Privacy and cookies policy

Under the General Data Protection Regulation you have a number of important rights that may be exercised free of charge. In summary, those include rights to:

• fair processing of information and transparency over how we use your use personal information
• access to your personal information and to certain other supplementary information that this Privacy Notice is already designed to address
• require us to correct any mistakes in your information which we hold
• require the erasure of personal information concerning you in certain situations
• receive the personal information concerning you which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to a third party in certain situations
• object at any time to processing of personal information concerning you for direct marketing
• object in certain other situations to our continued processing of your personal information
• otherwise restrict our processing of your personal information in certain circumstances

If you would like to exercise any of these rights, or find out more visit our data protection page.

To find out more about what we do with personal information, you can view Dorset Council's privacy notice

How cookies are used by Dorset Council

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable.

Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. These cookies allow us to distinguish you from other users of the website which helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our website. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

This information is used to improve services. For example:

• recognising your computer so you don't have to give the same information several times
• recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don't need to do it for every web page requested
• measuring how people use our website, which allows us to make changes so it is easier to use
• recognising choices you have made on the website so that you do not have to make them the next time you visit

We use cookies to control the site’s functions, to keep statistics and for session management. We do not store any personal information in cookies.

If you do not want to accept cookies, your browser can be set to automatically reject cookies or to inform you every time a website asks to store a cookie.

Please be aware the Dorset Council website will not function properly without accepting cookies, by turning them off or deleting them functionality will be lost. Should you wish to delete them after your session the browser you have used will be capable of deleting any stored cookies.

How to change your cookie settings

Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set, visit www.aboutcookies.org.

Find out how to manage cookies on popular browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Microsoft Edge
• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Opera
• Apple Safari

To find information relating to other browsers, visit the browser developer's website.

To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites, visit http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Cookies used on our website

Third party cookies

These are cookies set by other websites whose services we use in Dorset Council

Google Analytics - we use Google Analytics to gather aggregated information to understand how visitors engage with Dorset Council. Knowing which areas of content are most popular allows us to organise our content accordingly, making it easier for customers to find what they are looking for. The data is collected anonymously, reporting website trends without identifying individual visitors. The data collected is very helpful to us in improving this website, but you can opt out if you wish.

Google maps - we embed some Google maps on our pages to show the location of various facilities. Google uses cookies to manage locations and to provide web analytics in terms of the number of times a map has been viewed and/or shared.

YouTube (Google) - we embed some videos from our Dorset Council YouTube account to provide add value to certain areas of content. A YouTube cookie is used to provide web analytics in terms of the number of times a video has been watched and/or shared.

Necessary cookies

These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website, and will be deployed even if you choose not to accept cookies. 

Liferay is the software we use for this site, which is hosted on multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers.

Analytics cookies

We use Google Analytics, SiteImprove Analytics and Hotjar Analytics to collect data on the usage of our website, eg number of visits to a page, numbers of users browsing the site over time etc. This data is used to help us improve our site.

We will only create analytics cookies if you click the Accept button in our cookie banner. We do not track user demographics or use Adwords to obtain personal information on our users. We also anonymise IP addresses in our analytics.