Privacy and Data Protection Policy
User Anonymity & Personal Information on the NHS Forth Valley Website
Log files are maintained and analysed of all requests for files on the web servers. Aggregated analyses of these log files are used to monitor website usage. These analyses are made available to organisations participating in the NHS Forth Valley website to allow them to measure, for example, overall popularity of the site and typical user paths through the site.
In combination with other information which is not collected by NHS Forth Valley but which may be collected by suppliers of network services, it may in certain situations be possible to identify an individual user's use of the NHS Forth Valley website. NHS Forth Valley does not collect the additional information required and will make no attempt to track or identify individual users, except where explicit consent for this is given or where there is a reasonable suspicion that unauthorised access to systems is being attempted. In the case of all users, NHS Forth Valley reserves the right to attempt to identify and track any individual who is reasonably suspected of trying to gain unauthorised access to computer systems or resources operating as part of the NHS Forth Valley service. As a condition of use of this site, all users must give permission for NHS Forth Valley to use its access logs to attempt to track users who are reasonably suspected of gaining or attempting to gain unauthorised access.
All log file information collected by NHS Forth Valley is kept secure and no access to raw log files is given to any third party.
In certain cases, an NHS Forth Valley participating website may implement a registration scheme which will allow usage to be tracked. NHS Forth Valley policies do not permit this to be done except in cases where users have given informed consent for this to be done, and offending sites will be removed should NHS Forth Valley become aware of any breaches of this policy. NHS Forth Valley will endeavour to ensure that participating organisations have proper data-protection procedures in place in respect of the information they make available through their websites.
Use of Cookies
NHS Forth Valley does not store any information that would on its own allow us to identify individual users of this service without their permission. Any cookies that may be used by NHS Forth Valley are used either solely on a per session basis or to maintain user preferences. Cookies are not shared with any third parties.
User tracking
Except as stated already, NHS Forth Valley will make no attempt to identify individual users. You should be aware, however, that access to web pages will generally create log entries in the systems of your ISP or network services provider. These entities may be in a position to identify the client computer equipment used to access a page. Such monitoring would be done by the provider of network services and is outwith the responsibility or control of NHS Forth Valley.
