Privacy policy

The Scottish Public Health Observatory (ScotPHO) collaboration fully respects your right to privacy when using our website. On this page you will find details of our privacy practices in relation to our website and what we do to maintain your right to privacy.

Analysing use of our website

ScotPHO uses Google Analytics to help analyse the use of our website. This tool uses cookies (small text files stored on your computer) to collect information about visits to our website in an anonymous form. The information generated by the cookie is transmitted to Google (which includes your IP address*) and is used to produce summary reports and statistics on the use of our website. These reports contain aggregate anonymous information and do not include any information that could identify an individual visitor to our website.

ScotPHO will not use the analytics tool to collect any personal information about visitors to our website, nor will we allow any third party to do this. We will not link any data gathered by the tool with any information about you from any other source. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. Neither ScotPHO nor Google will seek to link an IP address with the identity of a computer user.

You can still use our website with no loss of functionality if cookies are blocked by your web browser.

* An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique identification number assigned to every computer connected to the internet, but it does not in itself reveal the identity of a computer user.

Registering with the ScotPHO website

You can register with the ScotPHO website to subscribe to our email lists (you can find details of these on our Registration page). In addition to your email address, you can optionally provide us with your name, job title and organisation. This additional information is used to produce an aggregate and anonymous profile of our registered users in terms of broad job categories and organisation. We may occasionally contact a sample of registered users to seek feedback on the content, structure and usage of our website.

There is no facility to log in to the ScotPHO website and all published content is freely available to all users, whether registered or not. We do not, and cannot, track the site usage of individual registered users.

Details of our registered users are held securely, will not be disclosed to any third party and will only be used for the purposes described above. Registered users can change their email list subscriptions or de-register with the website by emailing us their details.

Scotland’s Health on the Web

The ScotPHO website is situated on a server managed and maintained by the Scotland’s Health on the Web (SHOW) team, which has its own privacy and data protection policy.

How to contact us

If you have any queries or would like further information about our privacy policy, please contact us by email, telephone or letter. Contact details can be found on our Contact us page.