Privacy

Leicester City Council is strongly committed to protecting and respecting the privacy of its customers. This Privacy Policy and Data Protection Statement sets out the basis on which any personal data collected from you, or that you provide, is used by Leicester City Council. By visiting the Visit Leicester Site, you are accepting and consenting to the practices described in this policy. If you visit a website operated by a third party through a hyperlink included in this Site, your information may be used differently by the operator of a linked Website.

Summary

We regard your privacy as important and all employees who have access to your personal data or are associated with the handling of that data are obliged to comply with the Data Protection Act.

We do not capture and store any personal information about website visitors, except where you voluntarily choose to give us your personal details via email, or by using an electronic form, or enquiring about any of our services. We do not share your information with other companies or third party partners without your prior consent. We will only hold your personal information for as long as necessary.

Information we may collect from you

Visit Leicester may collect and process the following data about you:

Information you give us. You may provide personal information by filling in forms on the Site or by corresponding with Visit Leicester by phone, e-mail or otherwise. This includes information you provide when you register to use the Site, subscribe to the visitleicester.info service, enter a competitions or prize draw, and when you report a problem with the Site. The information you provide may include your name, address, e-mail address and phone number.
 Information collected about you. With regard to each of your visits to the Site, visitleicester.info may automatically collect the following information:

•Anonymous demographic information which is not unique to you such as your postcode, age, gender, preferences, interests and favourites;

•Technical information about your computer hardware and software, including the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet, browser type and version, domain names, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions and referring website addresses.

Uses made of the information

Visit Leicester uses the information held about you in the following ways:

Information you provide: This information will be used by Visit Leicester:

•To administer the Site and for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, statistical and survey purposes;

•To improve the Site to ensure that content is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer;

•To allow you to participate in interactive features of the Site, when you choose to do so;

•As part of our efforts to keep the Site safe and secure;

•To inform you of other products or services available from Visit Leicester and its affiliates;

•To measure or understand the effectiveness via surveys to conduct research about your opinion of current services or of potential new services that may be offered.

Disclosure of your information

Visit Leicester does not sell, rent or lease its customer lists to third parties. Visit Leicester may, from time to time, contact you on behalf of external business partners about a particular offering that may be of interest to you. In such an instance, your unique personally identifiable information (e-mail, name, address, telephone number) is not transferred to the third party. Visit Leicester may share data with trusted partners to help us perform statistical analysis and provide you with effective services.

All third parties are prohibited from using your personal information except to provide these services to Visit Leicester and they are required to maintain the confidentiality of your information.

Visit Leicester does not use or disclose sensitive personal information, such as race, religion or political affiliations without your explicit consent.

Visit Leicester analyses the frequency of visits by all users to the websites and pages within the Site to determine popularity of services and how best to customise and feature content.

If Leicester City Council is under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply visitleicester.info Terms and Conditions and other agreements; or to protect the rights, property or safety of Leicester City Council, users of visitleicester.info or the general public. This includes exchanging information with other companies for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.

Cookies

The Site uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of the Site. This helps Visit Leicester to provide you with a good experience when you browse the Site and also allows us to improve the Site.

What is a cookie?
 A cookie is a simple text file that is stored on a user’s computer (or mobile device) that is created when a user visits a website using a programme called a browser (for example: Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari).

A cookie is not a programme itself and does not actively do anything on a user’s computer. A cookie cannot be used to identify a user personally but they do contribute to improving a user’s experience of a website.

A cookie simply allows a website to read the contents of the cookie text file. The text file itself simply contains a unique identifier code; the site name and some digits and numbers.

Why are cookies used?

Most websites will use cookies in order to improve the user experience by enabling the website to ‘remember’ the user, either for the duration of the visit or for repeat visits.

Cookies do many different things, such as:

•Remembering what items a user may have added to a shopping basket or an itinerary as the user moves between pages on a website;

•Saving a user’s preferences to allow them to customise a website; and

•Measuring what users do on a website to ascertain which parts of a website are popular, how long they spend on a website, how often users return, where they come from etc.

What cookies are used by the Site?

•Cookies are set by the Site (first party cookies) but may also be set by other websites (e.g. You Tube) that run content on the Site’s pages (third party cookies).

•Cookies can be set to remember a visitor for the duration of their visit (session cookies) or to remember a visitor for repeat visits (persistent cookies).

Where your personal data is stored?

Leicester City Council will take all steps reasonably necessary and practicable to secure your personal information from unauthorised access, use or disclosure.

Leicester City Council will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that the data and personally identifiable information you provide on computer servers is as secure as is reasonably practicable and kept in a controlled, secure environment, protected from unauthorised access, use or disclosure.

The Site may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of partner networks, advertisers and affiliates of Visit Leicester. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that Leicester City Council does not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies.  Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

Keeping your data secure

We will keep your personal information confidential except to the extent that we are compelled to disclose it by law or to comply with an instruction of a regulatory body of competent jurisdiction. To comply with the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998, we adhere to strict security procedures and have taken all appropriate measures to ensure that no unauthorised disclosures of your details are made to a third party without your permission and unauthorised access to it is prevented. In order to assist us with our security policy, you must adhere to the provisions set out in the security section of our terms and conditions.

Use of an ISP

We reserve the right to appoint an Internet service provider ("ISP") to host this Website on our behalf which may be situated outside the European Economic Area (the "EEA"). In order to deliver the service to you, it may be necessary to transfer your information outside the EEA and by agreeing to our terms and conditions; you consent to any such transfer.

Access to Information

The Act gives you the right to access information held about you. Your right of access can be exercised in accordance with the Act. Any access request may be subject to a fee of £10 to meet our costs in providing you with details of the information we hold about you.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

Any changes made to this Privacy Policy in the future will be posted on this page and, where appropriate, notified to you by e-mail. Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to this Privacy Policy.

Contact

For the purpose of the Data Protection Act 1998 (“the Act”), the data controller is Leicester City Council of City Hall, 115 Charles Street, Leicester LE1 1FZ.

The nominated representative for the purpose of the Act is Susan Littlemore, the Place Marketing Manager.