Website Privacy Notice
Last updated: March 2025
This Privacy Notice explains how 80,000 Hours Limited and 80,000 Hours Foundation (together “80,000 Hours“, “we“, “us” or “our“) collects, uses and shares personal information about you when you:
- visit any websites operated by us, including https://80000hours.org/ and any other sites or applications containing a link to this Privacy Notice (collectively “Websites“); or
interact with us offline (for example, when you apply for a role within our organisations or volunteer at one of our events).
It also provides details of the rights that you have under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (the “UK GDPR“).
For the purposes of the UK GDPR, 80,000 Hours Limited and 80,000 Hours Foundation are “controllers” of your personal information as it is described in this Privacy Notice. This means we make decisions about how and why your information is used, and have a responsibility to make sure that your rights are protected when we do so.
80,000 Hours may have other privacy notices that apply to specific situations. To the extent you are provided with different privacy notices that are applicable, those notices will govern our interactions with you.
We recommend you read this Privacy Notice together with our Cookie Notice and Terms of Use.
If you have any questions, please contact us using the details in the “Who we are and how you can get in touch” section below.
What personal information do we collect?
When we refer to “personal information,” we mean information which relates to an identified or identifiable individual (i.e. a natural person). We may collect and process your personal information:
- directly from you (including through online forms or in conversation with staff about your career aims and aspirations),
from the device(s) you use to access the Websites,
from third parties (for example, if you receive career advice from a partner in our professional network, and this partner provides us with information about your work history in order for us to understand your career aims further), and
from public sources (such as LinkedIn).
Personal information we may collect from you directly
Please note that, we’ll only collect certain types of data if you communicate with us directly, such as if you apply for a career advising call. If you just browse our websites, we’ll generally collect a lot less data from you.
- Identity and Contact Data such as your name, profession, date of birth, mailing address, email address, and phone number. We may request additional information to verify your identity when you use our career services.
Transaction Data including billing address, bank, and payment card information when used to make a donation. For residents of the UK, we ask for UK taxpayer status for Gift Aid purposes.
Information about your interests, preferences and affiliations insofar as they relate to the services that we provide (e.g., providing advice on communities and professional networks relevant to your career aspirations, organising events).
Marketing and Communications Preferences including any consents you have given us.
The content of your Communications or any other personal information you provide to us directly, such as information provided voluntarily in relation to your profession, your salary after tax, and your date of birth.
Career Information including that regarding your career interests, goals, and plans as well as your professional experience and qualifications, right to work status, and other CV information.
Involvement in 80,000 Hours such as cause area interests or participation in professional groups or communities.
Demographic Information such as country of residence, gender, and age.
Engagement with 80,000 Hours such as your attendance at relevant events or activities on the Websites.
Biographical and Background Data including information that our career advisors may ask you so that we can support you with your career choices (such as details about your work background and any other reflections that you have about yourself as a candidate that you choose to provide to us).
Where we need your information to be able to offer you career related advice, we will not be able to do so if you do not provide us with it.
Personal information we collect from your device(s)
We may collect information from the device(s) you use to access the Websites such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address; device type; dates and times you visit and use the Websites; activity on the Websites and referring websites or applications; Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs (i.e., website addresses) visited prior to arriving at, and after leaving, our Websites; and approximate geolocation. We typically collect this information through the use of cookies and similar technologies.
For more information on how we use cookies, please see our Cookie Notice.
When you sign up for our newsletters that we run through Mailchimp, we may track when you open emails and click links in our email campaigns through Mailchimp.
Personal information we collect from third parties
We may collect your personal information from third parties, including the following:
Other organisations and industry experts
We work closely with organisations and industry experts in identifying and filling opportunities that may be of interest to you. Those opportunities may include jobs, grants, volunteer roles, scholarships, conferences and fellowships related to these problem areas and/or career options. Those organisations and industry experts may pass on data to us about individuals they interact with such as job applicants, employees, or volunteers so that we can assess them as potential recipients of our services, provide services to them, or consider them for a role.
We may also ask trusted informal advisors in their relevant areas to get advice, such as help assessing a grant application or to get formal or informal references in recruiting.
