Your right to privacy
Thank you for visiting the web site of the Adoption Authority of Ireland.  We fully respect your privacy when using our website.

Collection and use of personal information
We do not collect any personal data about you on our site, apart from information which you volunteer (for example by emailing us or by using our feedback facility).  Any information that you provide in this way is not made available to any third parties. It is treated with the highest standard of security and confidentiality, strictly in accordance with the Data Protection Acts and used by us for the purpose you provided it.

Links to third parties 
Where our site contains links to the websites of third parties the Adoption Authority of Ireland is not responsible for the content, copyright or privacy policies of such sites.

Cookies
‘Cookies’ are small pieces of information placed on your computer by a website and which, typically, can be read by the website on your subsequent visits.  The information stored in a cookie may relate to your browsing habits on the web page, or contain a unique identification number so that the site can ‘remember’ you on your return visit.

Google Analytics 

The Adoption Authority respects the rights of its users and does not, as a general rule, collect personal information of any kind. Where a user voluntarily provides personal information in response to a questionnaire or survey, the data will be used for research or analysis purposes only. We use Google Analytics (GA) to track site user interaction on our websites. We have a GA code installed on our sites which creates one or more text files on your computer (called a “cookie”). The cookies contain an ID number, which is used to uniquely identify your browser and track each site you visit that has GA enabled.

We use this data to find out the number of people using our sites and to better understand how they find and use our web pages. With this information, we can continually improve the information that we provide on our sites and the processes for actions such as contacting us. We can also use it to increase the number of new people finding our sites. For more information on Google Analytics, please visit Google's website.
Google analytics stores the following data:

• Time of visit, pages visited, and time spent on each page of the webpages
• Interactions with site-specific widgets
• Referring site details (such as the URL a user came through to arrive at our sites)
• Type of web browser
• Type of operating system (OS)
• Flash version, JavaScript support, screen resolution, and screen colour processing ability
• Network location and IP address
• Document downloads
• Clicks on links leading to external websites
• Errors when users fill out forms
• Clicks on videos
• Scroll depth

 Google also collects information about you from its Doubleclick tracking and profiling service, from ad-supported apps on your Android or iOS device, from your YouTube and Gmail activity and from your Google account. This data is put together and used to make inferences about your age, gender, interests, hobbies, shopping habits and living circumstances. Google Analytics uses cookies to define user sessions, as well as to provide a number of key features in the Google Analytics reports. This means that the cookies are linked to our website domain(s), and we will only use that cookie data for statistical analysis related to your browsing behaviour on our websites.

 Your rights
If you already have GA cookies, they will be updated with the latest information about your visit to our sites.

As we cannot access any personal data about you ourselves, we are not the Data Controller for your Google Analytics or Doubleclick profile data. You would need to contact Google directly for this information.

You have the right to object to this tracking and to stop it happening. See the next section.

If you would like more information about the methods used by us, please contact us at coprorate@aai.gov.ie.

How do I prevent being tracked by Google Analytics?

If you are uncomfortable with this tracking, you can take the following actions:

– Use a tracking-blocker

– Clear cookies after every browsing session

– Install the Google Analytics opt-out extension