Borough of Havant Website Privacy Policy
Coverage of this Policy
This policy applies to sites that are controlled by Havant
Borough Council. The specific instances are:
When we talk about "the Council" or "we" in this policy, we
are talking about those sites listed above, which may be extended
from time to time. If you have questions or concerns regarding our
Privacy Statement, please contact the
Solicitor to the
Council.
Our Privacy Policy
We are committed to providing you with an internet experience
that respects and protects your personal privacy choices and
concerns.
We make three pledges to you:
- We will not release personally identifiable information about
you without your permission (except as needed to provide to you any
services you have expressly requested) or unless required by
law.
- You can manage and control the information that you have
voluntarily provided to us.
- You can tell us what your privacy questions and concerns are so
that we can respond.
All personal data we hold is covered by our registration under
the Data Protection Act 1998. For details of our registrations use
this external link to the
Data Protection Registrar's website.
The authority is under a duty to protect the public funds it
administers, to to this end may use the information you have
provided for the prevention and detection of fraud. It may
also share this information with other bodies responsible for
auditing or administering public funds for these
purposes. For further details follow this link to this
website's page on
use of data to prevent and detect fraud.
Definitions
Personally identifiable information is information, such as
your name, telephone number, birth date, e-mail address,
credit card information or mailing address, that can be used
to uniquely identify you.
Anonymous information is not personally identifiable information.
Anonymous information is information about how you use our sites
(such as sites you visit and searches you do). Anonymous
information also includes the domain names and/or
I.P. addresses (as explained below)
of internet browsers that visit our site, the time of day the site
was visited, and other non-personal information. Anonymous
information helps us know what our users do and is used to
target improvements to the site.
Collecting and Using Personally Identifiable Information
Registration
It is not necessary to register to use any of the Council's
sites unless you wish to do so. You can visit our site and use any
of our services without telling us who you are or revealing any
personal information about yourself to us.
However there may be occasions when some form of personal
information is requested (for example, using an on-line form) for
validation purposes. In these instances, you need to complete
certain fields (some are required and some are optional). We may
use this information in several ways:
- to send you printed information
- to share your information with select third parties who work
with us, only if you give us permission (as we explain below)
- to validate voting or form return details
- to efficiently carry out an electronically-based process
We may also offer you the option on on-line forms for example
to volunteer personal information. This will usually be for the
purpose of keeping you up to date with developments in that
particular service.
Sharing Personally Identifiable Information with Other
Companies
We will not share your personally identifiable information
unless you have authorised us to share it or unless required by
law. If you have not authorised us to share it and you want to do
it now, or if you have authorised us to share your personal
information and have changed your mind, send us an email at
webmaster@havant.gov.uk. When
we share your personal information with other companies, they
cannot use this information this information with other information
they may already have about you, or share this information with
other companies or people without your express permission.
Disclosure of Your Identity
From time to time we may receive requests to disclose the
identities of our users. We will not disclose the identities of our
users unless we are legally required to do so. If a government
agency, or a law enforcement agency, requests information in
relation to the identity of our users, we will comply with the
request. If we receive a request by a third party that is not a
government agency (for example, a request in connection with civil
litigation), we will try to contact the user whose identity has
been requested using any contact information they may have provided
during their use of the site. If the request includes a deadline,
we will let the user know the deadline included in the request when
we provide notice that we received it.
Anonymous Information
We collect anonymous information when people use our site. We
use this information to improve our services in general. We do not
combine this anonymous information with personal information about
you. We share this anonymous information with some other companies,
such as Steria, Maxsi and Capita Business Services, so that a
better picture of what our visitors require from the site may be
built up. Maxsi's 'eVisit' software, for example, analyses
anonymous information that we collect during your visit to our
sites to understand what parts of the site should be developed as
priorities.
We will not share any anonymous information about your use of our
site with third parties if we believe that this information will be
linked with your personally identifiable information obtained from
another source, unless you have given us permission to do
this.
'Cookies'
The following statement is provided in accordance with the
EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications
2003.
A 'cookie' is a small piece of text that is sent to your
browser from a web server and stored on your computer's hard drive
- usually in c:\windows\temporary internet files if you
are using Microsoft Windows®. 'Cookies' do not damage your
computer, and may be 'persistent' (saved on your computer) or 'per
session' (deleted from your computer when you log off the
internet). As far as this site is concerned, we use a
'persistent cookie' to remember your personalisation
choice (resident / visitor / business) to help us provide a more
personalised experience of our site. We also use a
'per session' cookie to help our partner Maxsi use their
'eVisit Analyst' program to gather monitoring data which will help
us see which parts of our site work well and which don't.
'Cookies' make web surfing easier for you by saving your
preferences while you are on our site. More information about
'cookies' and how they work is available on
the BBC's 'Webwise' site.
You are able to decide whether you want to accept 'cookies' by
changing your browser's security settings on your computer (usually
in the 'Tools' menu or equivalent). You can reset your browser to
refuse all 'cookies', or allow your browser to show you when a
'cookie' is being sent. Because your special 'cookie' relates
only to your Internet browser, if you switch to a new computer, or
change or upgrade your browser, or clean out your computer's
'cookie' file, you will need to request a 'cookie' again. Choosing
to refuse cookies on our site will result in failure to register a
choice of personalisation.
Use of I.P. Addresses
An Internet protocol (I.P.) address is a set of numbers that
is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you log on to
your internet service provider (I.S.P.) or through your company's
local area network (LAN). Web servers, the powerful computers that
provide web pages for viewing, automatically identify your computer
by the
I.P. address assigned to it during your
session online.
Steria may collect
I.P. addresses for some
purposes (for example, to audit the use of our site). We do not
link a user's
I.P. address to a person's
personal information, which means we will have a record of each
user's session but the user remains anonymous to us.
Under certain circumstances,
I.P. addresses
and/or domain names may be linked to personally identifiable
information, when this information is stored in databases managed
by internet registrars or registries such as
Network Solutions or
ARIN.
Security
We operate secure data networks protected by firewall and
password protection. We, and where applicable our hosting
partners, have security measures in place to attempt to
protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of your user data
under our control.
Only certain employees have access to the information you provide
us. For example, we impose strict rules on our employees who have
access to the databases that store information generated from
on-line forms. While we cannot guarantee that loss, misuse or
alteration to data will not occur, we try to prevent such
unfortunate occurrences.
Third Party Relationships
To help you, Havant Borough Council has provided links from
this website to sites operated by other organisations. If you
use these sites, you will leave this website. If you decide to
visit any linked site, you do so at your own risk and it is your
responsibility to take all protective measures to guard against
viruses or other destructive elements. We recommend you check their
privacy policy - ours will no longer apply.
We do not endorse or give any guarantee about any linked
websites or the information, products or services they describe.
Links do not imply that we are affiliated or associated with that
organisation or legally authorised to use any trademark, trade
name, logo or copyright symbol displayed or accessible through
the links. Equally, it does not mean that any linked site is
authorised to use any trademark, trade name, logo or copyright
symbol of Havant Borough Council.