Publicly available sources
We may collect personal information about you from publicly available sources, including social media sites (e.g., LinkedIn) or news articles. Such information may include (as relevant) your education, employment history, and credentials.
We may do this, for example, to help you move into careers that you are interested in, when you apply for a role within our organisation, as part of headhunting work, or when linking up individuals like you with relevant career and volunteering related communities.
Referees
When you apply for a role within our organisation, we may ask you to provide us with details of individuals who can provide a reference on your behalf. If you do so, we will obtain personal information about you from these referees as part of the application process.
Sensitive Information
Certain types of personal information may be considered “sensitive” under the UK GDPR, such as information about your race or ethnic origins, political opinions, sex life or sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and health information (“Sensitive Information“). We may collect Sensitive Information, in certain circumstances. For example, we may collect:
- certain information about your philosophical, political or religious beliefs to the extent that these relate to your views on our focus areas;
information about ethnicity, for the purposes of diversity monitoring;
information about your mental health or other personal circumstances, for example if you provide these to us as part of one of our surveys, or during other interactions (including in the context of our community health services); and
if you are attending an event, your dietary and access requirements.
Criminal offence data (i.e., data relating to criminal convictions and offences) is also given extra protection under the UK GDPR. We will generally ask for your explicit consent for this Sensitive Information and criminal convictions data, but we may also rely on other legal bases to collect and use it, for example when we need to do so for safeguarding purposes, to carry out our legitimate activities as a not-for-profit or charity in relation to our members, in connection with our purposes as a not-for-profit to protect your vital interests, because the information has been manifestly made public by you, to obtain legal advice, or because we are subject to a legal obligation.
How do we use your personal information?
We use your personal information for the following purposes:
- to solicit and collect donations, assess grant requests, conduct due diligence, and process grants including making donations and communicating with donors and grantees;
to assess your suitability for services, events, funding, collaborations, roles, or other opportunities at 80,000 Hours or at organizations 80,000 Hours is assisting, and to suggest you for, or contact you about, any of these things;
to conduct research, support discussion of ideas and research, and publish related content;
to run and book you a place on conferences, fellowship schemes, reading groups, retreats, or other types of events that may be relevant to your career interests and aspirations;
to assess the impact of our work, and to promote our work and values through, for example, case studies and blogs;
to communicate with you, including to understand your career aims and aspirations, provide you with career related advice, notify you about changes to our terms and asking you to contribute to online discussions, undertake surveys and give feedback, process your concerns and queries, and provide you with other information we think may be useful to you in your career;
to ensure that the Website is presented to you in an effective manner;
to use data analytics to improve our Website, services, online forums or sites, marketing efforts, and user experience;
to carry out proper governance on our funding
to administer and protect 80,000 Hours, our initiatives, our people, and our websites; and
to protect our legal rights and comply with law and regulation.
Use of AI Systems
We aim to make fair, consistent, and informed decisions across our organisation. As a small team, we use AI systems, including large language models (“LLMs“), to assist us in processing personal information, including:
- Deciding which applications to accept for our advising service;
Determining which people to reach out to in order to proactively offer a call about our services;
Aiding our headhunting service by forming draft lists of recommendations and notes on the individual candidates for hiring managers;
Aiding our advisors, including by suggesting information for advisees and drafting follow-up emails; and
Generating transcripts of advising calls.
For each of these purposes, we weigh the potential benefits against the risks and take reasonable risk mitigation steps, including ensuring that no personal information from 80,000 Hours is used to train LLMs.
We do significant concordance testing to ensure that the AI tools are providing outputs consistent with trained human evaluators. We do random checks on an ongoing basis to ensure that the tools we use continue to provide outputs that meet our high standards for fair, consistent, and informed decisions.
For our advising service, you are welcome to ask that a human (re-)review the scoring part of the application process. To exercise this right please email [email protected] or by using the details in the ‘Who we are and how to get in touch’ section.
