Statement of Intent
From time to time, you will be asked to submit personal information about yourself (eg name and email address etc) in order to receive or use services on our website. Occasionally, you may be asked to provide us with information regarding your personal, professional interests and more detailed personal information.
By entering your details in the fields requested, you enable PAC to provide you with the services you select. Whenever you provide such personal information, we will treat that information in accordance with this policy. Our services are designed to give you the information that you want to receive. PAC will act in accordance with current legislation and aim to meet current Internet best practice.
Information on Visitors
During the course of any visit to the PAC site, the pages you see, along with something called a cookie, are downloaded to your computer (see "What is a cookie?" below). Most, if not all, websites do this, because cookies allow the website publisher to do useful things like find out whether the computer (and probably its user) has visited the site before. This is done on a repeat visit by checking to see, and finding, the cookie left there on the last visit.
Any information that is supplied by cookies can help us better understand your needs in order to provide you with a better service and it assists us to analyse the profile of our visitors. For example: if on a previous visit you went to, say, the Digest pages, then we might find this out from your cookie and highlight Digest information on a subsequent visit.
What is a cookie?
When you enter a site your computer will automatically be issued with a cookie. A cookie is a software tag used to identify visitors to our site. Cookies are text files and their purpose is to remember user preferences by identifying your computer to our server. Cookies in themselves do not identify the individual user, just the computer used. Many sites do this whenever a user visits their site in order to track traffic flows.
Cookies themselves only record those areas of the site that have been visited by the computer in question, and for how long. Users have the opportunity to set their computers to accept all cookies, to notify them when a cookie is issued, or not to receive cookies at any time. The last of these, of course, means that certain personalised services cannot then be provided to that user.
Submitting personal information
When you supply any personal information to PAC we have legal obligations towards you in the way we process and handle that data. We must collect the information fairly (see the notices on particular webpages that let you know why we are requesting the information); we must let you know how we will use it; and we must tell you in advance if we decide to pass the information on to anyone else. We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as you use the service you have requested, and remove it in the event that the purpose has been met, or, in the case of a personalised service, when you no longer wish to continue your registration as a personalised user. Where personal information is held for people who are not registered users of the site, that information will be held only as long as necessary to ensure that the service is run smoothly. We will ensure that all personal information supplied is held securely, in accordance with current legislation.
Access to your personal information
You have the right to request a copy of the personal information PAC holds about you. Please address requests to the PAC using the contact address available on our website.
Our Data Protection & Freedom of Information Policy and Privacy Notice are available on the Publications page.
Users under 18
If you are under 18, please get your parent/guardian's permission beforehand whenever you provide personal information to the PAC’s website. Users without this consent are not allowed to provide us with personal information.