Privacy and cookies

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.
• Measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure you get a fast service from the website.

You can manage these small files yourself and learn more about them here: Internet browser cookies – what they are and how to manage them

Our use of cookies

Website usage analysis

We use Google Analytics to help us accurately estimate the number of visitors to the website and volumes of usage to help us monitor visitor preferences and continually make improvements to our service. View the Google Privacy Policy to find out how to reject or delete these cookies. If you wish to stop Google Analytics from collecting this data on websites you visit add their Google Analytics Opt Out Tool to your browser. The cookies used for usage analysis are:

Name: _utma
Purpose: Identifying Unique Visitors for Google Analytics
Typical content: Randomly generated number
Expiration: Two years

Name: _utmb and _utmc
Purpose: Determining Visitor Session for Google Analytics
Typical content: Randomly generated number
Expiration: When user exits browser (_utmb) and 30 minutes (_utmc)

Name: _utmz
Purpose: Tracking Traffic Sources & Navigation for Google Analytics
Typical content: Randomly generated number, plus information on how the user found the site (eg direct link or search engine)
Expiration: 6 months

We also use cookies to ensure that you get a good service when you use our website, and do not need to re-enter search terms when looking for something on the site. These are:

Name: X-Mapping-xxxxx
Purpose: We use several different servers to make sure that visitors to our site get a fast service. This cookie tracks site visitors to make sure that they are connected to the same server throughout their visit to the site so that their service is not interrupted.
Typical content: Which server should serve content to user

Name: ci_session
Purpose: To remember your selections or preferences that you’ve already made when looking at information or using a service.
Typical content: Search queries, Form validation messages

Privacy Policy

• The National Lottery Commission is committed to protecting the privacy of visitors to this site (“the Site”). We are registered as a Data Controller under the Data Protection Act 1998 and we have security measures in place to prevent any unauthorised access to the personal data we hold.
• This privacy policy applies to all information collected by us or submitted by you via the Site. We reserve the right to update this privacy policy from time to time without prior notice to you. If we make any changes to this policy we will post the changes on this page of the Site.
• When submitting requests to us for information and/or registering your support we will need to know your name, organisation and email address.
• We will use the personal information you provide to us to provide the news up date service to you and to update our internal mailing lists.
• Your personal information may be shared with third parties for the purposes of processing that personal information.
• By submitting personal information to us, you consent to the terms of this privacy policy and our use of your personal information as set out herein.
• We reserve the right to record the personal information you supply to us both manually and/or on a computer database, in compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998.
• We may track the total number of visitors to the Site in aggregate form and we may pass these aggregate figures to third parties, but this information will not contain any personal data by which you could be identified.
• A computer ‘cookie’ is a small piece of information that is stored by your browser on your computer’s hard drive. We use cookies to keep track of your visits to the Site]. Most web browsers will usually allow you to change the setting of your browser not to accept cookies and although this may affect the quality of your visit to the Site you can still use most of the features on the Site.
• You can access all the personal information that you provide to us and request details of any third parties with whom we have shared your personal information by contacting us at info@natlotcomm.gov.uk. You can correct factual errors in your personal information or request that we remove personal information about you from our records by sending us a request detailing the error or your instructions to remove information from our records. To protect your privacy and security, we may take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting access to your information or making the requested alterations.
• The Site contains links to third party websites and it is possible that third party websites may also link to the Site. We do not accept responsibility for the privacy policies practised by third party websites and we accept no liability if, by using a link from the Site to a third party website you reveal information (whether intentionally or not) about yourself to that third party site. We accept no liability for any use made by that third party website of any information which you provide to it, whether you provide such information intentionally or not.