School of Entrepreneurship & Business
Privacy policy
This statement explains what information we gather when you visit the School of Entrepreneurship and Business website and informs you how this information is used and protected. This policy covers website hosted at www.essex-seb.org only. This privacy policy, and the ways in which personal data may be gathered and processed via this website, are subject to review and development and any such changes will only be notified by this page.
It is standard practice for webservers to collect data automatically about all requests for files (web pages, images, etc). Data gathered by University of Essex webservers include:
- your IP address
- details about your web browser
- detais about the files requested
- date and time of requests
- for each file requested, the referring page, if any, from which you may have followed a hyperlink
- search terms and search results
- the domain from which your request originated
- your username, if you have authenticated with the webserver
If you visit our pages via a proxy server, some of the logged data will be obscured; for instance, the IP address collected will be that of the proxy server rather than that of your computer.
All personal data is collected and stored in compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998.
Data relating to webserver requests is used for completion of the current activity (eg a request to view a web page), and are subsequently stored in log files, which are subsequently processed to provide statistical information about usage, load on servers, traffic patterns, troubleshooting, incident investigation, etc. Analysis of web usage may be used for: systems and performance monitoring; research; marketing (eg analysis of demographic information and user behaviour). Information gathered by specialist applications such as e-learning tools and portals will be used to support the function and management of those applications. Information gathered will not be used to contact users, except where consent has been explicitly given or where security incidents are under investigation.
Personal data will not be passed on to third parties and will remain confidential, unless explicitly stated (eg if a web form is gathering data to be passed on to an external partner). The two exceptions to this are:
- Log files and other data may be analysed by the School's external support providers when investigating faults ana other technical issues relating to webserver performance;
- Data may be passed to the police and other authorities where it is required in the investigation of illegal activities and security breaches.
Where data is passed to third parties, it is done so in compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998.
Anonymised usage data may be provided in publicly-available web statistics; any such data cannot be traced to individual users.
last reviewed: 15 May 2008