Privacy

Any personal data or sensitive personal data provided by you to us will be held and processed in accordance with the data protection principles set out in the Data Protection Act 1998 for the purposes of meeting the legitimate interests of Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish Ministers, the Scottish Government and other members of the Scottish Enterprise Network.

Privacy statement

This Privacy Policy explains our data processing practices and only applies to this website. Other websites to which this website links are not covered by this Privacy Policy. If you have any queries concerning your personal information or any questions on our use of the information, please contact the Helpline using our feedback form or email enquiries@scotent.co.uk

At Scottish Enterprise we are committed to protecting the privacy of our customers and website visitors. Our relationship with you is valuable and we understand the importance you place on the privacy and security of information which personally identifies you. In that respect, and whether you are a first time visitor to our website or a regular user, we take your privacy seriously. Please read the following in order to learn more about our privacy policy and our information gathering and dissemination practices.

• Why we require your information
• What information do we collect?
• What information do we share?
• Changes to Privacy Policy
• Questions or suggestions
• Your Rights

Why we require your information

• Scottish Enterprise provides a variety of on-line offerings, including information about Scottish Enterprise products and services, business information and publicity. Scottish Enterprise collects personally identifiable information when you register with us and when you use our services. We ask you for personal data only when it is needed to provide goods or services you have enquired about or asked us to provide or to respond to your request for information. You do not need to provide us with personal data simply to browse our site.
• Scottish Enterprise use this information to customise the content you see on our pages, to fulfil your request for certain products and services, to communicate with you generally and to contact you about special offers, promotions or new events and services.

What information do we collect?

We will collect information from you in the following circumstances:

• Registration
  Some areas of our website require you to be registered with us prior to access being made available to a particular area of the website or to obtain certain services. Our registration process involves providing us with your name, address, telephone and fax number and e-mail address and we may also request some optional information on your family, lifestyle, employment status and social circumstances. We use this information to provide you with the service you have requested or to answer your queries.
• Promotions and Events
  Personal data is required to keep you informed of developments including new (or existing) activities, guidance services and facilities, promotions, conferences, seminars and training offerings. Where we offer on-line registration in particular cases, we will require to obtain certain information about you such as contact details and billing information to process your registration and to follow-up such registration.
• Free Software Download
  When you download software from us we may request your contact information to process your order.
• Subscriptions and Newsletters
  Users of our website can register for a number of e-mail newsletters and news updates. This service is entirely optional and you may unsubscribe at any time by contacting the Helpline using our feedback form or email enquiries@scotent.co.uk
• Contest and Surveys
  From time to time we may offer users the option of participating in contests or surveys. Participation is entirely optional. Any information you provide during the course of a contest or survey is used by us to conduct research, improve our facilities and services or award prizes. Additional terms and conditions may apply to contests which will be notified to prospective applicants.
• Optional Information
  We may request optional information from you on our registration forms. We request this optional information so that we may serve you better (e.g., to provide more tailored products and services to you) and so that we may understand you better (e.g., through internal research, data analysis, market research and product research). If we request this additional information from you, we will identify it as optional.
• Information from Other Sources
  In our normal course of business, Scottish Enterprise supplements the contact information provided by you with information from third-party marketing firms. We use this additional information (e.g., demographic and census information) to help us to serve you better by, for example, targeting some of our offers, promotions, services and other events to you.
• Job Opportunities
  We advertise details of job opportunities with Scottish Enterprise on our website. If you apply for one of the available positions, you are required to provide us with contact details so we can get in touch with you. These details, together with the contents of your curriculum vitae, will be treated as confidential and will only be used for the purposes of considering you for a particular position.
• Discussion Forums
  Some users of our website are offered the opportunity of participating in discussion forums and posting news, comments and other content to message boards. These services enable users to interact easily with our staff and other visitors to the site about Scottish Enterprise and its products and services. The discussion forums and message boards are not private forms of communication, and therefore any information which is posted on them can be accessed by the general public.
• Cookies
  There are various technologies, including one called "cookies" which can be used to provide you with tailored information from a website. A cookie is a small data file that certain websites write to your hard drive when you visit them. The only personal information a cookie can obtain is information a user supplies him or herself. A cookie can’t read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites. Cookies, however, enhance our website performance in a number of ways, including providing a secure way for us to verify your identity during your visit to our website and personalising your experience on our site making it more convenient for you. The Scottish Enterprise website uses cookies so that we can serve you better. For example, we set cookies to maintain the open menus as you move between pages, or to remember user names and preferences (if applicable). These are used only when you are on the website. You can refuse cookies by turning them off on your web browser and you do not need to have cookies turned on to successfully use our service. Most browsers are defaulted to accept and maintain cookies, and you can set your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie, giving you the chance to decide whether to accept it or not.
• Use of Web Beacons
  Scottish Enterprise web pages may contain electronic images known as web beacons - sometimes called “single-pixel gifs” - which allows Scottish Enterprise to count users who have visited those pages and to deliver co-branded services. Web beacons are not used to access your personally identifiable information on the Scottish Enterprise website. They are a technique we use to compile aggregated statistics about Scottish Enterprise website usage. Web beacons collect only a limited set of information including a cookie number, time and date of a page view and a description of the page on which the web beacon resides. Web beacons work in conjunction with cookies. If you don’t want to associate your anonymous cookie information with your visits to these pages, you can set your browser to turn off cookies. If you turn off cookies, web beacon technologies will still detect anonymous visits to these pages, but the notices they generate cannot be associated with other anonymous cookie information and are disregarded.
• Website Usage Data
  With or without cookies, our website keeps track of usage data, such as the source address that the page request is coming from (i.e. your IP address, domain name), date and time of the page request, the referring website (if any) and other parameters in the URL (for example search criteria). We use this data to better understand website usage so we know what areas of our website users prefer. This information is stored in log files and is used for aggregated and statistical reporting but is not attributed to you as an individual.
• Security
  We recognise industry standards and employ security safeguards to protect information from unauthorised access and misuse. We use the most accurate and current information you provide in order to process your request. Furthermore, whenever you transmit sensitive information, such as billing or credit card information to us through our website, we provide you access to our secure server that allows encryption across the internet. This is done to help protect you from unauthorised use of the information you are sending to our server.
• User Submissions
  Please do not post confidential or proprietary information to our website. Any material, information or any other communication you transmit or post to our website (other than your personal information) will be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary, unless we are advised to the contrary and we will have no liability for it. Scottish Enterprise and its designees will be free to copy, disclose, distribute, incorporate and otherwise use the communications in all data, images, sound, text and other things embodied therein for any and all commercial or non-commercial purposes. Users of our website are prohibited from posting or transmitting to or from this site any unlawful, threatening, libellous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic or other material that would violate any law.

