Subject Access Request

[Lauren]

People have a right to access personal data you store about them free of charge and without delay. You must provide people with a copy of the data stored about them if they request it.

To help you to comply with a subject access request, we can provide you with a ZIP file of all the data stored in Tapestry that we can identify as being about a particular child, relative or staff member. By this I mean that it will find data their profiles are linked to. It won't however, be able to find information written in free text boxes not linked to them e.g. in observations where they're not tagged.

To get hold of that you will need to login into the browser version of Tapestry as a manager and go to your Control Panel (1). From there you'll need to go to either 'Manage Children', 'Manage Relatives' or 'Manage Staff' (2) depending on which is appropriate for the person who the subject access request is being made by or on the behalf of.
 

 

You'll then need to find the name of the person you're collecting the data about. Remember that subject access requests apply to people who you are still processing data about (even if you're just storing data about them), regardless of their user status, so you might need to use your page filters to find them if you've already deactivated their account or deleted them within the last 90 days.

 

 

Once you have found their profile though, simply click on the cog along the line from their name (1) and choose 'Respond to Subject Access Request' (2).
 

 

 

That will take you to a page which will tell you what sort of data will be included in the export. If you're happy to continue, you then need to click on 'Generate file for [name]'.

This is what it will look like for children. 

This is what it will look like for staff and relatives.
 

Once you have clicked on the button to 'Generate file for [name]', you'll be taken to a page showing that your SAR is being generated. You can view the file's progress and download it when ready from the Downloads page. You can go straight there (1) or access it anytime from the 'Downloads' tab on the Control Panel (2).

 

 

You might find that you can't download the file straight away, especially if the file includes a significant amount of data or if you have exported it at a busy time, but you will get a Tapestry notification when it is ready. How and when you receive the notification will depend on how you have your notification preferences set.

Once you've done to Downloads (1), you'll see the file is ready when there's a 'Download' button next to the file name. Just click on this to download the file to your device (2). As you can see in the example below, each file name will include the name of the data subject. 

 

If you click on the cog next to the download button, you will see two options. One to view the history of the file (e.g. who exported it in the first place) and one to delete the file. 

 

 

Deleting it will not delete the data from Tapestry, only the file itself. After 7 days the file will automatically be deleted. In both cases though it will only delete the file from this downloads section of Tapestry - anyone who has already downloaded it, will not lose their copy.

There is no limit (within reason) on how many times you export this type of file and doing so will have no affect on the data being stored on Tapestry.

These folders will all download as zip folders. You can still access the information in them when they are in that format, but as a human, you might not find it very nice to read - the different files will all open in notepad, and all the information will be in long lines. To unzip them, you need to right click on the folder and choose 'Extract All...'. Please note this does need to be done one folder at a time. 

 

That will open a pop up box which allows you to decide where you would like the unzipped folder to go. Once you are ready, click 'Extract'.

Opening the now unzipped file will show you a variety of folders, starting with one titled the same as the title of the download from Tapestry. 

If you are using a Windows computer, you may find that by default the files will still open in notepad, which isn't particularly nice to use. However, if you right click on each file, you should be able to choose to open it with a more modern text reader instead, e.g. WordPad or Word (although you might have to click on 'choose another app' to find that). 

 

The files within this folder will include all the personal data linked to the child being stored on Tapestry. Remember that you might be storing data outside of Tapestry too or on Tapestry but not linked to the child specifically so you should consider that when collecting all the information for your subject access request. 

 

 

Go back to Main Tutorials Page