Cookies and Web Chat Policy
We use cookies and a web chat service in order to provide a better website experience and to enable us to improve our website.
Cookies
A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we may store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer or device. They cannot be used to identify you personally. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users of the Site. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse the Site and also allows us to improve the Site.
Can the cookies we use be considered personal data?
According to GDPR, Cookies can be considered Personal Data:
“Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags. This may leave traces which, in particular when combined with unique identifiers and other information received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of the natural persons and identify them.” (Page 30 of the GDPR Regulation)
When you use our website we place cookies on your machine or device. These are not used, in conjunction with other information, to profile nor identify you.
Why and where do we use Cookies?
We use proprietary cookies in order to provide a better website, to enable us to monitor which pages our users find useful and which they do not. We use the following:
- Accessibility cookies, which allow us to store your accessibility settings, such as font colour, background colour, line size and text size etc.
- Recent opportunities cookies, which allow us to store which volunteer opportunities you’ve recently viewed
- Session state cookies, which allow us to store pages you’ve already interacted with e.g. surveys already completed
We use third party cookies as follows
- Social cookies from AddThis. To provide a better social web experience AddThis may create cookies with social login details.
- Google Analytics Cookies.
Google Analytics cookies
The information from Google’s cookies will be used by Google in accordance with Google’s privacy policy. For more information on the cookies set by Google Analytics please refer to the Google Analytics website. Volunteer Scotland use Global Site Tag gtag.js. This script places the following cookies:
| Cookie Name | Description | Expiration Time |
| _ga | Used to distinguish users. | 2 years |
| _gid | Used to distinguish users. | 24 hours |
| _gat | Used to throttle request rate. If Google Analytics is deployed via Google Tag Manager, this cookie will be named _dc_gtm_<property-id> | 1 minute |
| AMP_TOKEN | Contains a token that can be used to retrieve a Client ID from AMP Client ID service. Other possible values indicate opt-out, inflight request or an error retrieving a Client ID from AMP Client ID service. | 30 seconds to 1 year |
| _gac_<property-id> | Contains campaign related information for the user. If you have linked your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, AdWords website conversion tags will read this cookie unless you opt-out. | 90 days |
Log Files
Like most standard Web site servers we use log files. This includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and number of clicks to analyse trends, administer the site, track user’s movement in the aggregate, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses, etc. are not linked to personally identifiable information.
Controlling your cookie preferences
We currently provide a notice informing you of our use of cookies and seeking your implied consent.
You can choose to accept or decline specific cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to block or decline cookies if you prefer. This may prevent you from taking full advantage of the website.
If you want to opt-out from Google tracking you can opt out of Google Analytics for Display Advertising and customise Google Display Network ads. Using Google’s browser plugin you can opt out of Google Analytics.
Web Chat Service
This website uses Userlike, live chat software provided by Userlike UG. You can use Userlike to chat with our Disclosure Services staff in real-time on the main Contact Disclosure Services page. At the start of the chat, the following personal data is collected:
- Date and time of the chat
- Browser type/version
- IP address
- Operating system used
- URL of the previously visited website
- Amount of data sent
- If provided by you: first name, surname, e-mail address
Depending on the course of your conversation with Disclosure Services, further personal data may be provided by you in the chat. The nature of this information depends on your enquiry.
By accessing the Contact Disclosure Services web page, the chat widget is loaded as a JavaScript file from AWS Cloudfront. The chat widget technically represents the source code executed on your computer that enables the chat.
In addition, our Disclosure Services team stores the history of live chats. The purpose of this is to save our customers from having to go through a long history of requests, and for us to constantly monitor the quality of our live chat service. The storage of chat data also serves the purpose of ensuring the security of our information technology systems. If you do not wish your live chat history to be stored, please do not hesitate to contact our Disclosure Services team at disclosures@volunteerscotland.org.uk
Further information about the web chat service can be found in the Data Processing terms of Userlike.
Contact us
For any questions or additional information on our cookie and web chat policy please contact us at hello@volunteerscotland.org.uk