Exeter School Family Society WhatsApp Community Guidelines

The following are our guidelines for engaging with our WhatsApp Community, which we ask you follow to help ensure the best and safest experience for all users. In engaging with our WhatsApp Community, you are choosing to participate and agree to not hold the Exeter School Family Society (‘Society’) or its management committee liable for any content shared on the group chats or any contact made with you by other group members.

Exeter School Family Society observes the terms of service of WhatsApp.

Only ‘Announcements’ are official Society communications. The Society will always ensure any information shared by this route will also be available through other mediums, meaning joining the WhatsApp community is a personal choice only, and not essential to be able to participate fully in the Society and all its activities. For all the groups within the WhatsApp community, the Society has no control over what is posted and cannot guarantee accuracy or authenticity. The Society does not formally moderate messages, although will seek to remove the content, and if necessary the posting group member, if it becomes aware that any content contravenes these guidelines, are off-topic, abusive, discriminatory, harassing or are seen to be outside the ethos of the Society or the aims of the WhatsApp Community. We ask that you respect other members of our community by ensuring that you do not send messages that:

• Include any personal information such as your’s or other’s email address, personal address or phone number Violate another’s copyright or other intellectual property rights

• Solicit business or share commercial information, e.g. sell products and/or services, or recruit fans and followers

• Contain material that is excessively repetitive and/or disruptive to the community or is spam

• Include information containing proprietary, confidential, sensitive, or non-public information

• Breach WhatsApp’s’ own terms of service

• Are considered likely to provoke, attack or offend others

• Are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable

• Contain swear words or other language likely to offend

• Break the law or condone or encourage unlawful activity

• Are seen to impersonate someone else

• Describe or encourage activities which could endanger the safety or well-being of others

Exeter School Family Society will do its best to respond to any direct messages, but as a volunteer led organisation, direct email may elicit a quicker response. Except for ‘Announcements’, any messages sent by, or reacted to, by any Society member does not represent the views of the Society.

Under 18s & Vulnerable Adults Participation in the WhatsApp Community

Exeter School Family Society WhatsApp group is for parents/guardians/carers only and we ask that children or vulnerable adults do not join the WhatsApp Community, but there are no restrictions available to prevent this happening.

Some things to consider in joining the community and groups:

1. If you wish not to be easily identifiable

There is no way to hide your phone number, however there are ways you can make your identity less obvious. Consider not using a full name as the profile name to make identification harder, and instead perhaps use initials or similar.

Go to WhatsApp Settings / Privacy:

- Profile Photo, About, and Status: Set to “My Contacts” or “Nobody” to limit who can see these

- Groups: Set to “My Contacts” or “My Contacts Except…” to limit who can add them to new groups

- Last Seen & Online: Consider setting to “Nobody” or “My Contacts”

2. Read Receipts

These can be set to ‘Disable’ which prevents others from seeing when a message has been read.

- Settings / Privacy: Turn off “Read Receipts”

3. Mute Notifications

- To reduce pressure or distraction, mute the group or set custom notification tones.

Privacy Notice

In joining the Society’s WhatsApp Community, information about you (“personal data”) may be collected and stored. In such cases, and limited to such cases, Exeter School Family Society is responsible for the processing of your personal data as it decides why and how it is processed, acting as the “controller”. Your personal data is handled in line with our Privacy Policy which should be read in conjunction with WhatsApp’s own data policy, which applies to the data processed by them.