Legal bases for processing your personal information
We will only process your personal information when we have a legal basis for doing so. We set out in this section each of the legal bases we rely on, why and how we use your data, and the categories of personal data we process.
| Category of personal data | Purpose of processing | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Identity and contact data, transactions data, marketing and communications preferences, content of your communications, involvement in 80,000 Hours, demographic information, engagement with 80,000 Hours | To solicit and collect donations, assess grant requests, conduct due diligence, and process grants including making donations and communicating with donors and grantees | In our legitimate interests to build a community focused on improving the world including through facilitating donations |
| Identity and contact data, information about your interests, preferences and affiliations, marketing and communications preferences, content of your communications, career information, involvement in 80,000 Hours, demographic information, engagement with 80,000 Hours and biographical and background data The following Sensitive Information: certain information about your philosophical, political or religious beliefs to the extent that these relate to your views on our focus areas, information about ethnicity, for the purposes of diversity monitoring, information about your mental health or other personal circumstances and if you are attending an event, your dietary and access requirements | To assess your suitability for services, events, funding, collaborations, roles, or other opportunities at 80,000 Hours or at organizations 80,000 Hours is assisting, and to suggest you for, or contact you about, any of these things | This may be necessary to enter into a contract with you In our legitimate interests to best serve our aims (to further moral and philanthropic purposes; to support individuals with their career development; to carry out work for the public benefit; and to support and invest in other organisations that aim to do the same) in the most efficient manner possible In the case of Sensitive Information: with your explicit consent or another condition permitted by the UK GDPR |
| Identity and contact data, information about your interests, preferences and affiliations, content of your communications, career information, involvement in 80,000 Hours, demographic information, engagement with 80,000 Hours and biographical and background data The following Sensitive Information: certain information about your philosophical, political or religious beliefs to the extent that these relate to your views on our focus areas and information about ethnicity, for the purposes of diversity monitoring in our research | To conduct research, support discussion of ideas and research, and publish related content | In our legitimate interests to provide support to the not-for-profit and charitable community through doing and promoting research In the case of Sensitive Information: with your explicit consent or another condition permitted by the UK GDPR |
| Identity and contact data, information about your interests, preferences and affiliations, marketing and communications preferences, content of your communications, career information, involvement in 80,000 Hours, demographic information, engagement with 80,000 Hours and biographical and background data The following Sensitive Information: certain information about your philosophical, political or religious beliefs to the extent that these relate to your views on our focus areas, information about ethnicity, for the purposes of diversity monitoring | To assess the impact of our work, and to promote our work and values through, for example, case studies and blogs | In our legitimate interests to best serve our aims (to further moral and philanthropic purposes; to support individuals with their career development; to carry out work for the public benefit; and to support and invest in other organisations that aim to do the same) in the most efficient manner possible In the case of Sensitive Information: with your explicit consent or another condition permitted by the UK GDPR |
| Identity and contact data, information about your interests, preferences and affiliations, marketing and communications preferences, content of your communications, career information, involvement in 80,000 Hours, demographic information, engagement with 80,000 Hours and biographical and background data The following Sensitive Information: certain information about your philosophical, political or religious beliefs to the extent that these relate to your views on our focus areas, information about ethnicity, for the purposes of diversity monitoring | To communicate with you, including to understand your career aims and aspirations, provide you with career related advice, notify you about changes to our terms and asking you to contribute to online discussions, undertake surveys and give feedback, process your concerns and queries, and provide you with other information we think may be useful to you in your career | This may be necessary to enter into a contract with you In our legitimate interests to support individuals with their career development in the most efficient manner possible In the case of Sensitive Information: with your explicit consent or another condition permitted by the UK GDPR |
| Identity and contact data, and personal information we collect from your device | To ensure that the Website is presented to you in an effective manner | In our legitimate interests to improve our Website and ensure we present information to you in an effective manner With your consent |
| Identity and contact data, marketing and communications preferences and personal information we collect from your device | To use data analytics to improve our Website, services, online forums or sites, marketing efforts, and user experience | In our legitimate interests to improve our programs, Website and services including through, for example, the use of data analytics With your consent |
| Identity and contact data, transactions data, content of your communications, involvement in 80,000 Hours, demographic information, engagement with 80,000 Hours | To carry out proper governance on our funding and make public reports about donations (such reports will not directly identify you, but we will use your personal information when creating them) | In our legitimate interests to ensure funding efforts are carried out in a compliant and effective manner When we need to comply with the law |
| Identity and contact data, information about your interests, preferences and affiliations, marketing and communications preferences, content of your communications, career information, involvement in 80,000 Hours, demographic information, engagement with 80,000 Hours and biographical and background data | To administer and protect 80,000 Hours, our initiatives, our people, and our Websites | In our legitimate interests to best serve our aims and protect our initiatives, people and Websites When we need to comply with the law |
| Identity and contact data, information about your interests, preferences and affiliations, marketing and communications preferences, content of your communications, career information, involvement in 80,000 Hours, demographic information, engagement with 80,000 Hours and biographical and background data | To protect our legal rights and comply with law and regulation | When we need to comply with the law |
How do we share your personal information?
