Mortgage Help - Privacy policy

Communities and Local Government is strongly committed to protecting the privacy of users of its interactive products and services as well as to respecting the Data Protection Acts 1984 and 1998.

This campaign site (Directgov Mortgage Help, under the domain mortgagehelp.direct.gov.uk) and data collected from it is the responsibility of the Department of Communities and Local Government (CLG). The CLG is referred to as 'we' throughout the rest of this page.

Site usage information

Sessions
Sessions are pieces of data that are often created when you visit a website, and which are stored on the web server. Sessions are created when you visit Mortgage Help and are deleted the moment you close your web browser. Our sessions store a random number on our server so that your bespoke action plan can be saved and accessed from anywhere in the website. When you close your web browser the session and your bespoke action plan are immediately deleted and not saved anywhere at all.

The sessions do not contain any personal information about you, and they cannot be used to identify an individual user.

Page tagging
We use JavaScript to aggregate and analyse customer usage patterns on all websites that are part of the Mortgage Help domain. This provides us with data on usability and behaviour. We use this information to make changes to the layout of the website and to the information in it. This does not collect any personal or identifiable information about users.

We sometimes tag pages on this website during promotion campaigns using pixel tags (which are sometimes called spotlight tags or web beacons). These tags enable us to find out which advertisements are successful in bringing users to our internet site(s). With this technology, the information that we collect and share is anonymous and not personally identifiable.

What happens when I link to another site?
Mortgage Help contains links to other websites, both of government departments and of other organisations. This privacy policy applies only to our site, so you should always be aware when you are moving to another site and read the privacy statement of any other site(s) which collect personal information about you.

We do not pass on any personal information you have given us to any other site.

What happen when I access the Mortgage Help site through another site?
Where you are directed to the Mortgage Help site from another site (whether a third party site or a government site) we may receive personal information relating to you from the other site(s). You should read the privacy policies applicable to such sites as these will govern the use of any personal information that you provide when accessing such sites and which is provided to Mortgage Help.

Changes to this privacy policy

If this privacy policy changes in any way, we will place an updated version on this page. Regularly reviewing this page ensures you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances, if any, we will share it with other parties.