Waterford County Council has prepared a privacy statement to demonstrate the organisation's firm commitment to privacy. The statement explains the information gathering and dissemination practices in regard to data on all our websites.

What information we collect

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. 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.

Waterford 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 Workin Waterford.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

Waterford 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 Waterford 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 Waterford 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
Cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your computer's hard drive through your web browser to enable our systems to recognize your browser and to 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 Workinwaterford.ie's account-based features, and we recommend that you leave them turned on.

Does Seankellytour.com Share the Information it Receives?
Rarely. In cases where there is a statutory requirement to share information with a government agency or other local authority or where your information must be shared with another agency in order to answer a customer query, then the minimum amount of information required will be shared in an appropriate manner. Generally, information is shared with other agencies as an aggregate rather than as a specific piece of data.

What Information Can I Access Online?
Workinwaterford.ie and the other council websites will make as much public information available online as possible in order to improve the transparency of our organization.

Links To Other Websites
In order to make more information easier to find for our users, Workinwaterford.ie and the other Council websites link to content owned and hosted by other local authorities, government agencies, companies, organizations, etc. We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of other websites. We link to other websites that provide information relevant to members of the public living in Waterford and to websites whose content we think would be of interest or assistance to those planning a visit to Waterford. Waterford County Council makes no promises or recommendations about the quality of services provided by groups owning the websites we link to.

Security
Our websites have security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control. However, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, but it is our policy to ensure our security system adheres to the highest standards.

Glossary of Technical Terms Used:

• Web browser:
  The piece of software you use to read web pages. Examples are internet explorer, netscape navigator and opera.
  
• IP address: The identifying details for your computer ( or your internet company's computer ), expressed in "internet protocol" code ( for example 192.168.72.34 ). Every computer connected to the web has a unique IP address, although the address may not be the same every time a connection is made.
  
• Cookies:
  Cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your computer's hard drive through your web browser to enable our systems to recognize your browser and to provide security while you access your online ePayment account information.

Disclaimer
Waterford County Council, its Councillors, directors, employees, servants and agents, affiliates or other representatives and their respective parent and subsidiary companies, shall not be liable in respect of any claims, emergencies, demands, causes of action, damages, losses, expenses, including without limitation, reasonable legal fees and costs of proceedings arising out of or in connection with the use and/or dissemination of personal information relating to you in accordance with this privacy policy and your consents.

Amendments
Waterford County Council reserves the right in its sole discretion to amend this privacy statement at any time, and you should regularly check this privacy statement for any amendments.

More Information/Contact
If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the practices of this or another Waterford County Council website or your dealings with this or another Waterford County Council website, you can contact: info@waterfordcoco.ie