Privacy
This privacy statement aims to help you understand how the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office uses personal information collected via this website.
Information that you supply will be treated in confidence, and in accordance with the principles of the Data Protection Act and General Data Protection Regulation. See our Personal Information Charter.
You do not have to provide any personal information in order to browse this website.
When you use our website, we may collect tracking information such as your browser type, the type of operating system you use, the name of your internet service provider and pages visited on the site.
We obtain this information by using technologies, including cookies, to increase the functionality and user-friendliness of our website and to better tailor our website to your needs. For example, we may want to know how long the average visitor spends on our website or which pages get the most attention. Information such as this will only be used in aggregate form and does not identify you personally.
We collect information on our website visitors for a variety of purposes, including to reply to your enquiries more efficiently through the services we provide. We also use information in aggregate form (your individual details cannot be identified) to audit usage of the site.
We are committed to keeping your information as secure as possible. We also use additional methods to secure sensitive information about your activities with us. Employees of the suppliers who manage this website on our behalf have to follow a strict confidentiality procedure and privacy standards.
Use of cookies
When you visit our website, we may store some information on your computer. This information will be in the form of a ‘cookie’ or similar file and can help us in many ways. For example, cookies allow us to tailor a website to better match your interests and preferences. With most internet browsers you can erase cookies from your computer hard drive, block all cookies or receive a warning before a cookie is stored.
The web statistics package we use on our site, Google Analytics, sets cookies to help us accurately estimate the number of visitors to the website and volumes of usage. This is to ensure that the service is available when you want it and fast. The following cookies are set by Google Analytics:
| Cookie Name | Expiration period | Description |
|---|---|---|
| _ga | 2 years | Used to distinguish users. |
| _gid | 24 hours | Used to distinguish users. |
| _gat | 1 minute | Used to throttle request rate. If Google Analytics is deployed via Google Tag Manager, this cookie will be named _dc_gtm_. |
| AMP_TOKEN | 30 seconds to 1 year | 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. |
| _gac_ | 90 days | 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. |
| cookie_notice_accepted | 30 days | Saves the fact you’ve chosen to hide our cookie banner |
For further details on the cookies set by Google Analytics, please refer to the Google Analytics documentation.
Further information on how to prevent cookies from being stored on your computer can be found on All about cookies website under the ‘manage cookies’ section.
Links
This website contains links to other websites that are not controlled by us, including social media channels on which we have profiles. This privacy and cookies statement applies only to this site.