Website Privacy & Cookies

Information Collected Via This Website

ASCERT is committed to protecting your privacy. We will not share ANY of the information that you give us as an individual via this website to any third party without seeking your prior consent.

The information we collect via our website falls into two categories:

• Individual Information.
• Statistical Information.

Individual Information

We collect individual information about our website visitors in the following ways:

Enquiry Form Submission: This is information intentionally submitted by a website visitor via an electronic form on the site. When submitted, the content of this form is emailed to the relevant staff member within ASCERT (based on the subject type), for action/response. Contact details are collected to enable a response to the enquiry. When submitting an enquiry, the individual is giving consent for ASCERT to make contact within them for the explicit purpose of responding to that enquiry.

Subscriber Signup: This is information intentionally submitted by a website visitor via the Subscribe function on the website. The individual provides their contact details to express an interest in, and give consent to, receiving regular updates from ASCERT via email. This information is added to a mailing list that is managed via the Mailchimp software package. Mailchimp facilities individuals updating their subscription preferences.

Registered Member Signup: This is information intentionally submitted by a website visitor via an electronic form on the site. The individual provides their contact and other personal details to become a registered member in order to sign up for training programmes and access an individual learning area.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate

To further enhance your privacy when browsing and submitting individual information the ASCERT website incorporates SSL certification. SSL is a secure protocol developed for sending information securely over the Internet. AN SSL encrypts the data you input when using the ASCERT website prior to it being transmitted back to the ASCERT website server so that a third party cannot ‘eavesdrop’ on the transmission and view the data you have submitted. Only your computer and the ASCERT secure server are able to recognise the data.

You can tell if a website is using SSL when a padlock is displayed on the address bar in your browser and/or the address bar that shows URL as HTTPS instead of HTTP.

Please refer to ASCERT’s Privacy Policy for additional information on how ASCERT gathers, processes, stores and utilises individual’s data.

 

Statistical Information

We also collect statistical information such as the number of visitors to our site, the number of times a page is viewed and the number and type of files that are downloaded from our site using Google Analytics. From this information we can identify which parts of the site are the most/least popular. This information does not enable us to personally identify any individual user. This is done via the use of cookies.

 

What is a Cookie?

A cookie is a small snippet of information sent from a web server to a user’s browser, which then stores it. On subsequent access to the same web server this server can then read back this information snippet and use it to “recognize” the user.

We may gather information about your general internet use by using a cookie file. Where used, these cookies are downloaded to your computer automatically. This cookie file is stored on the hard drive of your computer as cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive. They help us to improve our website and the service that we provide to you.

Our cookies aren’t used to identify you personally. They’re just here to make the site work better for you. Indeed, you can manage and/or delete these small files as you wish.

 Cookies are specific to the server that created them and cannot be accessed by other servers, which means they cannot be used to track your movements around the web. Although they can be used to store information which may identify a user’s computer, cookies do not personally identify users and passwords and credit card information are not stored in cookies.

 

What Cookies are Used on the ASCERT Website?

Currently we have 11 First Party Cookies, 0 Third Party Cookies and 5 Third Party Requests associated to this website. You can check this for yourself at: www.cookie-checker.com

 

First Party Cookies We Use

The cookies that are set by this website itself and can only be read by this site. They are used to aid the functionality of the site.

 cb-enabled This cookie is associated with a free script which shows a cookie alert notice on a website. It is used to record when the user has dismissed the notice to prevent it re-appearing on return visits. The main purpose of this cookie is: Strictly Necessary. This cookie remains in your browser for one year.

exp_last_visit This cookie remains in your browser for one year and contains the date of the user’s last visit.

exp_last_activity This cookie remains in your browser for one year and records the time of the last page load. It is used in conjunction with the exp_last_visit cookie.

exp_tracker This is a temporary cookie that remains in the internet browser’s folder of your computer until you close the browser. It contains the last 5 pages viewed and is typically used for form or error message returns.

PHPSESSID This is a temporary cookie that remain in the internet browser’s folder of your computer until you close the browser. It is used to store a simple message when a form is submitted that can be displayed on a different page. For example, if an enquiry form is completed incorrectly, a message will be stored and presented to the user to indicate the errors in the submission. When an enquiry form is submitted successfully, a message is stored and presented to the user thanking them for their enquiry. No personal information is stored in this cookie.

exp_csrf_token This cookie protects against Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF). A CSRF attack forces a logged-on victim’s browser to send a forged HTTP request, including the victim’s session cookie and any other automatically included authentication information, to a vulnerable web application. This allows the attacker to force the victim’s browser to generate requests the vulnerable application thinks are legitimate requests from the victim.

We use Google Analytics first party cookies to collect information about how visitors use our site. We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the site. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited.

Google Analytics uses the following cookies:

__utmt (Google Analytics) This is used to keep track of the number of times the visitor has been to the site. Including when the first visit was and when the last visit was. It never expires.

__utma (Google Analytics) This randomly generated number is used to determine unique visitors to our site. It expires after 2 years.

__utmb (Google Analytics) This randomly generated number works with _utmc to calculate the average length of time users spend on our site. It expires after 30 minutes.

__utmc (Google Analytics) This randomly generated number works with _utmb to calculate when you close your browser. It expires when you close your browser.

__utmz (Google Analytics) This is a randomly generated number and information about how the site was reached (e.g. direct or via a link, organic search or paid search). It expires after 6 months

 You can access the Google Analytics Opt Out Browser Add-on at: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

 

Third Party Requests

These are requests that are made from our website to an external service. Despite the fact that these requests don’t set any cookies, they can still transfer privacy information to third parties. We have third party requests to Twitter to share data from that feed and Google Analytics to share data for analytical purposes.

 

Deleting Cookies

Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you are not obliged to accept. If you prefer, you can change your browser’s settings to prevent it from accepting cookies on your computer – go to: www.allaboutcookies.org for instructions on how to disable cookies. Please note that should you choose to decline cookies, you may be unable to access particular parts of our website.

 

Contact Information

If you have any questions or comments about website privacy and our use of cookies, please contact:

Information Officer
ASCERT
23 Bridge Street
Lisburn
Northern Ireland
BT281XZ

We can be reached via email at: dataprotection@ascert.biz

We can be reached via telephone at: 0800 2545 123