Introduction

The School of Psychology respects each individual’s right to personal privacy. We will collect and use information through our Web site only in the ways disclosed in this statement. This statement applies solely to information collected at The School of Psychology’s Web site – www.psy.plymouth.ac.uk.

The Data Protection Act 1998

The Deparment of Psychology complies fully with the Data Protection Principles laid down in the Data Protection Act (DPA) 1998.

Part I. Information Collection
The School of Psychology collects information through our Web site’s Online Research section, which contains experiments and questionnaires run within the school. The information collected by individual questionnaires or experiments varies according to the nature and purpose of the experiment.
The School of Psychology does not use any data collected for commercial or marketing purposes. No data collected is made available to any third party. We never knowingly ask a child under 13 to divulge personal information.

The School of Psychology web server records incoming IP addresses which we use exclusively for diagnosing problems with our server, administering our website and gathering site usage data. We do not link IP data to personal identification information nor use our logging information to identify individual users. The following data is automatically logged for each page request:

  1. The network address of the computer making the page request. (Note that under some - but not all - circumstances it may be possible to infer from this the identity of the person making the request. Note also that the data recorded may be that of a web proxy rather than that of the originating client ).
  2. The date and time of connection
  3. The HTTP request, which contains the identification of the document requested
  4. The status code of the request (success or failure etc.)
  5. The number of data bytes sent in response
  6. The contents of the HTTP Referrer header supplied by the browser
  7. The content of the HTTP User-Agent header supplied by the browser


Logging of additional data may be enabled temporarily from time to time for specific purposes. In addition, the computers on which the web site is hosted keep records of attempts (authorised and unauthorised) to use them for purposes other than access to the cache. This data typically includes the date and time of the attempt, the service to which access was attempted, the name or network address of the computer making the connection, and may include details of what was done or was attempted to be done.

We collect this information automatically using Microsoft IIS5 (the server software). The information is collected involuntarily.
We use cookies only where necessary to ensure the satisfactory operation of a questionnaire or experiment: an explicit statement will be included in the instructions of any experiment or questionnaire using cookies. A cookie is a small text file that our Web server places on a user’s computer hard drive to be a unique identifier. Cookies enable The School of Psychology to track previous responses to, or completion of, questionnaires and deliver customized content to users. Our cookies do not have an expiration date. Our cookies do not collect personally identifiable information.
No banner advertising appears on our Web site and no third parties are authorized to advertise on, use or collect data from our web site.

Part II. Information Usage.
The information collected by The School of Psychology will be used for academic research only. Users who provide information will receive email announcements only where necessary for the completion of an experiment and will be explicitly informed of this before undertaking any questionnaire or research project.

The information we collect will not be used to create customer profiles based on browsing or purchasing history. We will not supplement information collected at our Web site with data from other sources such as credit history to authorize purchases.
We do not share data with, or make data available to, any third party.
We may offer links to other Web sites. Please note: When you click on links to other Web sites, we encourage you to read their privacy policies. Their standards may differ from ours.
If our policy on information collection or uses changes, will advise you by posting a link to the modified privacy policy in the Online Research section of the site.

Part III. Access to Information
Users may access their own personal information by contacting the researcher running the experiment(s) in which they have participated. Any inaccuracies found should be reported to the researcher. Users may delete their information from our database(s) by contacting the researcher running the experiment(s) they have participated in and requesting that their data be removed.

Part IV. Problem Resolution
If problems arise, users may contact The School of Psychology by email [cmcooper@plymouth.ac.uk] or the researcher running an individual experiment using the email supplied on the instructions page. We are committed to resolving disputes as soon as is reasonably possible.

Part V. Data Storage and Security
The School of Psychology protects user information with SSL encryption (for sensitive data) during collection and all databases are held behind a firewall. The server operating system and all associated software are regularly updated all critical and security updates applied.
If you have any further questions about privacy or security, please contact us by sending an email to: [cmcooper@plymouth.ac.uk]