For clarity we have separated our privacy statements to reflect what how Metropolitan Police Friendly Society handles your data for the website for our (A) general website and (B) for online applications/quotes. We also provide a telephone recording statement.
Metropolitan Police Friendly Society, does not identify and track users of this site and the pages they access. We do, however have ways of tracking non identifiable users:
Firstly we use a third party website statistics provider, Google Analytics, which uses JavaScript together with cookies to establish general site usage statistics (for example the most visited page, trends in browsing activity, returning visitor numbers etc.). The statistics are grouped to display usage statistics per geographical location (to the granularity of a single town) rather than per IP Address or individual machine.
Google use cookies together with information held in each website request to perform its website statistics. Google keep a permanent record of, when and, which web pages (e.g. our home page) are being accessed by which browser (e.g. Internet Explorer) and from which IP (Internet Protocol) address. Google will only use this information for their Google Analytics purposes - they will not associate your IP address with any other information they hold through their other services. Google may pass this information onto third parties for processing on their behalf or where required to do so by law.
To prevent MPFS and Google from using your traffic for analytic purposes you can either disable JavaScript (from www.google-analytics.com) or disable cookies. For information of how to disable JavaScript please contact the IT department at MPFS on 01689 891454 or to disable or delete cookies see information on the About Cookies website for detailed instructions. Alternatively Google give you a way to opt out of Google Analytics on every website you visit.
The other way we have the potential to track browsing activity is via our web server access logs stored at our website hosting company. However we do not archive these statistics or use them for analytic purposes.
When a website user browses a website each page is requested and displayed as the result of a conversation between the web browser (your computer) and the web server (our computer).
Each different time the browser asks the web-server for a web page the web-server responds as if it is a new conversation. Without the use of cookies (or some other form of identification) the web-server cannot work out which website user it is talking to each time it responds to a request for a web page.
This means that when the web-server needs to remember something about the website user (for example during an online application) it must use some form of user tracking. We have opted to use cookies and sessions to identify users during the application/quote process. The cookies hold a unique code to identify who is using the application form pages. This means that more than one person can use the application system at the same time and the server will not get confused who it is talking to. We only hold the session cookie details for the duration of the application and the cookie is only used for the application/quote process.
We ensure that the data you send to us during the online application process is encrypted in transit (except where it is made from the Met Police Aware Intranet where encryption is not allowed) and stored safely on our servers (which are completely separate from the website). During an application/quote you may have answered a data protection question. We will ensure that we treat your personal data in lines with your response to the data protection question.
Metropolitan Police Friendly Society records incoming and outgoing telephone calls for staff training and internal use. We will not share this recording or any part of this recording with third parties, except where legally required to do so.
