Data Protection Policy - Privacy Disclaimer - Fair Processing Notice
This policy covers the treatment of personal data that Huntingdonshire District Council may collect including when you e-mail us, or when you complete and submit an online form on our web site.
When completing forms you may be asked for personal information such as name, address, postcode etc. It is only when you supply this type of information that you can be personally identified.
Information may be collected:
- To fulfil your request for information or services
- To provide and improve our services
- As part of the process of consultation
- To prevent and detect fraud
Huntingdonshire District Council is registered as Data Controller under the Data Protection Act 1998 for the purpose of processing personal data in the performance of its legitimate business. Any information held by the Council will be processed in compliance with the principles set out in the Act.
The Council is responsible for ensuring the confidentiality of personal data that it holds. It also has a duty to protect the public funds it administers and to this end may use the information you have provided to us to prevent and detect fraud. This may include sharing the information for these purposes with other persons or bodies involved for example in administering or auditing public funds or appointed as collection agencies responsible for collecting local taxes on the Council's behalf or used for credit referencing or for data matching. Further information about data matching can be found on the link to the right. Checks may be made on undeclared cohabiters.
If you have concerns about the processing of your personal data by Huntingdonshire District Council, you may contact the Council’s Data Protection Officer via the link on the right hand side or at its offices at Pathfinder House St Mary's Street Huntingdon Cambridgeshire PE29 3TN or the Office of the Information Commissioner, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF.
Security Policy
Some of the services on our website do give visitors the option of using a secure transmission method to send us their personal data.
Where this is the case you will see a gold padlock symbol at the foot of the page on the right hand side. A message may also appear stating that you are
viewing information over a secure connection.
Where this is not the case, your attention is drawn to the fact that any information provided over the internet is not secure; e-mails can be intercepted, lost, redirected, changed and read by other people.
We have implemented security policies, rules and technical measures to protect the personal data that we have under our control from:
- Unauthorised access
- Improper use or disclosure
- Unauthorised modification
- Unlawful destruction or accidental loss
Cookies
A cookie is a piece of information in the form of a small text file that is placed on an internet user's hard drive. It is generated by a web server, which is the computer that operates a website.
The information the cookie contains is set by the server and it can be used by that server whenever the user visits the site. A cookie can be thought of as an internet user's identification card, which tell a website when the user has returned.
What is the purpose of cookies?
Cookies make the interaction between users and websites faster and easier. Without cookies, it would be very difficult for a website to allow a visitor to fill up a shopping cart or to remember the user's preferences or registration details for a future visit.
Websites use cookies mainly because they save time and make the browsing experience more efficient and enjoyable. Websites often use cookies for the purposes of collecting demographic information about their users.
Cookies enable websites to monitor their users' web surfing habits and profile them for marketing purposes (for example, to find out which products or services they are interested in and send them targeted advertisements.)
Are cookies dangerous?
No. Cookies are small pieces of text. They are not computer programs, and they can't be executed as code. Also, they cannot be used to disseminate viruses, and modern versions of both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers allow users to set their own limitations to the number of cookies saved on their hard drives.
Can cookies threaten users' privacy?
Cookies are stored on the computer's hard drive. They cannot access the hard drive - so a cookie cannot read other information saved on the hard drive, or get a user's email address etc. They only contain and transfer to the server as much information as the users themselves have disclosed to a certain website.
A server cannot set a cookie for a domain that it is not a member of. In spite of this, users quite often find in their computer files cookies from websites that they have never visited. These cookies are usually set by companies that sell internet advertising on behalf of other websites.
Therefore it may be possible that users' information is passed to third party websites without the users' knowledge or consent, such as information on surfing habits. This is the most common reason for people rejecting or fearing cookies