Privacy notice

About this notice

The Lafuente Family Education Trust (“the Trust”, “we”, “us”) respects your privacy and is committed to protecting it. This notice explains what personal information we collect when you use this website and apply for funding, how we use it, when we share it, how long we keep it, and the choices you have.

The Trust is administered by its trustees, who review applications and decide on funding. If you have any question or request about your information, you can reach the trustees at privacy@lafuenteeducationtrust.org.

Information you give us

You provide information to us directly when you:

• Create an account — your name, email address, a password, and a description of how you are descended from the trust’s founder.
• Complete an application — your date of birth, phone number, and mailing address; the school you attend or plan to attend, your program, degree level, and expected graduation; whether you completed the FAFSA; your academic goals and essay; and the amount of funding you are requesting and what it is for.
• Tell us about accommodations — the application has an optional disability-accommodations field. It is entirely voluntary; you never have to complete it.
• Upload documents — such as a photo ID, a transcript, and a FAFSA record.
• Contact us — if you use the contact form or email the trustees, we receive your message and any contact details you include.

Information we collect automatically

When you use this website, we collect a limited amount of technical information:

• A sign-in cookie — used only to keep you signed in to your account. We do not use advertising or analytics cookies, and we do not track you across other websites.
• Your network (IP) address and the browser your device reports — recorded at certain moments, such as when you agree to a consent or when a record is accessed, as a record of when and from where that happened.

Information from a parent or guardian

If an applicant is a minor, we ask a parent or legal guardian to confirm the application before it is submitted. To do that, the applicant gives us the guardian’s name, their relationship to the applicant, and an email address, and we email that address a single-use confirmation link. We record who confirmed, from what address, and when.

Email from the trust

We send email only about your account and your application. We do not send newsletters, marketing, or promotional messages, and we do not keep a mailing list.

Because this email is about your own account, we send it for as long as you have an application or an account with us. If you would rather not hear from us, you can withdraw your application, or write to us at privacy@lafuenteeducationtrust.org and ask us to stop.

If you are a parent or guardian we asked to confirm an application, or someone we invited to claim a record from the past, you are not signed up for anything. Those two messages include a link that stops them: use it, and we will not send that address either of them again. You can also write to us at privacy@lafuenteeducationtrust.org.

Unsubscribing does not stop the messages you ask us for — confirming your email address when you register, and resetting a password — because without those you could not get into your own account.

Replies to our email reach the trustees. We do not send from an address that cannot be replied to.

The email we send is:

• A confirmation message when you register — we email the address you gave us to confirm it is yours, and your account cannot be used until you confirm it.
• Messages about your own application — when its status changes, and when the trustees ask you for something.
• A password reset link, when you ask for one.
• If you are under 18, one message to the parent or guardian you named, asking them to confirm your application.
• If the trustees hold a paper record of funding you received in the past, a single invitation to claim that record online. That address came from your own application to the trust.

How we use your information

We use the information we collect to:

• Confirm that you are a descendant the trust exists to support and assess your eligibility;
• Review your application and decide whether to fund it;
• Arrange and record payments toward your education;
• Communicate with you about your application and your account;
• Keep the trust’s funding and financial records; and
• Protect the security of the service and prevent misuse.

When we share your information

The trustees of the trust you applied to see your information as part of reviewing and deciding your application. A managing trustee has an additional oversight view — including a log of who looked at applicant records — so that access can be accounted for.

We use a small number of service providers to operate the service — for example, to send our emails and to store the documents you upload. They may use your information only to provide that service to us.

We may disclose information if the law requires it, or where necessary to protect the rights, safety, or property of the trust, its applicants, or others.

We do not sell your information, we do not share it for advertising, and the trust is not a business that would transfer your information in a sale or merger.

How we store and protect it

The documents you upload are encrypted where they are stored, access to applicant records is logged, and access to the system is limited to the trustees and the people who operate it on the trust’s behalf. No system connected to the internet can be guaranteed completely secure, but we take reasonable measures to protect the information in our care.

How long we keep it

How long we keep your information depends on what it is, and on whether the trust ended up funding you.

The documents you upload and the answers you write — your essays, your goals, and anything you tell us about accommodations you need — are permanently deleted three years after a final decision. That applies to everyone, funded or not. These are the most sensitive things we hold, and they have no further purpose once the decision they were provided for has been made. If you apply again, the three years runs from your most recent decision.

If the trust never funded you, we remove the rest of your record seven years after the final decision: your name, date of birth and contact details go, and a skeleton of the record remains without anything that identifies you, so the trust’s funding and audit history stays complete. The same applies to applications that are withdrawn or that expire.

If the trust did fund you, we keep the record of that — your name, where you studied, and what was paid — rather than deleting it on a timer. These are family trusts, and that record is the trust’s account of what it has done. It is also what allows us to recognise you if you come back to us years later for further study, instead of treating you as somebody we have never met. You can ask us to remove it at any time, and the next section explains how.

Your rights and choices

You can ask us to:

• Show you what we hold about you, and give you a copy you can keep;
• Correct information that is wrong or out of date; or
• Delete your personal information, where we are not required to keep it.

Making a request

To make any of these requests, contact the trustees at privacy@lafuenteeducationtrust.org. We will confirm who you are before we act, so that no one else can ask for your information. Some information — such as records tied to funding already paid — we may need to keep, as described above. You can also see and update much of your account information by signing in.

Applicants who are minors

The trust does not advertise and does not seek to collect information from children for any purpose other than considering an application made on their behalf. If an applicant is under 18, a parent or legal guardian is asked to confirm the application by email before it can be submitted, and we record that confirmation. If an applicant is under 13, the guardian’s confirmation is required for the application to proceed at all. A guardian does not receive an account; they are asked to do one thing, once. If you believe a child has given us information without a guardian’s involvement, contact us at privacy@lafuenteeducationtrust.org and we will address it.

Changes to this notice

We may update this notice to reflect changes to the service or to how we handle information. When we make a material change, we update the version shown below. When you register or submit an application, we record which version of this notice was in effect at the time, so it is always clear what you were shown.

How to contact us

If you have a question or a request about your information, contact the trustees of the Lafuente Family Education Trust at privacy@lafuenteeducationtrust.org.