Privacy notice for prospective students

What information does the university collect?

Your data may be collected in a number of ways including booking an event, via a sign up form including prospectus requests or through an external event such as an HE fair or international event.

Information held about you may include:

• your name: so we can address you correctly and so we have a record of you
• email: so can send you email communications
• telephone number: so we can send you SMS text messages, for example open day reminders
• postal address: so we can send you publications you have requested
• postcode:  so we can email you about additional benefits you may qualify for based on where you live, such as contextual offers or our Brighton Boost financial support package  
• country where you usually live: to ensure email communications are relevant to your international or home status, and for our international officers to contact you with information relevant to your country
• whether you or anyone coming with you have any special requirements when visiting us: including dietary requirements, allergies or whether you require visual or auditory support, or if you have physical access requirements
• your preferred year of entry: so we can send you relevant information about courses and updates for that year, and so we know when to delete your data.

Where data is gathered for events or projects run by our outreach team, we are required to collect certain personal details as an obligation to evidence effectiveness of the university’s widening participation programme. These include date of birth, education details, family information, gender, disability and ethnicity.

Further details are in the university’s widening participation outreach privacy notice.

Why do we collect your data?

We collect and process your information to deliver the recruitment-related services you have requested through activities such as:

• sending you a publication
• downloading a digital prospectus
• sending you news and information about being a student at the University of Brighton such as about applying, your subject, visiting us, student life, or being an international student
• booking and attending an event such as an open day or campus tour, including sending you booking reminders, SMS or email messages about any changes to the event, to provide you with a barcode for entry, further information after attending an event. Your data also ensure effective organisation of the event, for example ensuring the correct staffing levels, capacity in rooms or lecture theatres.
• participating in live chat or other online events
• our international team may contact you with relevant information about applying to the University of Brighton from your country
• Attending a UCAS fair where you have signed up with UCAS and scanned your code at our stand to indicate you would like to hear more from us and you have agreed that UCAS can pass your details on to us.

We may also use the information you provide us:

• to better understand your needs and inform improvements to aspects of our service
• to communicate with you and provide other information that we believe you may be interested in.

If you provide consent but later decide you want to withdraw this, you have the right to change your mind. Please see the section below 'your rights'.

How your data is held?

Depending on the service you require your personal data could be held securely and accessed by staff who it to do their job and to purpose the task at hand. Your data may be held within our email service provider Dotdigital, our CRM (Student-CRM also known as Data-Harvesting), the university edublog network, Spotler CRM system, Woopra analytics or the content management system which we use to run our website.

If you have already applied to the university, we hold information about you in our student record system, where your data is processed in accordance with our Privacy notice for applicants.

Data may also be stored in secure university systems such as Sharepoint.

For those taking part in outreach activity  your data may also be held in the HEAT database, inline with our Outreach privacy notice.

Your data is held within the UK or EU. If you have submitted a form via an event in a country that is not the UK or in the EU, your data may be held within that country (and then the UK or EU), and the data regulations of that country will apply.

How we track our emails

Our emails may contain a single pixel to tell us whether our emails are opened, which device is used to view the email and verify any clicks through to links within the email.

We may use this information for purposes including determining which of our emails are more interesting to prospective students and to ensure our emails are optimized for different devices.

The pixel will be deleted when you delete the email. If you do not wish the pixel to be downloaded to your device, you can disable image loading in your email client.

Who has access to data?

We may share your details with other teams within the university and external systems in order to fulfil the service your require. These teams may use a range of systems to store and process data, including, but not limited to the content management system which runs our website, the Student Data CRM, Dotmailer, Eventbrite, SITS and Woopra which provides analytics.

We work with organisations who help us to process data. Some personal details are held on:

• Student-CRM, also known as Data-harvesting, which is our customer relationship management system
• Eventbrite through which we manage some recruitment events
• a range of blogs via the edublog network
• Dotdigital email service provider
• Akero content management system
• the content management system which runs our website
• social media channels including Facebook, Instagram and X may hold your personal data if you contact us through that medium.

How long we will keep your data?

We will always request your preferred year of entry for study and your data will be kept for a period of up to 18 months after the start of that year of entry. For example, if you ordered a 2020 prospectus we will keep your data until March 2023, latest.

If you become a student with us, this data will be then kept according to the student records retention schedule – which for most data is 6 years after completion of your last year of study.

How you can request change or data deletion

You can unsubscribe from any of our emails – all our emails for prospective students at the pre-application stage have an unsubscribe link.

You can request to opt out of SMS messages via brighton.ac.uk/enquiries.

You have the right to request access, deletion or changes to your data at any time. Please email dataprotection@brighton.ac.uk.

Privacy notices

Changes to this notice

We keep our privacy notices under regular review. This privacy notice was last updated in September 2025.

Other privacy notices

We do our utmost to protect your privacy. Please be aware that other privacy notices exist within the university in respect of data held, including but not limited, to activities in relation to your enquiries, application, current students, alumni and use of our website.