This email complaint was triggered by discovering that our local Council had apparently signed-up with googleapis.com and google-analytics.com, thereby transferring information such as IP addresses, etc. to the United States.
Anybody here that knows more about the legal situation? No guesswork, just plain fact and if available, any weblinks relating to this.
Quote:
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I visited your website today for the first time in a couple of month or so, only to find that it appears to be in breach of its own Privacy Statement.
The following section is a copy of said statement:
Quote:
Privacy Statement
This website does not store any personal information about individuals who access this website, except where they voluntarily choose to give us their personal details.
We do not pass your personal information to outside organisations and/or individuals except with your express consent.
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The second sentence and the apparently recently introduced use of google application interfaces (API's loaded from googlespis.com) would seem to contradict that statement and therefore constitute such a breach of privacy.
Simply by loading scripts from their website googleapis.com, plus the use of the google-analytics.com site, suggest this breach. As soon as you load the page, both websites are called upon, thereby divulging my IP address, log-on node, etc. Whether or not any loaded scripts are made memory resident, ie. be available for googles use even after a page that no longer accesses such scripts, would have access to their functions I did not investigate but again, this gives additional rise for serious concern and the use of google-analytics.com would suggest just that.
Would it not be against UK privacy laws in general, providing an external, commercial website, located in the USA, where internet privacy is known to be, how shall we say, less of a concern, with such as I regard it personal information?
Why does the Council and its website developers deem it apropriate to provide said commercial corporation with such details about its users? I do appreciate that in these 'times of austerity' brought on by the banking crisis needs to save money, yet compromising its users privacy must surely be out of the question.
This is a worrying trend all across the internet, hardly any webpages fully load unless you give express permission to some dubious provider of supposedly 'free' software, even the BBC fell victim to this, though appears to have turned back from this approach in its latest beta version, probably after more or less massive complaints from the public or their own legal department discovering that this actually does contradict UK legislation.
Please be so kind and treat the issue raised above as a formal complaint about the uses of foreign websites while accessing a UK Council internet presence.
I reserve the right of filing a Freedom of Information request to divulge a full list of the data submitted to the USA.
I am looking forward to your reply most eagerly.
With best regards
Hoverfly (obviously changed)
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If you live in Britain, maybe it's time to pay a visit to your local councils website and see what they may have been up to.
We do need to fight back, not just sit back.