Meath County Council has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to your privacy. By visiting Meathppn.ie, or any subsites of the above you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Notice. This statement relates to our privacy practices in connection with the aforementioned websites. We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of other websites. Some technical terms used in this statement are explained at the end of this page. General Statement Meath County Council fully respects your right to privacy, and we will not collect any personal information about you on this website without your clear permission. Any information which you volunteer to Meath County Council’s websites will be treated with the highest standard of security and confidentiality, strictly in accordance with the Data Protection Acts, 1988 & 2003. What Personal Information About Customers Does Meath County Council Gather? The information we learn from customers helps us personalise and continually improve your online experience at Meathppn.ie and our other websites. Here are the types of information we gather: Information You Give Us: We receive and store any information you enter on our website or give us in any other way. You can choose not to provide certain information, but then you might not be able to take advantage of many of our features. When you register for newsletters etc., we require personal information (like name, email address, etc.). We use the information that you provide for such purposes as responding to your requests, customising our online services for you, improving our online services, and communicating with you. Where a user voluntarily provides personal information, the data will be used for analysis, research or customer service purposes only. Any personal data provided by you to us will be held in accordance with the data protection principles set out in the Data Protection (Amendment) Act, 2003, the Data Protection Act, 1988, Electronic Commerce Act, 2000, and other relevant EU and Irish legislation. If you register on our site you may be given an option to add yourself to one of our mailing lists which will send you periodic details about the selected service. We will always have a clear mechanism for you to remove yourself from these mailing lists. Meath County Council assures you that the identity of all who contact us through this website is kept confidential: we do not rent, sell, or exchange mailing lists, or otherwise disclose such information to third parties, except as may be required by law, or through voluntary cooperation with law enforcement authorities if we judge that such cooperation is necessary to combat fraud or other crime. Automatic Information: For general web browsing no personal information is revealed to us, although certain statistical information is available to us from our website logs. For example, like many websites, we obtain certain types of information when your web browser (browsers are pieces of software that allow you to access the internet; examples include: Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, etc.) accesses Meathppn.ie or our other websites. See below for examples. Also, to ensure the security of your online account information in our ePayments area, we use cookies to ensure that security is maintained by preventing the “hijacking” of your online identity (see below for more on cookies). The only information that is stored in that cookie is a key code which can be used by our server only during the current visit to verify your identity online. The cookie becomes unusable after either the user logs out or after 20 minutes of inactivity on our website. Examples of information collected: • Internet Protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the internet (for example 192.168.11.47) • Login—if using our account services • Email address—if you email any of our public email addresses • Computer and connection information such as browser type and version, operating system, platform, referring url and pages visited Meath County Council will make no attempt to identify individual visitors or to associate the technical details listed above with any individual, except in cases where criminal activity has taken place (i.e. in response to a “hacking” incident). It is the policy of Meath County Council never to disclose such technical information in respect of individual website visitors to a third party (except for law-enforcement bodies and then only in response to illegal activity such as “hacking”; also our Internet Service Provider which records such data on our behalf and which is bound by confidentiality provisions in this regard), unless obliged to disclose such information by a rule of law. The technical information will be used only by Meath County Council, and only for statistical and other administrative purposes. You should note that technical details, which we cannot associate with any identifiable individual, do not constitute “personal data” for the purposes of the Data Protection Acts, 1988 & 2003. Cookies A cookie is a small text file that a website can store on your computer to help keep track of different things, like if you want to stay logged into a website, or your preferences within a website. We use cookies on our website to: allow certain functionality to work i.e. search facilties – to allow search selections to be maintained for the duration of your search. anonymously track activity on our website via Google Analytics. This information is used to to keep our site relevant and make it easier to use. provide security while you access your online payment account information. The “Help” portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether. However, cookies allow you to take full advantage of some of Meathppn.ie’s account-based features, and we recommend that you leave them turned on. You can find more information about cookies on the following wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie Log Files and Statistics We use IP addresses, URI’s of … Continue reading Privacy Statement