Privacy and data protection

Data protection

Any information you provide will be held securely and in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998. Your personal details will not normally be disclosed to third parties. In some circumstances, however, we may need to disclose your personal details to a third party so that they can provide a service you have requested, or fulfil a request for information. Any information about you that we pass to a third party will be held securely by that party, in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998, and used only to provide the services or information you have requested.

You have a right to request a copy of your personal details at any time to check the accuracy of the information held. If you want to ask whether the CC holds any personal data relating to you, please write to:

Head of Planning
Competition Commission
Victoria House
Southampton Row
London WC1B 4AD

Alternatively you can email your request to: planning@cc.gsi.gov.uk

Proof of identity

Before we can act on your request, you will need to supply proof of your identity. This should include:

• A photocopy of the identification pages of your current passport or of a current photo driving licence
• An original of a current utilities bill (for example, gas or electricity) or credit card or bank statement, which includes your name and current address.

This can be returned to you if required.

If you do not have any of these forms of identification, please contact planning@cc.gsi.gov.uk for assistance. 

Information we collect from visitors

We collect several kinds of information depending on the part of the site being visited: feedback, email enquiries, email addresses, site usage information and, in a few cases, personal details such as your name and postal details if you order publications.

1. Feedback

If you provide feedback about the website through our contact form we will only use this information to develop and improve the site.

2. Comments and questions

If you send an enquiry by email or using the contact form it may not always be possible for the CC to provide the information requested directly. In such circumstances we may pass your enquiry to another public authority so that they can fulfil your information request.

3. Email alerts and interactive services

If you sign up to receive email alerts, submit comments or use any of our other interactive services we will use the information you give us to provide the service(s) you have requested only. We may occasionally contact email alert subscribers to help us evaluate and improve the service that we offer. If you have used an online form to sign up for a service, you can correct, update or remove any personally identifiable information directly, via our contact form. We will hold the information you have provided for as long as you require access to the service requested. If you inform us that you wish to cancel, your details will be deleted from our records.

4. Cookies

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the Internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, your computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

• Enabling a service to recognize your device so you don't have to give the same information several times during one task
• Recognizing that you may already have given a username and password so you don't need to do it for every web page requested
• Measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there is enough capacity to ensure they are fast

You can manage these small files yourself and learn more about them through Internet browser cookies - what they are and how to manage them

Cookies for improving service

Our font scale cookie enables the website to remember whether you have chosen to change the size of font by using the smaller/larger links at the top of each page.

Name: BIScookie-fontscale
Typical content: a number from 0 (smallest) to 4 (largest)
Expires: when user exits browser

Cookies for measuring visitor numbers

Google Analytics is another software package we use to track numbers of website visitors.
Name: _utma
Typical content: randomly generated number
Expires: 2 years

Name: _utmb
Typical content: randomly generated number
Expires: 30 minutes

Name: _utmc
Typical content: randomly generated number
Expires: when you close the browser

Name: _utmz
Typical content: randomly generated number + info on how the site was reached (e.g. directly or via a link, organic search or paid search)
Expires: 6 months

For further details on the cookies set by Google Analytics, please refer to the Google Code website 

Third party cookies

Cookies used by Survey Monkey

Occasionally we link from this website to online surveys created using SurveyMonkey - as a means for you to respond to a consultation, for example. SurveyMonkey places the following cookies on your machine (in addition to Google Analytics cookies).

Cookies as surveymonkey.com:

Name: s_sess
Typical content: encoded text string of current user survey status
Expires: when you close the browser

Name: s_pers
Typical content: encoded text string of current user survey status
Expires: 3 years

Cookies as www.surveymonkey.com:

Name: P_nnnnnnnn (where n is a number)
Typical content: number
Expires: 8 months

Name: testCookie
Typical content: number
Expires: when you close your browser

5. Log files

Log files allow us to record visitors' use of the site. The CC puts together log file information from all our visitors, including IP address,* which we use to make improvements to the layout of the site and to the information in it, based on the way that visitors move around it. Log files do not contain any personal information about you.

*An IP address is a numerical label assigned to a computer on a network using the Internet Protocol. Any computer or mobile device connected to the Internet has an associated IP address so that data can be routed to it. It is difficult to trace an IP address back to an individual person, and we make no attempts to do so.

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