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Privacy Policy

Privacy policy

Privacy and Cookies


Historic Scotland recognises the importance of protecting the privacy of the users of this website. Any personal data collected through this website will be treated as confidential in line with the principles of the Data Protection Act 1998.

Under the Data Protection Act, we have a legal duty to protect any information we collect from you. We use leading technologies and encryption software to safeguard your data, and keep strict security standards to prevent any unauthorised access to it.

We collect two kinds of information from visitors: feedback (through you emailing us), and site usage information, using cookies and page tagging techniques.

Cookies and Website Traffic Analysis


When users visit Historic Scotland websites, their computers will automatically be issued with 'cookies'. Cookies are text files which identify users' computers to Historic Scotland’s server. The website then creates "session" cookies to store some of the preferences of users moving around the website, e.g. retaining a text-only preference.

Cookies in themselves do not identify individual users but identify only the computer used and they are deleted on departure from the website. A cookie can not read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites.

Cookies enhance our website performance in a number of ways including providing a secure way for us to measure use of the website including number of visitors, how frequently pages are viewed, and the city and country of origin of users. This helps to determine what is popular and can influence future content and development.

Users have the opportunity to set their computers to accept all cookies, to notify them when a cookie is issued, or not to receive cookies at any time. The last of these means that certain personalised services cannot then be provided to that user.

For this purpose, the Historic Scotland uses a web traffic analysis package to measure and analyse usage of the website. The information collected by Historic Scotland will include IP Address, pages visited, browser type and operating system.