The Scottish Government seeks to ensure that the information published on its website is up to date and accurate. However, the information on the website does not constitute legal or professional advice and the Scottish Government cannot accept any liability for actions arising from its use. The Scottish Government cannot be held responsible for the contents of any pages referenced by an external link.

Any personal data collected through this website will be treated as confidential in line with the Data Protection Regulations (DPR) and Data Protection Act 2018.

Collection and use of personal information

The Scottish Government is the sole owner of the information collected on its websites. The Scottish Government processes personal data for the purposes of aiding its work with the Scottish Ministers to improve the well-being of Scotland and its people.

Registration

A user does not have to register to use the Procurement Journey website, but a user must register if they wish to receive route content updates via email.

The registration information we require to allow a user to register is the full name and email address of the user if they wish to receive email updates.

This information is stored securely on our database until such time as a user chooses to unsubscribe from receiving route content updates. 

Sharing

• Legal Disclaimer
  Though we make every effort to preserve user privacy, we may need to disclose personal information when required by law wherein we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a current judicial proceeding, a court order or legal process served on our website.
• Third Party Intermediaries
  We use an outside contractor to manage our user database. This company does not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes.
• Service Providers
  We partner with other third parties to provide specific services. For example database development and hosting. When the user signs up for these particular services, we share names, or other contact information including mobile number and full contact information with the third party service providers so that the third party can supply these services. These third parties are not allowed to use personally identifiable information except for the purpose of providing these services.

Users of our site are always notified when their information is being collected by any outside parties. We do this so our users can make an informed choice as to whether or not they should proceed with services that require an outside party.

Surveys

From time-to-time our site requests information from users via surveys or contests. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary and the user therefore has a choice whether or not to disclose this information. The requested information typically includes contact information (such as name and address), and demographic information (such as postal code). Contact information will not be shared with any third parties unless we give prior notice and choice. Though we may use an intermediary to conduct these surveys or contests, they may not use users' personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes.

Correcting/Updating/Deleting/Deactivating personal information

If a user's personally identifiable information changes (such as postal code, phone, email or postal address), we provide a way to correct, update or delete/deactivate users' personally identifiable information. This can be done by contacting us by email or phone.

Accessibility Information

This web site has been designed to comply with the international web accessibility standards issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as part of their Web Accessibility Initiative.

All reasonable efforts have been made to ensure that top level and main content pages are compliant to a minimum of AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 standards.

Cookies and website traffic

When users enter the Scottish Government website their computers will automatically be issued with 'cookies'. Cookies are text files which identify users' computers to the Scottish Government'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. Scottish Government session cookies are deleted on departure from the website. However, those from third parties may persist.

Many websites use cookies to track traffic flows, whenever users visit those websites.

The Scottish Government website uses cookies 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. For this purpose, the Government uses web analytics to measure and analyse usage of the website. The information collected by the Scottish Government will include IP Address, pages visited, browser type and operating system. The data will not be used to identify any user personally.

Most modern web browsers allow users to control cookies through the browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.

Session cookies
If logged in, Session Cookies are stored only temporarily during a browsing session and are deleted from the user’s device when the browser is closed.

Google Analytics

These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our site, which we use to help improve it. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited.

__utma Keeps track of the number of times a visitor has been to the site pertaining to the cookie, when their first visit was, and when their last visit occurred.
__utmb Records moment in time when a visitor enters a site and expires at the end of the session.
__utmc Records moment in time when a visitor leaves a site and expires after 30 minutes.
__utmz Keeps track of where the visitor came from, what search engine was used, what link was clicked on and what keyword was used.

Information on how to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites and Google use of cookies:

Google Analytics Opt-out

Google privacy pages

Log files stored on the Government's web server allow the recording and analysis of users' use of the website. Log files do not contain any personal information.

Social media accounts

Scottish Government social media accounts are managed by communications teams and policy teams.

What we post

Posts and Tweets will be about:

• Key policy developments
• Key publications and consultations
• News releases
• Video, audio and imagery
• Ministerial events
• Sector developments

If you follow a Scottish Government social media account, you can expect regular posts and tweets providing alerts about content on our other digital channels (news, publications, videos, ministerial speeches, etc).

Following

If you follow us we will not automatically follow you back. Being followed or re-posted by a Scottish Government social media account does not imply endorsement of any kind.

Availability

We will update and monitor our social media accounts during office hours, Monday to Friday.

Social media accounts may occasionally be unavailable and we accept no responsibility for lack of service due to platform downtime.

Direct messages and replies

We will read all direct messages and ensure that any emerging themes or helpful suggestions are passed to the relevant people in the Scottish Government. We will also keep an eye on replies and respond if appropriate.

Also see

• Scottish Government Social Media Policy
• Acceptable behaviour
• General enquiry contacts

Links

This Website contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we, the Scottish Government, are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every Website that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this Website.

Notification of changes

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, and other places we deem appropriate so our users are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.

If, however, we are going to use users' personally identifiable information in a manner different from that stated at the time of collection we will notify users via email or by posting a notice on our Web site for 30 days.