General Statement
The Community Platform fully respects your right to privacy, and will not collect any personal information about you on this website without your clear permission. Any personal information which you volunteer will be treated with the highest standards of security and confidentiality, strictly in accordance with the Data Protection Acts, 1988 & 2003.
Collection and Use of Personal Information
Personal information for the purposes of this document is information that can identify an individual such as name, address, contact details. Community Platform does not collect any personal data about you on this website, apart from information which you volunteer (for example by e-mailing us or by joining as a member). Any information which you provide in this way is not made available to any third parties and is used only in line with the purpose for which you provided it. Your personal data may also be anonymised and used for statistical purposes.
Collection and Use of Technical Information
Technical details in connection with visits to this website are logged for our statistical purposes. The technical details logged include the following items:
• the IP address of your internet connection
• the type of browser you are using
• the date and time you accessed our site
• the pages you have accessed, and the documents downloaded
• the previous website address from where you reached us, including any search terms used.
The Community Platform will make no attempt to identify individual visitors, or to associate the technical details listed above with any individual. This information is used to allow us to improve the information we are supplying to our users, find out how many people are visiting our sites and for statistical purposes. Some of the above information is used to create summary statistics which allow us to assess the number of visitors to the different sections of our site, discover what information is most and least used, inform us on future design and layout specifications, and help us make our site more user friendly.
Cookie Policy
In a similar way to most websites the Community Platform site makes use of cookies. Cookies are small data files that are stored by your web browser on your computer. You can find out all about cookies and their uses on Wikipedia.
The Community Platform uses cookies to:
• measure how people use our website so we can improve the content, structure and layout
• remember settings and preferences so we can tailor content to your specific needs
• help determine the effectiveness of online advertising and the targeting of those advertisements
Our cookies are not used to identify you personally. They are used to improve the effectiveness of the Community Platform’s online work and to provide you with a better end user experience on our websites.
Cookies on This Website
By using the Community Platform website you may get first party cookies (i.e. set by the communityplatform.ie domain) in addition to third party cookies (i.e. set by an external domain such as facebook.com). The following categories describe the range of cookies that can be used during your visit to our site.
Remembering Settings and Preferences
We use cookies to store preferences and settings from your visit. This includes the cookie used to check whether you have viewed our cookie banner so we don’t show it to you again for thirty days.
Measuring Website Usage (Google Analytics)
We use Google Analytics to collect information about how people use this site. We do this to make sure it’s meeting its users’ needs and to understand how we could do it better.
Google Analytics stores information about what pages you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got here and what you click on. We do not collect or store your personal information (e.g. your name or address) so this information cannot be used to identify who you are.
Google provides details on the cookies used as well as a plugin that can be used to opt out of Google Analytics.
Managing Cookies in your Browser
Some people find the idea of a website storing information on their device a little intrusive, in particular when the information is stored and used by a third party. In some cases, you can choose to accept cookies from the primary site but block them from third parties. In others, you can block cookies from specific advertisers, or clear out all cookies. Information about the procedure to follow in order to enable or disable cookies can be found on your Internet browser provider’s site via your help screen.
Glossary of Technical Terms Used
Browser – The piece of software you use to read web pages. Examples are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.
IP address – The identifying details for your computer (or your internet company’s computer), expressed in “internet protocol” code (for example 192.165.75.24). 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.