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Privacy policy

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (‘BBSRC’) (we or us) is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.

This policy (together with our terms of use and any other documents referred to in it) sets out the basis on which any personal data we collect from you, or that you provide to us, will be processed by us.  Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.

For the purpose of the Data Protection Act 1998 (the Act), the data controller is the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) of Polaris House, North Star Avenue, Swindon, SN2 1UH.

Information we may collect from you

We may collect and process the following data about you:

• Information that you provide by filling in forms on our site http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk (our site). This includes information provided at the time of registering to use our site, subscribing to any services we may offer, posting material or requesting further services. We may also ask you for information when you report a problem with our site.
• 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 and other communication data, and the resources that you access.

IP addresses and cookies

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

For the same reason, we may obtain information about your general internet usage by using a cookie file which is stored on the hard drive of your computer, or by using JavaScript code. 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. This information obtained enables 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.

This information is currently collected using Google Analytics. You may wish to visit Google's Privacy Center.

You may refuse to accept cookies by activating the setting on your browser which allows you to refuse the setting of cookies. However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our site. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies when you log on to our site.

Similarly you can set up your browser to disable JavaScript – please see your browser’s help pages for instructions on how to do this.

Where we store your personal data

All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers. 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 you not to share a 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 use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

Uses made of the information

We 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, products or services that you request from us or which we feel may interest you, where you have consented to be contacted for such purposes
• To allow you to participate in interactive features of our service, when you choose to do so
• To notify you about changes to our site

Disclosure of your information

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, or in order to enforce or apply our terms of use and other agreements; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of the BBSRC, or others.

Your rights

You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes. We will usually inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for such purposes or if we intend to disclose your information to any third party for such purposes. You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by checking certain boxes on the forms we use to collect your data.  You can also exercise the right at any time by contacting us at webmaster@bbsrc.ac.uk.

Our site may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of our partner networks and affiliates.  If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies.  Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

Access to information

The Act gives you the right to access information held about you. Your right of access can be exercised in accordance with the Act. Any access request may be subject to a fee of £10 to meet our costs in providing you with details of the information we hold about you.

Changes to our privacy policy

Any changes we may make to our privacy policy in the future will be posted on this page and, where appropriate, notified to you by e-mail.

Contact

Questions, comments and requests regarding this privacy policy are welcomed and should be addressed to webmaster@bbsrc.ac.uk.