Magic Notes - Privacy notices by service area

Hartlepool Borough Council (HBC) is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information.

This privacy notice is issued in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and describes how Hartlepool Borough Council will collect, use, and store your personal data as part of the implementation of Magic Notes, an AI-powered transcription and summarisation tool used within Adult Social Care Services. It explains the purposes for which your data will be processed, the legal basis for processing, your rights regarding your data, and how we ensure its security and confidentiality.

We may update this notice at any time.

It is important that you read this notice, together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information.

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).
There are “special categories” of more sensitive personal data which require a higher level of protection.

We will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:

• Personal Identification Details: This includes your name, address, date of birth, and contact information.
• Social Care Information: Details about your care needs, support plans, and any relevant health or wellbeing information discussed during meetings with social workers.
• Case Notes and Meeting Summaries: Transcriptions and AI-generated summaries of conversations between you and your social worker, which help maintain accurate records of your interactions and care planning

”Special categories” of particularly sensitive personal information require higher levels of protection. We need to have further justification for collecting, storing and using this type of personal information. We may process special categories of personal information in the following circumstances:

1. In limited circumstances, with your explicit written consent.
2. Where we need to carry out our legal obligations and in line with our data protection policy.
3. Where it is needed in the public interest

Less commonly, we may process this type of information where it is needed in relation to legal claims or where it is needed to protect your interests (or someone else’s interests) and you are not capable of giving your consent, or where you have already made the information public.

We primarily collect personal information through Magic Notes, which transcribes and summarises conversations during meetings between you and your social worker. This information is recorded in real-time and converted into written case notes to support accurate documentation. Additionally, personal data may be collected through face-to-face interactions, telephone conversations, or email communications with Adult Social Care staff.

We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal information in the following circumstances:

• To support accurate case recording and decision-making: Magic Notes transcribes and summarises conversations between you and your social worker to ensure that your care needs, concerns, and support plans are accurately documented.
• To enhance the efficiency of social care services: By automating case note creation, we aim to reduce administrative burdens on social workers, allowing them to focus more on delivering care and support.
• To maintain and update your records: Transcribed notes are stored securely within our case management system and are updated as needed to reflect changes in your care plan or circumstances.
• To improve service quality and compliance: The data collected through Magic Notes helps us monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of our services, ensuring that we meet regulatory standards and deliver high-quality support.
• To respond to queries, concerns, or complaints: If you have any questions or issues regarding your recorded information, we will use the data to investigate and address your concerns in line with our complaints procedure.

Situations in which we will use your personal information

We need all the categories of information in the list above (see what personal information we collect) primarily to allow us to undertake our statutory function, i.e.

• Accurate Case Recording: Ensuring that interactions between you and your social worker are accurately transcribed and summarised to maintain comprehensive records of your care needs and support plans.
• Enhanced Service Delivery: Supporting social workers by reducing administrative workload, allowing them to focus more on providing direct care and assistance.
• Informed Decision-Making: Using transcribed notes to facilitate more accurate assessments, care planning, and referrals to ensure you receive the appropriate level of support.

The situations in which we will process your personal information are listed below:

Some of the above grounds for processing will overlap and there may be more than one ground which justifies our use of your personal information.

If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may not be able to provide you with a suitable assessment of your needs, support plan or review, or we may be prevented from complying with our statutory obligations.  

We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your personal information for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal information without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.
 

We do not need your consent if we use special categories of your personal information in accordance with our written policy to carry out our legal obligations or exercise specific rights as required by law. In limited circumstances, we may approach you for your written consent to allow us to process certain particularly sensitive data. If we do so, we will provide you with full details of the information that we would like and the reason we need it, so that you can carefully consider whether you wish to consent.

You will not be subject to decisions that will have a significant impact on you based solely on automated decision-making, unless we have a lawful basis for doing so and we have notified you.

We do not envisage that any decisions will be taken about you using automated means, however we will notify you in writing if this position changes
 

We may have to share your data with third parties, including third-party service providers and other entities in the group.

We require third parties to respect the security of your data and to treat it in accordance with the law.

We will not transfer your personal information outside the EU.
 

We will share your personal information with third parties where required by law or where it is necessary to provide status updates to referring bodies. Examples of the organisations we may need to share information with are:

• Healthcare Providers: To coordinate and verify information relevant to your care and ensure continuity of support.
• Social Services: To integrate support services and ensure a holistic approach to your care needs.
• Regulatory Bodies: To comply with legal or regulatory requirements
• Other Local Authorities: If your care services involve multiple authorities or if information needs to be shared for assessment purposes.

In some cases, such as for the prevention and detection of crime or for safeguarding purposes, we are legally obliged to share information with other agencies e.g. such as the police.

Which third-parties process my personal information?

”Third parties” includes third-party service providers (including contractors and designated agents). The following third-parties process personal information about you for the following purposes: 

• NEC Software Solutions: As the Council’s IT provider, NEC may need to access the system to diagnose and resolve technical faults.
• Magic Notes: An AI-powered transcription service used to record, transcribe, and summarise interactions between social workers and service users. Magic Notes processes personal data to assist with case documentation and improve the efficiency of social care services.

How secure is my information with third-party service providers?

All our third-party service providers are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.
 

We have put in place measures to protect the security of your information. Details of these measures are available upon request.

Third parties will only process your personal information on our instructions and where they have agreed to treat the information confidentially and to keep it secure.

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality. Details of these measures may be obtained from the Data Protection Officer.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.
 

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal information are available in our retention policy.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use such information without further notice to you. 
 

Your duty to inform us of changes

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes during your working relationship with us.

Your rights in connection with personal information

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

• Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
• Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
• Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).
• Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
• Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
• Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.

If you want to review, verify, correct or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact the Data Protection Officer in writing. 

We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.