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Privacy Policy and Cookies

Kent County Council (KCC) complies with the Data Protection Act 1998 and is registered as a ‘Data Controller’ (Reg. No. Z5297748). KCC endeavours to keep your personal information accurate and up to date and ensures that it is not kept longer than necessary.

How we use your personal information

KCC collects and uses your personal information to provide you with statutory and other services. Your personal information may be shared with internal departments or with external partners and agencies involved in delivering services on our behalf.

Statutory services such as education and social care, protection of vulnerable children and adults, and the support of public health and wellbeing, may involve collecting, using and sharing Sensitive Personal Data as defined by the Data Protection Act 1998. KCC does not disclose or share sensitive or confidential information without your explicit consent except in a small number of situations where disclosure is required by law, or where we have good reason to believe that failing to do so would put you or someone else at risk.

You may decide you do not wish your personal information to be collected or shared, or may set conditions on our use of it. In such cases we may not be able to provide with the service you require, or may only be able to provide it in a limited way. There are occasions where we have a statutory obligation to collect or use personal information.KCC may use ethnic, gender, sexual orientation and age information (i.e. equalities data) to compile statistics in order to comply with equality legislation and assist in planning and service provision. Such data does not identify individuals or affect your entitlement to services.

KCC must protect public funds and may use personal information and data-matching techniques to detect and prevent fraud, and ensure public money is targeted and spent in the most appropriate and cost-effective way. In order to achieve this, information may be shared with other bodies responsible for auditing or administering public funds including the Audit Commission, the Department for Work and Pensions, other local authorities, HM Revenue and Customs, and the Police.KCC reserves the right to monitor and record electronic communications (website, email and telephone conversations). There are a number of reasons why we may do this; staff training, records of conversations or detection, investigation and prevention of crime. KCC will inform you if your call is being recorded or monitored.

KCC may use personal information to identify individuals who need additional support during emergencies or major incidents e.g. emergency evacuation.

Third parties

KCC does not pass personal data to third parties for marketing, sales or any other commercial purposes without your prior explicit consent. Your personal information may be processed by an external service provider acting on our behalf in order to provide one or more services. We may process your personal information using web services hosted outside the European Economic Area, but only where a data processing agreement is in place that complies with obligations equivalent to those of the Data Protection Act.

Email

Emails that we send to you or you send to us may be retained as a record of contact and your email address stored for future use in accordance with our record retention schedule. If KCC needs to email sensitive or confidential information to you, we will perform checks to verify the correct email address and may take additional security measures. If sending us such information we recommend using our secure online forms where provided, or the postal service.

Website

The KCC website does not store or capture personal information of users with general public access, but does log the IP address of a visitor. KCC does not use cookies for the general running of the www.kent.gov.uk website, but does use them to enable requested services (e.g. payments) and to remember choices during the visit. Anonymous information about page visits is collected using Google Analytics.

Using our website confirms your acceptance of our cookies.

Where our website links to external resources or websites, these may add their own cookies. These are outside our control. Cookies can be disabled by changing the settings on your computer browser, but you may need to re-enter information at times.

Your rights

You have the following rights:

  • You may request that KCC stops processing your personal data in relation to any council service. (This may delay or prevent us delivering a service to you. We will seek to comply with your request but may be required to hold or process information to comply with our legal duties).
  • You are entitled to request access to and a copy of any information we hold about you. If you find that the information KCC holds about you is no longer accurate, you have the right to ask to have this corrected.
  • You have the right to see CCTV images of yourself and be provided with a copy.

Please contact the Information Resilience and Transparency Team at data.protection@kent.gov.uk to exercise any of these rights, or if you have a complaint about why your information has been collected, how it has been used or how long we have kept it for.

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