The Department fully respects your right to privacy, and will not collect any personal information about you on this website without your clear permission. Any personal information which you volunteer to this Department will be treated with the highest standards of security and confidentiality, strictly in accordance with the Data Protection Acts 1988-2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679 is a regulation on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union. It came into force across the European Union on 25 May 2018. It replaces the previous data protection directive which has been in force since 1995 and forms the basis of our new Data Protection Irish laws (Data Protection Acts 1988-2018).
Collection and use of personal information
The Department does not collect any personal data about you on this website, apart from information which you volunteer (for example by e-mailing us or by using our online Contact Us form). Any personal information which you provide in this way is not made available to any third parties, save as required by law, and is used by this Department only in line with the purpose for which you provided it. You should also note that any personal information which you provide to us by way of completing an application form or provide in another format for any of the services we administer will only be used by us for the purpose(s) for which you provided it.
Sharing personal information
The Department does not routinely share your personal information. In limited cases, save as required by law, we may be required to share your personal data in order to verify or validate certain information in order to administer a service to you or on your behalf. In these instances, we will inform you about our data sharing processes.
Collection and use of technical information
Technical details in connection with visits to this website are logged by our internet service provider for our statistical purposes. No information is collected that could be used by us to identify website visitors. The technical details logged are confined to the following items:
- the IP address of the visitor’s web server
- the top-level domain name used (for example .ie, .com, .org, .net)
- clickstream data which shows the traffic of visitors around this web site (for example pages accessed and documents downloaded)
- the type of web browser used by the website visitor
- the version of the operating system used by the visitor.
The Department will make no attempt to identify individual visitors, or to associate the technical details listed above with any individual. It is the policy of the Department never to disclose such technical information in respect of individual website visitors to any third party (apart from our internet service provider, which records such data on our behalf and which is bound by confidentiality provisions in this regard), unless obliged to disclose such information by a rule of law. The technical information will be used only by this Department, and only for statistical and other administrative purposes. You should note that technical details, which we cannot associate with any identifiable individual, do not constitute "personal data" for the purposes of the Data Protection Acts 1988-2018.
Cookies
Cookies are small text files which are downloaded to your computer or mobile device when you visit a website or application. Your web browser (such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome) then sends these cookies back to the website or application on each subsequent visit so that they can recognise you and remember things like user preferences.
Cookies can record your preferences when visiting a particular site and can help identify user trends for statistical analysis of our site. This can enable us, over time, to provide a better experience on our site by improving content, modifying navigation and generally making our site more user friendly. Without cookies, a web server has no memory of anything about a user's previous visits. It is important to note that accepting cookies used on our site does not give us access to any personal information. Most browsers automatically accept cookies by default, but you can usually refuse cookies or selectively accept cookies by adjusting the preferences in your browser.
You can control the cookies placed and retained on your device - Manage cookies
Managing cookies in your browser
Most browsers will allow you to see what cookies you've got and delete them on an individual basis, block third party cookies, block cookies from particular sites, block all cookies from being set and delete all cookies when you close your browser. To find out how to block cookies, see the ‘Help’ menu on your browser. Please note that if you turn off cookies or change your settings, some features may not work correctly. You should be aware that any preferences will be lost if you delete cookies.
Usage of Matomo for website analytics
When you visit our site, we will store: the website from which you visited us from, the parts of our site you visit, the date and duration of your visit, your anonymised IP address, information from the device (device type, operating system, screen resolution, language, country you are located in, and web browser type) you used during your visit, and more. We process this usage data in Matomo Analytics for statistical purposes, to improve our site and to recognize and stop any misuse.
Changes to our Privacy statement
If in the future we make any changes to our privacy statement, the latest version of our statement will be posted on our website. If you would like further information about this privacy statement, please contact us at: dataprotection@enterprise.gov.ie.