How we use your personal information
This privacy notice explains how Wolfson College (‘we’, ‘our’, ‘the College’, ‘us’) handles and uses information we collect when you visit the College website – https://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/. Where you engage with the College for another purpose (e.g. as a prospective or current student, as a previous student, as a member of the College, or as a visitor to the College), there are other privacy notices to explain our management of your personal information. Where you enter your personal information into an online form for any specified purpose, you will be told about the use we will make of that information (e.g. to send you newsletters or to enable your attendance at an event).
This statement forms part of the College’s compliance with data protection law in the UK.
The controller for your personal data is Wolfson College, Barton Road, Cambridge CB3 9BB. Your primary contact for all data protection matters is the College Data Protection Lead: bursar@wolfson.cam.ac.uk This is the same address to contact if you wish to exercise any of your data protection rights, including requesting copies of personal data the College holds about you, or making a complaint about how the College has managed your personal data.
The designated Data Protection Officer appointed by the College under UK GDPR is Intercollegiate Services Limited (ISL), 64 Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB2 1UR; 01223 768745; dpo@isl.colleges.cam.ac.uk.
The legal basis for processing your personal data is that it is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests, where we have concluded that our interests do not impact inappropriately on your fundamental rights and freedoms. You may ask us to explain our rationale at any time.
What data are processed and why?
Where you enter your personal information into an online form for any specified purpose, you will be told about the use we will make of that information (e.g. to send you newsletters, consider your request for use of College facilities, or to enable your attendance at an event).
We collect and process your personal information for operating and improving our webpages, analysing their use and ensuring the security of our website.
We use a third-party service to develop and host our site. We also use third party developers to collect standard internet log information and details of your visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out, for example, the number of visitors to each page of our website.
We also collect the request made by your browser to the server hosting the website which includes the IP address, the date, and time of connection, and the page you ask for. We use this information to ensure the security of our websites and we delete it after a maximum of 30 days. We may use and disclose it as necessary in the event of a security concern or incident.
As is the case with most web sites, our web server produces log files that record, for each HTTP request sent to it, the IP address from where our server believes the request came from (which is often the address of an intermediate proxy server), the date and time, the HTTP request itself (command and URL), our server's result code, and the number of bytes transmitted. If a user has logged into our web server, it may also record that user's identity. Such logins may be verified via the University of Cambridge Raven authentication service. We may enable the recording of additional data from time to time as the need arises.
Our website is hosted securely and in conformity with current data protection legislation by a third party, Contra.
Online forms will not normally be retained beyond the point necessary to fulfil a contractual obligation on the part of the College.
All data is available to the server's administrators and will be used primarily to monitor the server's performance, to optimize the content of our web site, and to detect malfunctions or malicious behaviour. Log files may also be made available to College officers and staff or University Computing Service staff, for similar purposes. We may keep our log files indefinitely. Our detailed log files are not normally available to anyone outside the College or Computing Service, unless we are required to transfer such data by UK law. We may publish summary statistics generated from our web-server logs, which do not contain information related to individual users.
This site may store HTTP cookies in your web browser as part of user authentication (login) and to store information needed by other facilities.
As is the case with most web sites, individual pages on this site may contain links to data on other web sites. If your web browser is configured to fetch embedded images, objects or iframes automatically, similar data may be recorded by these other web servers as well as these items are being loaded.
Individual pages on this web site may contain forms for interacting with databases and other interactive services. Any data entered into such forms may be recorded by the respective server and, where personal data is collected, we ask the operator of such a service to provide a link to a privacy policy for this service.
Your rights
You have the right: to ask us for access to, rectification or erasure of your personal information; to restrict processing (pending correction or deletion); to object to communications and to ask for the transfer of your personal information electronically to a third party (data portability).
Some of these rights are not automatic, and we reserve the right to discuss with you why we might not comply with a request from you to exercise them.
If you have questions or concerns about your personal information, or how it is used, please speak to the relevant College staff in the first instance. If you need further guidance or want to make a complaint, please contact the College Data Protection Lead: bursar@wolfson.cam.ac.uk
If you feel that the College has not met your expectations while handling your personal data, you have the right to make a complaint. Full details of the College’s data protection complaints procedure can be found at https://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/about/governance/data-protection.
You retain the right to lodge a complaint about our management of your personal data with the Information Commissioner’s Office. Details of how to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office are available at https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/
This is a live document which will be updated periodically. The most recent version will always be available on our website.
College Data Protection Lead
June 2026
Version Control
| Date | Version | Review Reason |
| 06/2026 | 1.0 | New privacy notice. Provides ISL contact details and complaints information to comply with new DUAA legislation. |
Links
Information Compliance at the University of Cambridge
These pages provide information about Data Protection, Freedom of Information, and offer guidance on Records Management related to both Acts
- Privacy policy for the Raven web authentication server