How PALMA got your information
We wrote a record about you without asking. Here is everything in it, where we got it, and how to make it go away.
- Version
- 1.0
- Effective
- 1 September 2026
- Status
- In force
- Clauses
- 6
Why you are reading this
PALMA has written a record about you, and you never gave PALMA anything.
PALMA is an awards body. It writes a record about a creator when somebody nominates them, or when the editorial desk establishes that a creator belongs in the archive of their industry. Both of those happen before the creator has an account, and usually before they have heard of PALMA.
That means PALMA obtained information about you from somewhere other than you, and UK GDPR Article 14 requires PALMA to tell you so. This page is that notice. It is linked from every record PALMA holds that nobody has claimed.
The controller is Palma Awards Ltd, incorporated in England and Wales. Write to concerns@palmaawards.com and a person replies.
Everything PALMA holds
Four things. There is no second file.
| Field | Why an awards archive needs it | Where it came from |
|---|---|---|
| The name they work under | An award cannot name a candidate without it. | The creator’s own public professional presence, or a nomination. |
| Country | Categories and eligibility are organised by country. Nothing finer is needed. | The creator’s own public professional presence, or editorial research. |
| Links to work the creator has published themselves | The record has to be checkable. A link the creator published is also what evidences that the work was made public by them. | Published by the creator on their own platforms. |
| PALMA honours, once conferred | The institutional record of what PALMA decided. It does not exist until PALMA confers something. | PALMA’s own award decisions. |
That is the whole record. PALMA does not hold, and will not add, a city, an address, a date of birth, an age, contact details, a legal name where you work under another one, a biography written by anyone but you, or anything a nominator wrote about you.
PALMA never collects information about an unclaimed creator merely because it might be useful later.
That is a rule enforced in PALMA’s code, not a statement of intent: the routes that write an unclaimed record strip anything beyond the list above before storing it, and a test fails if that changes.
Where it came from
Your own public professional presence, a nomination, or editorial research.
- IYour own public work. A link you published on a platform you control, and the name you publish it under. This is the main source, and it is the reason PALMA considers the information appropriate to publish at all.
- IIA nomination. Somebody put your name forward. PALMA takes the name and the category from it. It does not take what they wrote about you. Nomination text goes to the panel and is never published, never shown on your record, and never disclosed to you or anyone else as a description of you.
- IIIEditorial research by PALMA. Checking that a creator exists, works under the name given, and is the person the nomination meant. Done by a person, from sources the creator published themselves.
PALMA does not buy data, does not scrape platforms in bulk, and does not use data brokers or enrichment services. If a field could not be justified in one sentence in the table above, it is not collected.
The lawful basis, honestly
Legitimate interests. Not your consent, PALMA does not have it and does not claim to.
PALMA relies on legitimate interests, UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f): the interest of maintaining an accurate public record of achievement in an industry, balanced against your interests and rights.
PALMA is not relying on your consent. Consent you never gave is not consent, and an organisation that claims it is making a legal error and an ethical one.
The balance works because the record is minimal, because it is drawn from what you published yourself, because nothing sensitive is in it, and because you can end it. If that last part stopped being true, the basis would stop holding, which is why the objection route below exists as a page rather than an inbox.
How to make it stop
Say so. For an unclaimed record, the answer is normally yes.
Under Article 21 you may object to processing based on legitimate interests. For an unclaimed record PALMA treats an objection from the person named as decisive: the record comes down.
There is a link on every unclaimed record, ask PALMA to remove it, and it needs no account and no reason. PALMA keeps only a minimal note that the record was removed and must not be recreated, which exists so that a later nomination does not quietly put you back.
You may also ask for a copy of what PALMA holds, ask for a correction, or complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk , at any time, including without contacting PALMA first.
The one thing PALMA will normally keep is an honour it has already conferred. That is explained, with the limits on it, in the privacy notice. Even then the record can be reduced to the achievement itself, a name, a category, a year.
Why PALMA does it this way at all
An archive that only lists volunteers is not a record of an industry.
An awards body that could only name people who had signed up would not be recording an industry; it would be recording its own mailing list. The people most worth recognising are frequently the people not paying attention to awards.
That is a real justification, and it is also exactly the argument every organisation makes just before it starts hoarding. So PALMA accepts the constraint that goes with it: the record stays minimal, it comes down on request, and none of it depends on anybody trusting PALMA’s good intentions.