With the advent of the new digital database of members, we have rewritten our data retention policy to reflect the new circumstances in relationship to GDPR.

When you join the Society, your name, contact details, and any further details you put into the Member Directory, are all held in a secure database, together with a note of your membership plan and status. No financial information other than the amount paid for membership or publications is held by us. You can access and edit your profile both public and private by logging into the Member Area.

Your membership expires automatically at the end of the subscription year. When you next log into the website, the member area page will tell you that your membership has expired, providing a link to the membership renewal page, where you can select your membership and pay via PayPal, or tell us that you are paying by BACS (if you need to send us a cheque, please email us for the address).

On verification of the renewal payment the Membership Officer will manually reactivate your status and you will once again be able to access member privileges such as book discounts, place Member Notices, and create or update your Member Directory Profile.

Please note the following

• If you do not renew, your membership status will remain ‘Expired’ and a notice will be sent by email (or post for those without email addresses) inviting you to renew in order to receive the current year’s publications, discounts on previous publications, and access to member-only content.
• If you have not renewed by the end of the September following expiry, any entry in the Directory will be hidden from public view.
• However, your details will not be removed from the database, which means your address details, directory entry, and your membership history are retained in case you renew in the next year.
• Membership status will change to ‘Cancelled’ two full years after expiry, and data will be removed in an ongoing process after that. Former members who renew after two years may have to enter their personal and Directory details again from scratch.
• You can ask to see which details we hold for you – these are simply your name, contact details, public directory profile, and membership history (generally speaking, only back to 2015-2016, when the computer database was first compiled. Many entries have notes of earlier membership which were later added manually). Active members can change all details except for the login username, and you can also ask us to alter details for you.  If anyone asks us to completely remove their entry from the database we will of course do that immediately.

For all questions about renewals and member access to the website, please email membersinterests@str.org.uk