Website Privacy Notice

This website (the “Site”) is provided by The Board of Management of North East Scotland College, a body corporate constituted by and acting under the Further and Higher Education (Scotland) Act 1992 and having its administrative centre at Aberdeen City Campus, Gallowgate, Aberdeen AB25 1BN (“we” or “us”).

This privacy notice tells you what to expect when we collect personal information. It applies to information we collect about:

NESCol is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. Should we ask you to provide certain information by which you can be identified when using this website, then you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy notice.

NESCol may change this policy from time to time by updating this page. You should check this page from time to time to ensure that you are happy with any changes. This policy is effective from 1st November 2019.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) you have legal rights about the way we manage and use your data. You can:

  • ask for a copy of it, free of charge
  • ask us to change data held about you that is incorrect or incomplete
  • ask us to stop using your personal data until it is rectified.
  • ask for the use of your data to be restricted
  • ask us to erase your data (known as the ‘right to be forgotten)
  • tell us that you have changed your mind if you have previously given consent for your
  • information to be used for a particular purpose
  • ask us for a portable electronic copy of your data (data portability)

If you have any questions or requests regarding our use of your personal information you should contact the College’s Data Protection Officer in the first instance

Data Protection Officer

Email dataprotection@nescol.ac.uk

Data Protection Officer
North East Scotland College
Gallowgate
Aberdeen AB25 1BN

You can also contact the Information Commissioner’s Office if you think that your data is not being processed in accordance with Data Protection legislation. Their helpline is and their website is at www.ico.org.uk.

Sharing your information

We will not share your information with any third parties for the purposes of direct marketing.

We use data processors who are third parties who provide some services for NESCol. We have contracts in place with our data processors which means they cannot do anything with your personal information unless we have instructed them to do so.

Information that is gathered about you via the website for specific purposes such as applications to study or making an enquiry will be shared only with relevant College staff for that purpose. You can find out more about this on our privacy notices page.

In some circumstances we are legally obliged to share information and in these instances the College will ensure there is a lawful basis to do so and document our decision making.

Purpose and legal basis for processing

We use your personal information gathered in relation to use of our website and obtained through online applications, contact forms and other means of inputting your details to:

  • Maintain and monitor the performance of our website
  • Improve the site and the services it offers
  • To process online applications for courses (see our student applications privacy notice for more details)
  • To contact you, if requested, about specific matters.

The lawful bases we rely on are Article 6(1)(a) of the GDPR, where consent is required, or Article 6(1)(f), where its in our necessary legitimate interests (for example to maintain integrity of of IT systems), or Article 6(1)(b) in relation to course applications and entering into an agreement with NESCol.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site. The table below explains the cookies we use on the North East Scotland College Website and why. Please note we only use cookies to enhance the functionality on the website and do not use cookies to attempt to identify you for the purposes of processing your data in any way.

AWSELB – Our website uses a “load balancer” to direct web page requests to multiple servers. This cookie ensures that a visitor always gets directed to the same server, which ensures correct website behaviour.
_ga, _gat, _gid,_utma, _utmb, _utmc,_utmz – These cookies are set and used by Google Analytics to gather information about your visit to our website. You are able to opt in to their usage.
wfvt_, wordfence_verifiedHuman – Our website uses “Wordfence”, a security plugin. These cookies help it distinguish between malicious visitors to the website and genuine people.
PHPSESSID – As you browse around the pages of the website, the session cookie tells the website that you are the same person requesting the webpages, and not a new visitor to each page. This cookie does not identify you personally and is not linked to any other information we store about you. It will ensure that cookie preferences that you have set and preferences about the display (high contrast or reduced animation) are remembered from page to page. This cookie is not persistent and will ‘die’ when you leave the website. This cookie is essential as without it the site will not work.
EU_COOKIE_LAW_CON SENT – This cookie tracks whether you have consented to the use of cookies on the site. This will change as the cookie consent model is updated. This is an essential cookie.

Analytics

Our recommended settings include the use of Google Analytic cookies. When someone visits our website we use a third-party service, Google Analytics, to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out information such as the number and demographic details of visitors to a certain page of the website. This information allows the college to understand general web behaviour and make changes to the web experience where appropriate.

This information is anonymised and processed in a way which does not identify you as a user and we do not make any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website via Google Analytics.

We follow Google’s policy for informing you that we use Google Analytics (see clause 7 at https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html) and advise that if you want specific information about how Google collects and processed data to check it at this link https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites?hl=en-GB&gl=uk . Google will keep this up to date.

We recommend that you allow this cookie.