Privacy Policy & Cookies
Information Collection and Use:
We are the sole owner of the information collected on this site. We will not sell, share, or rent this information to others.
When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.
What are cookies?
These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:
- enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task
- recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested
- measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast
- analysing anonymised data to help us understand how people interact with govt services so we can make them better
You can manage these small files and learn more about them here All About Cookies.org. There’s also a cookies awareness video (below) and further information on how to remove cookies at About Cookies: how to control cookies.
First-party cookies (cookies set by us)
These are cookies set by our web domain known as ‘first-party’ cookies. Some are necessary to the functionality of the site, others provide information to us that we analyse to monitor and improve the site. These first-party cookies do not store or collect any personal information or anything that make you personally identifiable to us. Typically, the cookies generate a random, unique number to store information about a user.
Cookies for measuring website usage
Google Analytics cookies: _utma, _utmb, _utmc, _utmv, _utmd,_utmz
- Purpose: to record how many people are using the website and how they move around the site once they’ve arrived. Google’s privacy policy
- Data stored by cookies:
- _utma stores each user’s number of visits, time of the first visit, the previous visit and the current visit
- _utmb and _utmc checks how long a visitor stays on the site: when a visit starts and ends
- _utmz tracks where a visitor came from (search engine, search keyword, link)
- _utmv and _utmd track visitor journeys through the site and classifies them into groups
- Duration of cookies:
- _utma expires two years after your last visit to this site
- _utmb expires 30 minutes after your visit, or after 30 minutes of inactivity
- _utmc expires at the end of a session (when you close your browser)
- _utmz expires six months after it was last set
- _utmv (not set) expires immediately
- _utmd (not set) expires immediately
- Where it is used: all pages of our website
How to control and delete cookies
We will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you. However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by our websites, or indeed any other website, you can do this through your browser settings. The ‘Help’ function within your browser should tell you how.
Alternatively, you may wish to visit the About Cookies website, which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of browsers. You will also find details on how to delete cookies from your machine as well as more general information about cookies.
Please be aware that restricting cookies may have an impact upon the functionality of our website.
If you wish to view your cookie code, just click on a cookie to open it. You’ll see a short string of text and numbers. The numbers are your identification card, which can only be seen by the server that gave you the cookie.
For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual. To opt-out of third-parties collecting any data regarding your interaction on our website, please refer to their websites for further information.
Log Files
We use IP addresses to analyse trends, administer the site, track user’s movement, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information.
Security
This website takes every precaution to protect our users’ information. When users submit sensitive information via the website, your information is protected both online and off-line.
We do not ask for sensitive information such as credit card numbers online.
We do everything in our power to protect user-information off-line. All of our users’ information, not just the sensitive information mentioned above, is restricted in our offices. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job (for example, billing or customer services) are granted access to personally identifiable information.
If you have any questions about the security of our website, you can send contact us here.
Supplementation of Information
We do not share any information we receive from this website with any 3rd party sources.
Site and Service Updates
We may send the user site and service announcement updates. Customers are not able to un-subscribe from service announcements, which contain important information about the service. We communicate with the user to provide requested services and in regards to issues relating to their account via email or phone.
RELEVANT LEGISLATION
Along with our business and internal computer systems, this website is designed to comply with the following national and international legislation with regards to data protection and user privacy:
UK Data Protection Act 1988 (DPA)
EU General Data Protection Regulation 2018 (GDPR)
DATA BREACHES
We will report any unlawful data breach of this website’s database or the database(s) of any of our third party data processors to any and all relevant persons and authorities within 72 hours of the breach if it is apparent that personal data stored in an identifiable manner has been stolen.
RIGHT TO ERASURE (RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN)
The introduction of GDPR gives you, the user the right to erasure, also known as the right to be forgotten. If at any point, you wish your personal data to be erased please make a verbal or written request and will we will respond with a month. This right is not absolute and only applies in certain circumstances.
EMAIL NEWSLETTER
If you choose to join our email newsletter, the email address that you submit to us will be forwarded to CampaignMonitor who provide us with email marketing services. We consider CampaignMonitor to be a third party data processor. The email address that you submit will not be stored within this website’s own database.
Your email address will remain within CampaignMonitor’s database for as long as we continue to use CampaignMonitor’s services for email marketing or until you specifically request removal from the list. You can do this by unsubscribing using the unsubscribe links contained in any email newsletters that we send you or by requesting removal via email. When requesting removal via email, please send your email to us using the email account that is subscribed to the mailing list.
If you are under 16 years of age you MUST obtain parental consent before joining our email newsletter.
While your email address remains within the CampaignMonitor database, you will receive periodic newsletter-style emails from us.
Notification of Changes
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page so our users are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under circumstances, if any, we disclose it. If at any point we decide to use personally identifiable information in a manner different from that stated at the time it was collected, we will notify users by way of an email. Users will have a choice as to whether or not we use their information in this different manner. We will use information in accordance with the privacy policy under which the information was collected.