our Websites and other services are used;
to administer and protect the charity and web presence (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting, and hosting);
to provide support to the effective altruism community and other field-building efforts including community health, facilitating donations, supporting careers, introducing individuals to events and opportunities, and doing and promoting research
to inform our marketing strategies; and
to best serve our charitable aims in the most efficient manner possible.

For more information on how we use your personal information, please see the “How do we use your personal information?” section above.

Sensitive information

Certain types of personal information may be considered “sensitive” under the UK GDPR, such as information about your race or ethnic origins, political opinions, sex life or sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and health information. We may collect Sensitive Information, in certain circumstances. For example, we may collect:

certain information about your philosophical beliefs to the extent that these relate to your views on effective altruism;
if you are attending an event, your dietary and access requirements;
information about your mental health or other personal circumstances, for example if you provide these to us as part of one of our surveys, or during other interactions (including in the context of our community health services); and
information about ethnicity, for the purposes of diversity monitoring.

We will generally ask for your consent for this Sensitive Information, but we may also rely on other legal bases to collect and use it, for example when we need to do so for safeguarding purposes, to protect your vital interests, to obtain legal advice, or because we are subject to a legal obligation.

Your personal information rights

Under the UK GDPR, you may have the right to ask us for a copy of your personal information; to correct, delete, or restrict (stop any active) use of your personal information; and in certain cases to obtain the personal information you provide to us in a “structured, machine readable format.” You can also object to the use of your personal information in some circumstances (in particular, when we don’t have to use the data to meet a contractual or other legal requirement, or when we are using the data to send you marketing emails).

Where you have given us your consent to use your personal information, you can take back that consent at any time. If you do, we will stop using your personal information immediately, unless we collected it for a different purpose (for example, the information is necessary to comply with a legal obligation). If you decide to take back your consent, this will not affect the lawfulness of our actions before you made that decision. This means that our use of your personal information before you took back your consent remains legal.

These rights may be limited, for example, if answering your request would reveal personal information about another person or if you ask us to delete information which we are required by law to keep or have important legitimate interests to keep.

You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority about how we process your personal information. In the UK, the supervisory authority is the Information Commissioner’s Office.

To exercise any of these rights, or to make a complaint to us, you can get in touch using the details set out in the “Who we are and how you can get in touch” section above.

Cross-border transfer of your personal information

EV has global initiatives, and is based in the United Kingdom and the United States. We generally store your personal information within the UK and the US. Sometimes we use service providers who access your personal data in other countries.

When we need to share your personal information with people or organisations outside the UK, including in the United States, it might be subject to data protection laws that offer less protection than under the UK GDPR. Where this is the case, we take steps to ensure your personal information is protected, including by entering into contracts that have been approved by the relevant authorities (such as “standard contractual clauses” or an “international data transfer agreement”). If you want to learn more about this, or to get a copy of the transfer mechanism that we use, please reach out using the details given in the “Who we are and how you can get in touch” section above.

Effective Ventures Foundation is a charity in England and Wales (with registered charity number 1149828, registered company number 07962181, and is also a Netherlands-registered tax-deductible entity ANBI 825776867). Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc. is a registered 501(c)(3) organization in the USA (EIN 47-1988398).