Safeguarding the privacy and confidentiality of your personal information is of the utmost importance to the Government, whether you interact with us over the counter, over the telephone, or through the Internet.  The e-Government Portal Team is dedicated to protecting the privacy of your online information, and all information you share with us over the Internet is covered by our Privacy Statement.

 When you visit this web site we may collect personal data about you.   The eGovernment Portal will, however, only use these personal data in accordance with the purposes set forth in this Privacy Statement and is committed to safeguarding the personal information collected.  This statement sets out our purpose for collecting your personal data; how data is used; our interaction with third parties; the use of cookies and how we treat with credit card and banking details.

Information Collected

We may collect and process the following data about you:

• Data on forms you submit is kept for our records.
• If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence.
• We may also ask you to complete surveys that we use for research purposes, although you do not have to respond to them.
• Details of your visits to our site including, but not limited to, traffic data, location data, weblogs, operating system, browser usage and other communication data, and the resources that you access. 

We may collect information about your computer, including where available your IP address, operating system and browser type, for system administration and to report aggregate information. This is statistical data about our users' browsing actions and patterns, and does not identify any individual and we will not collect personal information in this way.

How information is used

We may use information held about you in the following ways:

• To ensure that content from our site is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer. 
• To provide you with information, on government services that you request from us or which we feel may interest you, where you have consented to be contacted for such purposes. 
• To carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us.
• To allow you to participate in interactive features of our service, when you choose to do so.
• To notify you about changes to our service.

Third Parties

We may disclose your personal information to third parties:

• If we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, our customers, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection.

Use of cookies

We may obtain information about your general internet usage by using a cookie file which is stored on the hard drive of your computer. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer's hard drive. They help us to improve our site and to deliver a better and more personalised service. They enable us:

• To estimate our audience size and usage pattern.
• To store information about your preferences, and so allow us to customise our site according to your individual interests.
• To speed up your searches.
• To recognise you when you return to our site. 

You may refuse to accept cookies by modifying the setting on your Internet browser.  However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our site. 

Credit Card and Banking Information

We do not store credit and banking details at this site but any other information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers.  Authenticated users will be connected by a secure communication channel. Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask that you do not share your password with anyone.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will enforce strict procedures and security features to try to prevent any unauthorised access.

Changes to our Internet privacy statement

We will continue to refine our Internet policy and principals to meet the needs of you, our customers. If we make any changes to our Internet policy, we will outline those changes on our web site. We reserve the right to make changes to this policy and related procedures at any time.