Privacy Statement
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Privacy Statement

Website of Sligo County Council

Sligo County Council has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to your privacy. By visiting Sligococo.ie, you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Notice.

This statement relates to our privacy practices in connection with the aforementioned websites. We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of other websites. Any external links to other websites are clearly identifiable as such. Some technical terms used in this statement are explained at the end of this page. You can contact us at Sligo County Council, County Hall, Riverside, Sligo, Co. Sligo. Telephone: 071 9111111  Fax: 071 9141119 Email: info@sligococo.ie 
 

General Statement

Sligo County Council fully respects your right to privacy, and we will not collect any personal information about you on this website without your clear permission. Any information which you volunteer to Sligo County Council's websites will be treated with the highest standard of security and confidentiality, strictly in accordance with the Data Protection Acts, 1988 and 2003.


What Personal Information About Customers Does Sligo County Council Gather?

The information we learn from customers helps us personalise and continually improve your online experience at Sligococo.ie and our other websites. Here are the types of information we gather: 

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. When you register for an account, we require personal information (like name, email address, etc.). We use the information that you provide for such purposes as responding to your requests, customizing 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.

If we do use mailing lists to pass on information on your account(s) or promotions to you about our online services, we will always have a clear mechanism for you to remove yourself from future mailings.
We do not store any record of your credit card or Laser number. Any credit or debit card data is transferred directly from your computer to our card services partners’ server over a secure, encrypted connection. Our card services partners are the Local Government Computer Services Board (LGCSB) and RealEx.
Laser Visa Master Card
 
Sligo County Council  takes the confidentiality of your information seriously. For this reason, we use a RealEx to accept and process your credit card details. To guard against fraud, your information is securely encrypted while transmitted to us and at no time is this information made available to anyone else. Our secure server software (SSL) is the industry standard and among the best software available today for secure commerce transactions.

Sligo 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 Sligococo.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 192.168.88.21)
  • 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

Sligo 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 Sligo 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 Providor 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 Sligo County Council, and only for statistical and other administrative purposes. You should not 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 and 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 ePayment 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 Sligococo.ie account-based features, and we recommend that you leave them turned on.

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.

This website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. (“Google”).  Google Analytics uses “cookies”, which are text files placed on your computer, to help the website analyze how users use the site. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States . Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for website operators and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage.  Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google’s behalf. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. By using www.sligococo.ie, you consent to the processing of data about you by Google in the manner and for the purposes set out above.

Does sligococo.ie 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. For example, Sligo County Council must make annual landfill returns which include the total tonnage collected but would not include information on individual customers utilizing our refuse collection services.

We may choose to release automatic information (see above) and other information received to the website to companies and organizations for fraud protection and credit risk reduction. Information of this type will only be shared about users who have caused or attempted to cause damage to sligococo.ie or other council websites. This type of information would be shared only as a result of “hacking” attacks, fraud or other illegal activities.

Agents

We employ an outside company to compile reports on our online activity. This firm, webtrends, analyses our web traffic and compiles reports on online usage of our website. However, they retain information on only the last 1000 visits to Sligococo.ie and all of this information is of the type discussed above in the Automatic Information section.

How Secure is Information About Me?

We do not collect credit card information or other payment methods via this website. All transactions are completed via the Local Government Computer Services Board (LGCSB)/RealEx online payment processing engine to ensure maximum protection for your account information.

Laser Visa Master Card


It is important for you to protect against unauthorized access to your password and to your computer. Be sure to sign off when finished using our ePayments Account Viewer tool and to sign off from your computer when using a shared computer.


What Information Can I Access Online?

Sligococo.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.

You can also access your traffic Fine details and Housing loans provided you are able to supply the requested information to do so. This is done to ensure confidentiality.

Links To Other Websites

In order to make more information easier to find for our users, Sligococo.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. Any external links to other websites are clearly identifiable as such. We link to other websites that provide information relevant to members of the public living in Sligo and to websites whose content we think would be of interest or assistance to those planning a visit to Sligo. Sligo County Council makes no promises or recommendations about the quality of services provided by groups owning the websites we link to.


Glossary of  Technical Terms Used

Web browser

The piece of software you use to read web pages. Examples are Microsoft 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

See above.