Privacy Statement
Cork City Council keeps its privacy policy under regular review and places any updates on this web page.
This statement was last updated: 16-02-2023
Cork City Council has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to your privacy. By visiting corkcity.ie and all associated sites, or any sub-sites, of the above you are deemed to accept the practices set out and described in this Privacy Statement.
This Statement relates to our privacy practices in connection with the aforementioned websites. We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of other websites. Some technical terms used in this Statement are explained at the end of this page.
General Statement
Cork City Council fully respects your right to privacy. We will not collect any personal information about you on this website without your clear permission. Any information which you volunteer to the Council’s websites will be treated with the highest standard of security and confidentiality, strictly in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations and Data Protection Acts, 1988-2018.
What Personal Information Does Cork City Council Gather About Its Customers?
The information we learn from customers helps us personalise and continually improve your online experience at Corkcity.ie and our other websites. The following are the types of information we gather:
Information You Give Us:
We receive and store any information you enter on our website or give us in any other way. You can choose not to provide certain information, but then you might not be able to take advantage of many of the features of our websites. When you register for online forms etc., we require personal information (like your name, email address, etc.). We use the information that you provide for such purposes as responding to your requests, customising our online services for you, improving our online services, and communicating with you.
Where a user voluntarily provides personal information, the data will be used for analysis, research or customer service purposes only. Any personal data provided by you to us will be held and processed in accordance with the data protection principles set out in the General Data Protection Regulations and Data Protection Acts, 1988-2018, Electronic Commerce Act, 2000, and other relevant EU and Irish legislation.
If you register on our site you may be given an option to send online forms with your email address. Your email address will only be used for the purpose of the form and sent only to the specific people dealing with the relevant form.
In the event of online payment being processed via the Cork City Council website we do not store any record of your credit card. Any credit or debit card data is transferred directly from your computer to our card services partners’ server over a secure, encrypted connection.
Cork City Council assures you that the identity of all who contact us through this website is kept confidential. We do not rent, sell, or exchange mailing lists, or otherwise disclose such information to third parties, except as may be required by law, or through voluntary co-operation with law enforcement authorities if we judge that such co-operation is necessary to combat fraud or other crime.
Automatic Information:
For general web browsing no personal information is revealed to us, although certain statistical information is available to us from our website logs. For example, like many websites, we obtain certain types of information when your web browser (browsers are pieces of software that allow you to access the Internet; examples include Internet Explorer, Edge, Chrome, Opera, Mozilla, etc.) accesses Corkcity.ie or our other websites. See below for examples. Also, to ensure the security of your online account information in our Pay Online area, we use cookies to ensure that security is maintained by preventing the “hijacking” of your online identity (see below for more on cookies). The only information that is stored in the cookie is a key code, which can be used by our server only during the current visit to verify your identity online. The cookie becomes unusable after either the user logs out or after 20 minutes of inactivity on our website.
Examples Of Information Collected:
- Internet Protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the internet (for example 192.168.11.47).
- Login-if using our account services.
- Email address-if you email any of our public email addresses.
- Computer and connection information such as browser type and version, operating system, platform, referring url and pages visited
Cork City Council will make no attempt to identify individual visitors or to associate the technical details listed above with any individual, except in cases where criminal activity has taken place (i.e. in response to a "hacking" incident). It is the policy of Cork City Council never to disclose such technical information in respect of individual website visitors to a third party (except to law-enforcement bodies and then only in response to illegal activity such as "hacking"; also our Internet Service Provider which records such data on our behalf and which is bound by confidentiality provisions in this regard), unless obliged to disclose such information by a rule of law. The technical information will be used only by Cork City Council, and only for statistical and other administrative purposes.
You should note that technical details, which we cannot associate with any identifiable individual, do not constitute “personal data” for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulations and Data Protection Acts, 1988-2018.
Cookies
We use a CMP or Consent Management Platform on this website. On first visit you will be presented with a banner outlining the categories of cookies in use and how to enable or block each type. You can change or withdraw your consent to all or selected cookies at any time by clicking on the cookies widget in the bottem left of your screen or by visiting our cookies information page.
Only necessary cookies are enabled by default on this website. All other categories are blocked until you choose to consent to them through the cookies banner. Your consent will only last six-months after which time you will be asked to renew your consent settings.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is an industry body that develops standards and guidelines to support online business processes and their use of cookies. It has produced a series of web pages which explain how they work and how they can be managed. Please see their website if you would like to know more.
To ensure the security of your online account information in our ePayments area (rent payment for example), we use cookies to ensure that security is maintained by preventing the “hijacking” of your online identity . The only information that is stored in the cookie is a key code which can be used by our server only during the current visit to verify your identity online. The cookie becomes unusable after either the user logs out or after 20 minutes of inactivity on our website.
Third-Party Content
We use content from selected third-party providers to perform certain functions on our website with the intention of enhancing your experience as a user. These third-parties may set their own cookies on your device. We do not control which cookies are set by third-parties or how the cookie information is used. This cookie information can only be accessed by the third-party who set it. You can however, block all third-party content on this site by opting out of the relevant cookies that are necessary for it to be displayed on your web browser.
Here is the full list of third-party content used on this site.
Does Corkcity.ie Share The Information It Receives?
Rarely. In cases where there is a statutory requirement to share information with a government agency or other local authority or where your information must be shared with another agency in order to answer a customer query or to provide a customer service, then the minimum amount of information required will be shared in an appropriate manner. Generally, information is shared with other agencies as an aggregate rather than as a specific piece of data. For example, Cork City Council must make annual landfill returns which include the total tonnage collected but would not include information on individual customers utilising our refuse collection services.
We may choose to release automatic information (see above) and other information received to the website to companies and organisations for fraud protection and credit risk reduction. Information of this type will only be shared about users who have caused or attempted to cause damage to Corkcity.ie or other council websites. This type of information would be shared only as a result of “hacking” attacks, fraud or other illegal activities.
How secure is Information About Me?
We do not collect credit card information or other payment methods via this website. All transactions are completed via a third party online payment processing engine to ensure maximum protection for your account information.
It is important for you to protect against unauthorised access to your password and to your computer. Be sure to sign off when finished using our online payments Account Viewer tool and to sign off from your computer when using a shared computer.
Departmental Privacy Notices
Individual departments within Cork City Council have issued their own privacy notices, outlining their procedures and legislation in relation to data protection.