Privacy

How we use your information

The purpose of this web page is to inform members of the public about what to expect when Devon County Council collects personal data about them. We will collect personal data about different types of people including:

  • visitors to our websites
  • complainants and other individuals as part of complaints and requests for information
  • people who use our services, such as social care clients or other service users
  • people who contact the council requesting either information or a service
  • job applicants and our current and former employees

Whenever we collect personal data from you, we will be transparent with you and will provide you with access to information detailing who we are, what we are going to do with your personal data and for how long we intend to hold your information. This information will be made available via a privacy notice that will be available to view on our privacy notice library.

Privacy notices introduced as a result of COVID-19:

Visitors to our website

When someone visits our website, we collect certain information about these visitors, such as IP addresses and details of the pages which these people have visited. This information does not allow us to identify individuals but helps us to ensure our website is structured in the most effective and user-friendly way.

We will sometimes collect personal data via our website. In these circumstances, we will inform individuals why we wish to collect this information, what we will do with it and we will include details of who we will share this information with. This information will feature in a privacy notice which will be issued in accordance with our data protection policies.

Use of IP addresses

An IP address is a set of numbers that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you log on to your internet service provider (or through your local area network (LAN). Web servers, the powerful computers that provide web pages for viewing, automatically identify your computer by the IP address assigned to it during your session online.

IP addresses may be collected for certain purposes (for example, to audit the use of our site). We do not link a user’s IP address to a person’s personal data, which means we will have a record of each user’s session but the user will remain anonymous to us.

Under certain circumstances, IP addresses and/or domain names may be linked to personally identifiable information, when this information is stored in databases managed by internet registrars or registries such as Network Solutions or ARIN.

Use of cookies

You can read more about how we use cookies on our cookies page.

Search engines

Our website search is powered by Google. Search queries and results are logged anonymously to help us improve our website and search functionality. No user-specific data is collected by either Devon County Council or any third party.

People who call our Customer Service Centre

When you call our Customer Service Centre (My Devon) we may collect personal data for the purposes of dealing with enquiries. Certain calls may be monitored and recorded for training purposes. Any information that is collected from you will be processed in accordance with the council’s privacy notices and associated data protection laws.

Website feedback – to help us understand our users

We use Hotjar to better understand our users’ needs and to optimise our online services. Hotjar helps us better understand our users’ experience, for example, the content they find useful (or not), how much time they spend on which pages or which links they choose to click on. This enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback.

Hotjar use cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behaviour and their devices (in particular device’s IP address (captured and stored only in anonymized form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), preferred language used to display our website). Hotjar stores this information in a pseudonymised user profile. This information will never be used to identify individual users or to match it with further data on an individual user.

If you do not want Hotjar to store your data then you can configure your browser to set a do not track flag that Hotjar will recognise. Find out more on Hotjar’s do not track page.

How to contact us

For more information about how the Council will process your personal data, or for details on how to access information from us, please email us or write to:

The Data Protection Officer
County Hall, Room 120
Topsham Road
Exeter
EX2 4QD

Email: keepdevonsdatasafe@devon.gov.uk