Privacy policy

Food Standards Scotland is the ‘Data Controller’ of the personal information we collect from  you or which is provided to us. This may include your name, email address, postal address and telephone number. We value any information that we collect and take your privacy seriously.

Why we need your personal information 

​​​​​As part of our role as a competent authority in Scotland. This may include (and is not limited to) policy consultations, food and feed regulation, food safety enforcement and legislation, 

• in the performance of contract,
• to ensure compliance with a legal obligation, or
• on some occasions, we may ask for your explicit consent to process your personal data where the use of the data is optional

We have put in place appropriate and adequate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal information. All the personal data we process is located on servers within the European Union. Our cloud based services have been procured through the government framework agreements and these services have been assessed against the national cyber security centre cloud security principles.

We want to assure you of the following factors we consider when collecting your personal information, we will:

• ensure that you know the reason why we need your personal information and why we are legally allowed to hold and process it
• only ask for what we need and will not collect too much information from you
• protect your information by making sure that nobody who should not have access to your information has access to it
  let you know if we are required by law to share your information with other  organisations, and
• make sure we don’t keep your information longer than necessary

You have a right to see the information we hold on you by making a request in writing to openness@fss.scot. If at any point you believe the information we process on you is incorrect you can request to have it corrected. If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact our Data Protection Officer at dataprotection@fss.scot who will investigate the matter. If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data not in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

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This website contains links to other sites. Please be aware that FSS is not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every website that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy policy applies solely to information collected by this website.

Any personal data you provide when signing up for our news and food alerts will only be used for that purpose. This information will not be passed to any third parties. Users can unsubscribe from this service at any time or update their preferences.

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will add those changes to this website, and other places we deem appropriate so our users are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.

FSS operates a Records Retention and Disposal Schedule to ensure that information is not kept for any longer than necessary in accordance with the principles of Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding our privacy policy, please contact us at openness@fss.scot.

Last updated: 1 October 2025.