What information do we share?

There are times when we are required to share the information we learn from you with other parties. We do not sell or rent this information to others but will send personally identifiable information about you to other companies or people in the following situations:-

• Agents
  Scottish Enterprise will share your information with professional advisers, strategic partners, survey and research organisations, The Scottish Government and other individuals and organisations that we employ or work with to perform functions in certain situations on our behalf. Examples of these functions include delivering packages, sending postal mail, faxes and e-mail, providing marketing assistance in data analysis, handling credit card transactions, fulfilling orders, providing services, (including but not limited to careers and employment services) and following up on enquiries (including by phone, e-mail, post or fax). These agents have access to the personal information required to perform their functions, but may not use it for any other purpose. This may also in certain circumstances involve the transfer of your information abroad.
• Compliance with law
  We will release personal information where we are required to by law or by the regulations and other rules (including auditing requirements) to which we are subject. We may also exchange information with other companies and organisations for fraud protection and credit risk reduction.
• Consent
  Other than in the above situations you will receive notice from us when your personal information might go to third parties and you will have the opportunity to decide not to share that information.
• Changes to Privacy Policy
  We may edit this policy from time to time. If we make any substantial changes we will notify you by posting a prominent announcement on our web pages.
• Questions or suggestions
  If you have any questions or suggestions regarding this policy, have any concerns about the practices of our websites, you believe we are not properly adhering to our privacy policy or wish us to remove your personal details from our database, please contact the Helpline using our feedback form or email enquiries@scotent.co.uk

Your Rights

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information held by us in our records in return for which we may charge a small fee. You also have the right to require us to correct any inaccuracies in your information. Contact the helpline using our feedback form or email enquiries@scotent.co.uk or call 0845 607 8787 (from within Scotland: 0141 228 2000 from anywhere in the UK) for further details.