Privacy and Cookies

Defence Privacy Statement

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

  • enabling a service to recognise your device so you don't have to give the same information several times during one task
  • recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don't need to do it for every web page requested
  • measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there's enough capacity to ensure they are fast

You can manage these small files yourself and learn more about them through "Internet browser cookies - what they are and how to manage them” in www.direct.gov.uk/managingcookies.

The cookies used by this site are listed below after the glossary.

Other websites linked from this site do not necessarily follow the same policies.

The Ministry of Defence will process personal information provided by you in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998, for the purposes of processing enquiries, collection of statistical and associated data, and related matters.

Further information on your rights under the Data Protection Act 1998 can be found on the Information Commissioner's website.

Glossary

IP address

Every machine connecting to the Internet has a four-number address (e.g. 146.9.80.88), which may or may not stay constant between sessions online. Many web users connect indirectly to the Internet via an intermediary (proxy) server.

Log files

Every time our web site is accessed an entry is made in the web server's log file. This tells us broadly where an access is coming from, when it was made, which file was requested and whether the request was successful or not. It usually does not allow us to identify individual users. The data is used to assess usage levels and spot technical problems (such as broken pages or web server errors).

Web server

The machine which on which the MOD website is physically located, which delivers (serves up) web pages to your computer.

Our use of cookies

Cookies for enabling the provision of services

Name: ASP.NET_SessionId
Typical content: randomly generated alpha-numeric value
Expires: when user exits browser

A cookie that stores a unique identifier for your session. More information can be found at ASP.NET Cookies overview

Cookies for improving services

Name: __utma
Typical content: randomly generated numeric value
Expires: Two years

This cookie is used to determine unique visitors to our site.

Name: __utmb
Typical content: randomly generated numeric value
Expires: 30 minutes

This cookie is used to establish and continue a user session with this site.

Name: __utmc
Typical content: randomly generated numeric value
Expires: when user exits browser

This cookie operates in conjunction with the __utmb cookie to determine whether or not to establish a new session for the user.

Name: __utmz
Typical content: randomly generated numeric value
Expires: 6 months

This cookie stores the type of referral you use to reach this site.

Name: _sm_au_c
Typical content: randomly generated alpha-numeric value
Expires: When the user exits the browser

This cookie helps accurately estimate the number of visitors to the website and volumes of usage.