Privacy and cookies on this site

Our policy is to respect and protect the privacy of anyone who visits the East Sussex County Council Your East Sussex website.

Personal information collected via online forms

We have taken great care to make sure that no-one can intercept personal information about you.

Where we ask you for personal information through an online form or through a social media form, this information will only be used for the purpose indicated and it will be held securely. Information sent through an online form is encrypted.

Email is not a secure method of communication because the text may be intercepted by third parties. If you need to send us sensitive or private information, please see How to send us a secure encrypted email.

Your information will not be used for any other purpose without your permission and will not be kept for longer than necessary. If you are concerned about providing your personal information online, we can arrange alternative means for you to do this. Please contact the Web Team.

Use of IP addresses

Every computer has its own individual IP address, identifying it in the same way as a telephone number identifies your phone line.

Your anonymised IP address will appear on our usage logs which help us monitor how people use the site. With the exception of our online contact forms, we do not link IP addresses to anything personally identifiable. This means that while your use of the website will be logged you will remain anonymous to us.

Use of cookies

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website.

Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user’s device. They do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, and generally improve the user experience. A common use of cookies is to store information entered into a form so it does not need to be re-entered on subsequent visits. We use cookies occasionally on our site, but you can use your browser settings to block them if you want to.

You can find out more about cookies, how they’re used and how you can opt out of using them:

• All about cookies.org

Cookies we use

Category 1: strictly necessary cookies

These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies, services you have asked for, such as reserving a library book or making an electronic payment, cannot be provided.

Consent: in law, we don’t need your consent to use these cookies:

• ‘ASP.NET_SessionId’ and ‘ASPSESSIONIDxxx’ (the xxx part is different for everyone)These are temporary cookies needed by some of the tools on the website to recognise you from one page to the next. They’re deleted when you leave our site.
• ‘ARRAffinity’This is a temporary cookie set by our web host to make sure our website works consistently from one page to the next. It’s deleted when you leave our site.
• ‘RequestVerificationToken’This is a unique code generated when you submit a form, which helps us to ensure your data is secure. It’s deleted when you leave our site.

Category 2: performance cookies

These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance, which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies a visitor. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how a website works.

Consent: By using our website, eastsussex.gov.uk, you agree that we can place these types of cookies on your device:

• ‘_ga’, ‘_gat’These are set by Google Analytics. We use this service to help us understand how many people are visiting the website and how they’re using it so that we can see where we can improve. See:- Web analytics for East Sussex County Council – Data.gov.uk– Opt out of Google Analytics – Google Tools website
• ‘_ceg.u’, ‘_ceg.s’These are set by Crazy Egg. We use this service to help us understand how people are using specific pages on our website so that we can see where we can improve. They’re deleted after three months.
• ‘mp_mixpanel_c’This cookie is set by Mixpanel for analyzing traffic used by our GovDelivery overlays, in particular, it shows how users reached the platform.

Category 3: functionality cookies

These cookies allow the website to remember choices you make (such as your user name, language or the region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features. For instance, a website may be able to provide you with local weather reports or traffic news by storing in a cookie the region in which you are currently located. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of web pages that you can customise. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.

Consent: By using our website, eastsussex.gov.uk, you agree that we can place these types of cookies on your device:

• ‘textsize’We’ve provided a way to change the size of the text on our website. We use these cookies to remember your choice, so you don’t have to keep changing the size.
• ‘ReadingOrder’We use this to guide you through what happens after you receive a school admissions decision. It remembers the last page you saw, and it’s deleted after one hour.
• ‘C4ATBCookie*’These cookies are set by our web chat feature and are deleted after a year. We use this service to provide an easy way for you to contact us online.
• GovDelivery Overlays – Local Storage’ Local storage is like a cookie that isn’t used to gather user information. Our GovDelivery overlays save data to local storage on your machine that our website can reference when it is loading. The overlays use this information to tell how the overlay was last used and to determine if the overlay should be displayed again.

Category 4: targeting cookies or advertising cookies

These cookies are used to deliver adverts more relevant to you and your interests They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement as well as help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. They are usually placed by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. They remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organisations such as advertisers. Quite often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organisation.

Consent: Our site doesn’t use any cookies which fall into this category.

External links

This site contains links to other sites. East Sussex County Council is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of these sites.

This policy sets out East Sussex County Council’s position on linking to and from our website.

Linking to our site

You are welcome to link to East Sussex County Council’s Your East Sussex website. We would appreciate being informed of any link to our site. Contact us using the questions and comments form, selecting ‘Web Team’ as the recipient.

East Sussex County Council receives many such requests and retains the right to withdraw this permission without explanation or notice if in our judgement use of such links is excessive or inappropriate.

Links made to East Sussex County Council’s Your East Sussex website should not infer any endorsement or partnership by the Council of that site and its services or products, where such an agreement is not applicable.

Reciprocal links cannot be guaranteed due to the number of requests we receive to link to external websites.

East Sussex County Council does not allow the use of its logo’s without prior written agreement from the Council.

Linking from our site

East Sussex County Council’s Your East Sussex site contains links to websites operated by other parties. Although we look at all sites carefully to assess their reliability and content, the Council is not responsible for the reliability or content of the websites and does not necessarily endorse the views expressed within the websites or any association with their operators. We are not responsible for updating the websites. We cannot guarantee that the links will work all the time, and we do not have any control over the availability of the linked pages.

East Sussex County Council usually includes links to other websites that conform to one or more of the following criteria:

• being directly related to the work we do
• belonging to partner organisations
• government websites
• specific page or pages of information or a document that offers more detail relating to content on our website.

In relation to requests for links, the editor’s decision will be final.

Privacy and email newsletters

Read our email news privacy policy

Contacting us

If you have any comments or questions about the accuracy of information on this site please contact the Web Team.