This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies.
Our CMS (content management system) does not use any ‘persistent’ cookies, i.e. cookies that remain on your computer after you have concluded your visit to our website. These ‘session’ cookies are not used to store any personal information, and are discarded at the end of your visit.
What are cookies?
When a website is visited, that site may write a cookie (a small computer file) to the computer that is visiting the site. Depending on the individual website, the cookie may store an array of information about the actions performed during the site visit.
One of the ideas behind the use of cookies is to enhance the visitor’s experience on the next time they visit – for example, you may not have to enter a user name, address, etc. on subsequent visits made from the same computer. In this way, the website being visited may also be able to determine when the site was last visited, for how long, etc.
What if I want to turn cookies off?
You can stop your browser accepting cookies, or stop it accepting cookies from a particular website. Settings will typically be found in the ‘options’ or ‘preferences’ menu of your browser.
Anonymous Analytics cookies
Every time a user visits our website, web analytics software provided by Google Analytics generates an anonymous analytics cookie. These cookies can tell us whether or not you have visited the site before.
Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies, and if you don’t, we generate new ones. This allows us to track how many individual unique users we have, and how often they visit the site, but these cookies cannot be used to identify individuals and are used for statistical purposes only.
Third party cookies
We do not use advertisements. Some of our online partners may use cookies to analyse customer journeys in a similar manner to Google Analytics.
Privacy of personal information
Watford Borough Council only use the information from Google Analytics to analyse the general usage of the website. Nothing is done to collect personal or identifiable information, and the data is only analysed by the Council internally. The Council does not pass information to third parties.
Information about how you use the website and your IP address* is transmitted to Google, but Google will not link your IP address with any other information held by Google. Similarly, the Council will not try to link an IP address with the identity of a visitor.
*What’s an IP Address?
An IP address acts as a locator for one computer to ‘talk’ to another. Put simply, a customer using a computer to connect to a website requires IP addresses to maintain contact for the duration of the visit. An IP address is not intended to act as an identifier that always uniquely identifies a particular device.