Website privacy and cookies policy

What does a legitimate interest mean?

We process your information for our legitimate interests and those of third parties while applying appropriate safeguards that protect your privacy. This means that we process your information for things such as:

• Maintaining and improving our services to meet the needs of our users
• Understanding how people use our services to improve the performance of our services
• Ensuring our services to provide you with a better user experience
• Detecting, preventing or otherwise addressing fraud, abuse, security or technical issues with our services
• Researching and improving our services for our users

When this policy applies

The University hosts a number of websites on various web servers: this policy covers websites hosted at www.essex.ac.uk, www1.essex.ac.uk, www2.essex.ac.uk, courses.essex.ac.uk, blogs.essex.ac.uk, moodle.essex.ac.uk, libwww.essex.ac.uk, and perception.essex.ac.uk; other University of Essex web servers have their own privacy policies. Our web pages link to external websites: the University has no responsibility for privacy or other legal issues relating to these external sites.

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.

This policy was last reviewed on 24 May 2018.

Data collection

It is standard practice for web servers to collect data automatically about all requests for files (web pages, images, etc).  As we are processing Data gathered by University of Essex web servers include:

What data is collected?

• your IP address
• details about your web browser
• details 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

In addition to data collected automatically by the webservers, some of our pages request additional information; for instance, the prospectus request form asks for contact and other details, and the MyEssex portals allow you to record a range of preferences so that you can customise whatyou see. Where this happens you will find further specific information about the data gathered and its use.

Additional data for specialist applications

Specialist applications, including the MyEssex portals and e-learning tools, such as Moodle, Perception and OCS gather user data specific to their intended purpose. Data gathered by these applications includes user identifiers, tracking information, user contributions (e.g. on discussion forums, submitted essay content and assessment answers).

What we do with the data 

Data relating to web server requests are used for completion of the current activity (e.g. a request to view a web page), and are subsequently stored in log files, which are later processed to provide statistical information about usage, load on servers, traffic patterns, troubleshooting, incident investigation, etc.

These data are also recorded by Google Analytics which is used by the University to report on web traffic on its sites. Analysis of web usage may be used for: systems and performance monitoring; research; marketing (e.g. 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.

Do we share the data?

Personal data will not be passed on to third parties and will remain confidential, unless explicitly stated (e.g. if a web form is gathering data to be passed on to an external partner). The four exceptions to this are:

• Log files and other data may be analysed by the University's external support providers when investigating faults and other technical issues relating to webserver performance.
• Many University of Essex web pages include tracking code which allows Google Analytics to record usage and traffic information. These data are held on Google servers, are used for reporting and analysis by the University and a limited number of external consultants; they are not shared with any other parties. They are not used to identify individuals.
• Data entered by the user for online ordering of certain goods and services are passed to our credit card-processing partner Netbanx together with a unique transaction number when required for the purpose of processing online orders and payments. Such data is also stored by the University in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018. University web pages do not gather details of your credit or debit card.
• 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 2018.

Anonymised usage data may be provided in publicly-available webstatistics; any such data cannot be traced to individual users.

Data Protection Act

Under the Data Protection Act 2018, any individuals about whom the University may be holding personal data have the right to access the data that is being held about them. Full details about how this works, and how to request such information are available on the Records Management web pages under How to access your personal data.

You always have the choice to experience our sites without personalised advertising based on your web browsing activity. Your privacy is important to us.