80,000 Hours Limited and 80,000 Hours Foundation share common goals and certain resources. As such, your personal information may be shared amongst these entities.
We may share your personal information with third parties as follows.
Donations through our platforms
If you make a donation to us using the Giving What We Can platform, 80,000 Hours platform, or another donations platform operated and/or owned by the 80,000 Hours Foundation, we will ask you if you would like to disclose your name and email address. Charities find it helpful to know where the donations they receive come from to allow them to:
- reconcile donor lists with their own records;
track conversions, etc.; and
send you details of their work and appeals for donations.
We will only send this information if you give your consent for us to do so. Whilst we make every effort to ensure that the charities we deal with do not use your personal information in a way which you would not expect, we will not be able to control what the charity does with it or who it is further disclosed to.
We will ask you every time you make a donation, but be aware that if your personal information is disclosed to a charity once, we will not be able to force them to delete it. They may not know that any subsequent donations you make to them have come from you, but they will still have your personal information on file from the first time you donated and agreed that we could pass it on. If you do not wish to pass your personal information on to the charity, we will still make the donation on your behalf and you will still be eligible for Gift Aid.
Grant recipients
If you are a grantee, we may share your email address with other grantees as part of an email chain so that you can communicate with and support each other, but we will only do so with your explicit consent.
Recruiting and 80,000 Hours’ one-one-one service
If you apply for 80,000 Hours’ advising service, you can request by email that your personal information (or certain parts of your information) be kept strictly confidential between you and your advisor rather than shared with the team at 80,000 Hours. We will attempt to accommodate reasonable privacy requests, but there may be circumstances in which we will need to share information, for example when we have a legal obligation to do so, or when it is necessary for safeguarding purposes.
We work closely with organisations and industry experts in identifying and filling opportunities. Those opportunities may include jobs, grants, volunteer roles, scholarships, conferences and fellowships related to these problem areas and/or career options.
If either you use 80,000 Hours’ one-on-one advising service, or you apply for a role at 80,000 Hours and your application is not successful, we may share your contact details and relevant information with a contact at another organisation or with an industry expert to suggest you for an opportunity you might be a good fit for. We err on the side of caution and avoid sharing sensitive or unnecessary information. We may alternatively contact you to suggest you apply for the opportunity.
We will only ever share your information with trusted organisations and individuals, and will ask them to respect the security of your information. We will ask them only to let you know about opportunities for which you are specifically well suited and to not add you to any mass mailing lists. We will never receive payment for sharing your information. We will only do this with your explicit consent.
If you apply for 80,000 Hours’ advising service after being referred to our service by a third party, we may let this third party know whether your advising application was successful. This feedback helps our supporters refer appropriate candidates to the service. If you do not want us to share the result of your application with your referrer, please state this on your application.
Other times we may share your data
In exceptional circumstances, we reserve the right to pass on your personal information when there is a legal or “duty of care” imperative (for example if we need to safeguard other individuals).
We may share your personal information with our affiliate companies and organisations for the purposes set out in this notice.
We may also share your personal information with third-party service providers, who will process it on our behalf for the purposes identified above. We use third-party providers of certain services such as but not exclusively website hosting, website analytics, behavioural remarketing services, marketing automation, payment processing, IT maintenance, and identity checking. We also pass information to our payment processing partner when you make a payment such as a donation—we do not generally store your card details when doing so.
Other than that, we may share your personal information:
- with government authorities and/or law enforcement officials if required for the purposes above, if required by law, or if required to protect our legitimate interests (e.g. with HMRC for tax regulation purposes in the UK);
with funders and investors to help our organisation grow;
if all or part of our organisation is closed, combined with another organisation, or becomes its own organisation (for example, when an initiative is no longer hosted by 80,000 Hours), we will share your personal information with external advisers (such as lawyers, accountants, or financial advisers) who are helping us with this process and the owners of the new organisation; and
in connection with any legal process or potential legal process.
