Privacy Statement

This policy explains what information we gather when you visit the Church of England website and explains how that information is used.

It is important for you to appreciate that the central website provides extensive links to other independent sites, both within the Church of England and elsewhere. This policy applies only to direct accesses to the Church of England website - URLs starting http://cofe.anglican.org/ or http://www.cofe.anglican.org/.

Data collected.

As with the vast majority of websites, the Church of England automatically logs certain information about every request made of it (see below for more details). This information is used for system administration, for bug tracking, and for producing usage statistics. The logged information may be kept indefinitely.

Relevant subsets of this data may be passed to computer security teams as part of investigations of computer misuse involving this site or other computing equipment within the hosting organisation. Data may also on occasion be passed to the administrators of other computer systems to enable investigation of problems accessing this site or of system misconfigurations. Otherwise the logged information is not passed to any third party except if required by law. Summary statistics are extracted from this data and some of these may be made publicly available, but those that are do not include information from which individuals could be identified.

Where forms are provided on this site, the pages containing these forms include information on how data submitted on them will be processed and used.

Cookies.

This site does not use cookies (small files stored on your computer's hard drive) to track the activity of external users. However, cookies are used to manage authenticated access to the site by authorized users within the Church of England.

Logged data.

The following data is automatically logged for each request:

• The name or network address of the computer making the request. Note that under some (but not all) circumstances it may be possible to infer from this the identity of the person making the request. Note also that the data recorded may be that of a web proxy rather than that of the originating client.
• The date and time of connection.
• The HTTP request, which contains the identification of the document requested.
• The status code of the request (success or failure etc.).
• The number of data bytes sent in response.
• The contents of the HTTP Referrer header supplied by the browser.
• The content of the HTTP User-Agent header supplied by the browser.
• Logging of additional data may be enabled temporarily from time to time for specific purposes.

Access to user data.

For the purpose of the UK Data Protection Act 1998, the 'Data Controller' for the processing of any data collected by this site is the Church of England, and the point of contact for subject access requests is the Webmaster. The Church of England is also Data Controller in respect of any personal data served as content by this site.