Privacy Policy
Last updated: 5 November 2026
Who we are
Kadampa Meditation Centre London is a registered charity in England and Wales (number 1100615), and is the controller of the personal data described here. Our website is meditation.london. For anything to do with your data, email info@meditation.london.
What we collect, and why
| What | Why, and our lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Bookings, paid or free: your email, what you booked and what you paid. Also the name and any phone number you give when booking, and a meal choice where an event offers one. | To provide what you booked and run the register on the door (contract). To keep accounting records (legal obligation). |
| Your account: your email, a password if you choose to set one (stored in scrambled form, so we cannot read it), and any name, phone number or address you choose to add. | To let you sign in and see your bookings and membership (contract). Everything except your email is optional. |
| Membership: your level and related payment references. | To provide your membership (contract). Your Direct Debit is set up with GoCardless, not on this website. |
| If you come without booking: the name staff write on the register, any email or phone number you give them, and what you paid. | To run the class and account for money taken at the door (legitimate interests, and legal obligation for the money). Email and phone are optional. |
| “How did you hear about us?”, if you answer it when booking. | To understand how people find us, so we spend a charity’s money sensibly (legitimate interests). It is optional. |
| Newsletter: your email address, and when you opted in. | To send you the newsletter (consent). Booking a class does not sign you up unless you choose to when asked. You can unsubscribe at any time, using the link in any newsletter or by emailing us. |
| Messages you send us, and questions you type into the website’s chat assistant. | To answer you (legitimate interests). |
Card details are entered directly with Stripe. We never see or store them. We do not make automated decisions about you, and we do not build marketing profiles.
Sensitive information
We do not ask about your beliefs or your health. We recognise, though, that a record of attending a Buddhist centre could suggest something about your beliefs, and that a meal choice could too. So we treat booking records as sensitive: only staff who need them can see them, and we do not disclose them outside the centre other than to the service providers below. Where this data does reveal religious belief, we rely on the condition for not-for-profit religious bodies processing data about members and people in regular contact with them, or otherwise on your explicit consent.
The chat assistant
The chat assistant is an AI service provided by Anthropic. What you type is sent to Anthropic to generate a reply. We do not save your conversation or link it to your account, and it is not a medical or counselling service. Please do not enter personal, health or payment details.
Who we share data with
We do not sell your data. We do not share it with anyone for their own marketing. These service providers process it on our behalf:
- Stripe: card payments
- GoCardless: membership Direct Debits
- Supabase: our database, accounts and sign-in
- Resend: sign-in and booking emails
- Google: our email accounts, including info@meditation.london
- Kualo: our domain name, and hosting for our previous website, which we will delete once it is retired
- Vercel: website hosting
- Anthropic: the chat assistant
- Email Octopus: the newsletter
- Sanity: website content and images
Stripe and GoCardless also act as controllers of some payment data in their own right, and keep it under their own legal obligations, including after we have removed it from our systems. We may also disclose data if the law requires us to.
Some of these providers process data outside the UK, including in the United States. Where they do, we rely on UK adequacy regulations or on the safeguards approved for such transfers, such as the ICO’s International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum. Email us for details.
How long we keep it
| Data | How long |
|---|---|
| Checkouts that were started but never paid for | Deleted after 30 days |
| Phone number and meal choice on a booking | Removed after 18 months |
| Name and email on a booking made without an account | Removed after 2 years |
| Your account, and your bookings linked to it | Until you delete it. Any name, email or link to you on a booking is removed after 7 years at the latest. |
| Amounts, dates and items booked | Kept with nothing to identify you, for accounting records and attendance figures |
| If you came without booking | Email and phone removed after 90 days, name after 12 months |
| Newsletter | Until you unsubscribe |
The periods above are applied automatically. Emails you send us are kept only for as long as we need them to deal with what you asked.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law, you have the right to:
- get a copy of your personal data
- have inaccurate data corrected
- have your data erased
- object to, or restrict, how we use it
- receive it in a portable format
- withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent
If you have an account, you can correct your details, download your data or delete your account yourself from your account page. If you booked without an account, you can sign in with the email address you booked with to do the same. Deleting your account does not unsubscribe you from the newsletter, which has its own unsubscribe link. For anything else, including if you came without booking, email info@meditation.london. We will respond within one month.
Cookies and similar technology
We only use what the website needs in order to work, so we do not ask for cookie consent. We do not use analytics, session recording, tracking or advertising cookies.
- Sign-in cookies, set by Supabase, which keep you signed in
- Your basket, saved in your browser until you check out or clear it
- A reference to your booking for one day, so you can see its confirmation page
- A note in your browser for this visit that you closed the chat prompt
Some content comes from other organisations. Google Maps and the kadampa.org centre directory stay switched off until you click to show them. When you do, those organisations receive your IP address and may set cookies of their own. Our interactive maps load their background images from OpenStreetMap, which receives your IP address but sets no cookies for this. Links to payment pages and social media take you to sites with their own privacy policies.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please email info@meditation.london with “Data protection complaint” in the subject line. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days, look into it without undue delay, and tell you the outcome.
You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113.
Changes to this policy
We will post any changes on this page and update the date at the top.