Copyright & Privacy Notice

Our website is hosted by FinalSite, which uses tools such as Google Analytics to detect your device type so as to deliver the appropriate format pages, and to analyse trends in how our website is used by visitors. Information automatically monitored includes IP addresses, the type of device, platform, and browser used, your ISP, date/time stamps, and potentially your geographic location as indicated by your internet-enabled device. As part of SEO (Search Engine optimisation), referral and exit references may be recorded, including any search engine keywords that were used to link to our site. 

This information is reported anonymously and cannot be directly linked to individual users. We may use it to identify popular and little-used areas of our site to understand which of our webpages are used the most and least often. We may use this data to analyse broad trends in our visitors and their use of our website and then use that information to make decisions about how to make it easier for people to find the information they want on our website.

Our website may use “cookies”, small text files that are stored on your device. Cookies are pushed (sent) by a web page server, and help personalise your website use. For example, tracking cookies allow the web server to record which pages you have visited, and change the format of the linking text accordingly so that you can see which pages you have already visited by the changed appearance of linked text. Tracking cookies cannot be used to run programs or deliver viruses to your device. Cookies are uniquely assigned to your device, and can only be read by a web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you.

You can read the EU's GDPR group's overview of cookies here (external site).

In GDPR terminology, ELA Basel's site uses session cookies, persistent cookies, preference cookies, and statistics cookies: they may be both first-party and third-party, which is at the discretion of our website hosting company, FinalSite.

If you do not want analytical tracking during your use of our site you can

• disable cookies in your browser; or
• set your computer security (anti-virus) software to reject cookies; or
• disable Javascript in your browser; or
• use an opt-out browser add-on; or
• use a browser, for non-endorsed example Ghostery or DuckDuckGo, that is marketed as a browser that blocks tracking.

Disabling or rejecting cookies or disabling javascript will mean that some features or functionality may stop working.

Turning off the GPS location function on your device will only prevent applications from acquiring an accurate fix on your location whilst it is turned off. Further, applications can use IP tracking (by linking your current internet node or mobile data tower to a geographic location) to obtain an approximate location.

To prevent this, set your operating system (typically Windows, MacOS, Android, or iOS) to block apps from using your location. Since a number of applications (such as navigational and map applications including fitness trackers) require GPS to operate, you should use your operating system's application-specific blocking of location tracking. Conventionally this is done by requiring all apps to request permission to use location data, and then granting permission on an ad-hoc basis.

Alternatively, use a VPN service to mask your location.

Some operating systems, browsers, and apps have a Do Not Track setting that sends a DNT signal with browsing data. All such DNT settings, as well as location blocking requests, operate on good faith: it assumes applications honour your request not to track your use or location. Apple Computer and Twitter, amongst others, removed the setting from their software in 2020 after research indicated over 75% of sites did not honour DNT requests.

Using a private browsing mode (often referred to as "incognito") is not a DNT request: it simply makes no permanent record of your online activity on your local device (thus it will not appear on your history). It has no effect on your online presence, and does not block tracking of any kind.

All GDPR-compliant web sites offer an opt-in request to accept cookies; typically users can grant permission by type of cookie. Although legally bound to honour the users' request, there is currently no effective method by which a user can actually monitor or enforce their cookie tracking requests.

Our website contains links to sites run by organisations other than ELA Basel which we believe may be of interest or use to visitors. It is our practice to identify all such links as being to an "external site". ELA Basel is not responsible for the content. tracking, or privacy practices of such external sites. 

Our use of student and parent data as a school is subject to a different privacy policy that is available on our parent portal (password protected).