Your personal information rights
Under the UK GDPR, you have the right to:
- ask us for a copy of your personal information;
to correct, delete, or restrict (stop any active) use of your personal information;
and in certain cases to obtain the personal information you provide to us in a “structured, machine readable format.”
You can also object to the use of your personal information in some circumstances (in particular, when we don’t have to use the data to meet a contractual or other legal requirement, or when we are using the data to send you marketing emails).
Where you have given us your consent to use your personal information, you can take back that consent at any time. If you do, we will stop using your personal information immediately, unless we collected it for a different purpose (for example, the information is necessary to comply with a legal obligation). If you decide to take back your consent, this will not affect the lawfulness of our actions before you made that decision. This means that our use of your personal information before you took back your consent remains legal.
Any request to exercise one of these rights will be assessed by us on a case-by-case basis. There may be circumstances in which we are not legally required to comply with your request or the right may be limited, for example, if answering your request would reveal personal information about another person or if you ask us to delete information which we are required by law to keep or have important legitimate interests to keep.
You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority about how we process your personal information. In the UK, the supervisory authority is the Information Commissioner’s Office.
To exercise any of these rights, or to make a complaint to us, you can get in touch using the details set out in the “Who we are and how you can get in touch” section below.
Cross-border transfer of your personal information
80,000 Hours is based in the United Kingdom. We generally store your personal information within the UK but sometimes we use service providers who access your personal information in other countries; we may also transfer your data to certain partner organisations which are based outside the UK (as set out above in the section entitled: “How do we share your personal information?”).
When we need to share your personal information with people or organisations outside the UK, including in the United States, it might be subject to data protection laws that offer less protection than under the UK GDPR. Where this is the case, we take steps to ensure your personal information is protected, including by entering into contracts that have been approved by the relevant authorities (such as “standard contractual clauses” or an “international data transfer agreement”). If you want to learn more about this, or to get a copy of the transfer mechanism that we use, please reach out using the details given in the “Who we are and how you can get in touch” section below.
How do we secure your personal information?
We put in place organisational and technical measures to protect your personal information. These measures include taking all steps reasonably necessary to ensure our IT systems are secure and putting in place procedures to deal with suspected data breaches.
In the event of a data breach, we will take steps to minimise the loss or destruction of data and, if required by law, will notify you.
Although we use reasonable security measures once we have received your personal information, the transmission of data over the internet (including by email) is never completely secure. We work to protect personal information, but we cannot guarantee the security of information transmitted to or by us.
How long do we keep your personal information?
We will only keep your personal information for as long as we need it to achieve the purposes for which we collected it, to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations, to exercise our legal rights, and to protect ourselves from legal claims. This period will vary depending on the nature of your interactions with us.
If we no longer need this personal information for the purposes set out in this notice, we will delete it or anonymise it so that nobody can identify you from the information.
Links to third party websites
The Website may contain links to third party websites, including options to apply for jobs at third parties. If you follow a link to any third party website, please be aware that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for their handling of your personal information.
Updates to this Privacy Notice
We reserve the right to change this Privacy Notice from time to time. We will alert you when substantive changes have been made by indicating the date this Privacy Notice was last updated or as otherwise may be required by law. It is recommended that you periodically revisit this Privacy Notice to learn of any changes.
Who we are and how you can get in touch
80,000 Hours Limited is a not-for profit in England and Wales. 80,000 Hours Limited operates through a company limited by guarantee, the registration number of which is 15746854. 80,000 Hours registered office is at Third Floor, 20 Old Bailey, London, United Kingdom, EC4M 7AN.
80,000 Hours Foundation is a registered charity in England and Wales, charity number: 1212431. Like most charities, 80,000 Hours Foundation operates through a company limited by guarantee, the registration number of which is 15777224. 80,000 Hours registered office is at Third Floor, 20 Old Bailey, London, United Kingdom, EC4M 7AN.
If you have questions in relation to this Privacy Notice or on how we use your personal information, please contact us at: [email protected].