In order to operate, the Department must keep records on student progress. These records are generally kept by the Supervisors of the courses and are considered confidential. Access is restricted to academic staff who are associated with the course and any staff member needing to see your record to evaluate your overall academic performance. Support staff may have access when assisting the academic staff as may temporary employees such as student markers. This data is usually kept until the next years enrolment is completed. An overall course mark is, of course, part of your permanent academic record, kept by Registry.

The Department also keeps a database, "The Booking System", which is used to control access to the Laboratories machines, provide printing and network accounting services, to generate student logins for the Macintosh fileservers and UNIX systems, to generate Class Lists for the course supervisors course marks databases, to provide contact details when needed and to generate statistics which may help us provide a better service.

To this end we store the following details in this database.

• Login name.
• Full Name.
• Student ID.
• Sex. (For Statistical Purposes)
• Booking Details.
• Pages printed to date and Pages allocated by the Department or purchased by you.
• Internet account balance.
• The name of your Degree and the Papers you are enrolled in.
• Contact address and phone numbers.
• Internal status information for machine and service access control.

Staff details are also recorded in this Database, with the course details usually blank, and with the addition of their room and extension number.

The data stored in this database is considered confidential and access is restricted to staff who need access for maintenance of the database and those needing the data to carry out their jobs.

Most of the previous year's data is purged at the start of each year. The Student ID, Name and Login name being kept for one more year, so as to maintain the same Login name in case you re-enroll. The Balance of any printer quota and internet access fees you may have purchased, will be carried forward. Printer quota and internet access fees derived from the previous years course fees, will not be carried forward. If you do not enroll in Computer Science, Mathematics or Statistics, these balances will be deleted at the start of the following year.

Students may request a copy of any information held on them by the Department and request any inaccuracies be corrected. It should be noted though, that disputes over recorded marks should be directed to the Lecturer concerned and will only be altered if he/she is satisfied that an error has been made.

Some corrections to the "The Booking System" Database will have to be made through Registry. Your Name, Student ID, Sex, Degree, Courses enrolled for and Contact details are all derived from the Registry Student Records database and can only be permanently altered in our database if the Registry database is corrected.

Disputes over printer quota or your Internet account balance should be directed to the Computing Services staff. A transaction log of all printing is kept by the printing system. This includes the name of the application and the file printed along with the time and Printer used.

It should be noted that most of our systems keep logs of user access and activity. These logs are used for both the generation of statistics and to help us with system security. By "systems" we are referring to the UNIX systems, the MacJANET fileservers, the Booking System etc. These logs are checked by the support staff and potential breaches of the Departmental or University Regulation investigated.

We do not make a habit of delving into people's directories or files. If nothing else the sheer numbers of users would prohibit this. We do, however run security checks and perform routine maintenance tasks that may direct us to someone's directory and may then examine the contents of that person's directory. Unless what is found seriously impacts on any of our services or breaches one of the Departmental or University Regulation , we will keep the information confidential. Even then, access will be limited to those who need to know.

Similarly we may decide it is necessary to closely monitor a user's activities. Again any information seen will be kept confidential. If it is found that the user was engaged in an activity that seriously impacted on one or more of our systems or was breaching one of the Departmental or University Regulation , any information obtained would be limited to those people who needed to know.

Some students have been concerned that we read all student electronic mail. We don't, and couldn't think of a more boring way to spend our time. A quick look at the number of users and the volume of mail being sent would quickly show this to be an impossible task.

Our Postmaster does receive badly addressed incoming or outgoing mail and is then required to scan the messages in order to aid delivery. Any information seen will be kept confidential unless it seriously impacts on any of our services or breaches one of the Departmental or University Regulation . Even then, access will be limited to those who need to know.