This section describes the DeCO2 website privacy policy in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2019/679. The DeCO2 Horizon Europe funded project (Grant agreement ID: 101147781) project is coordinated by IEECP- The Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy. IEECP as the project Coordinator, is committed to respect your privacy and protect your personal data. Your personal information will not be made available to anyone other than website owners and operators and your personal information will never be used for marketing purpose and/or shared with third parties outside the DeCO2 project. 
The following text summarises how and when we may collect, use and share information related to the visitors of the DeCO2 website, newsletter recipients, and users of the contact form. IEECP - The Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy is the controller of your personal data under relevant data privacy law and in terms of personal information processing. When using this website or subscribing to our newsletter, you consent to the collection, storage, processing and use of your information as described below.

By visiting and using our website, you give your consent to these privacy policy terms.
This policy was last updated in August 2024. Our privacy policy can be updated if need be and we will regularly inform all our subscribers of any update, also available on this webpage.

Information collection and use
The information collected on this website will mainly be used by DeCO2 for:
•   Statistics purposes (monitoring and reporting to the European Commission)
•   To keep visitors informed about DeCO2 activities (newsletter or events registrations) and
•   To improve your navigation on our website (internal monitoring to improve website structure and flow).

We may collect personal data from public sources online in the public domain, whenever your professional activity is directly linked to our working topics: for instance, to fulfil our communication and dissemination activities, we gather contact details of officials from the EU Institutions and Member States, journalists, or EU associations.

Web visitors IP address is anonymized and not kept within our analytics tools reporting, except for newsletter registrations, which are nonetheless kept strictly confidential and only accessible to the Project Coordinator and or/DPO and the Dissemination, Exploitation and & Communication Manager of the project.
We will not sell, rent, trade or lease any personal data collected online or offline. All information will be kept strictly confidential unless you give us consent to do otherwise.
We collect and temporarily store specific technical data when you visit our website for web management use or security purposes. This data includes:

• Personal information or data

• Cookies and data use

 

Personal information or data

Personal information or data is information that can, with reasons, be used to identify you or other individuals, such as: name, personal address, phone number, geolocation data, etc. directly or indirectly. The categories of data collected depend on how you use the DeCO2 website. By browsing the site, you confirm that you understand and agree to the use of your personal information/data in accordance with this Privacy Policy. If you require any clarification, please contact our data protection officers (Table 1).

The DeCO2 website collects and stores only the information submitted when you subscribe to our newsletter or complete an online form such as event registration, or survey. If we ask you to provide sensitive information (such as your name and email), it will only be used to contact or identify you, and you will be informed about it.  We collect and process data when visitors:
Register online for receiving information on new material (newsletter).
Voluntarily complete a survey or provide feedback via email or via links shared on the website.

Use or view our website via their browser’s cookies.
Register online to our events or webinars.

We use this data to provide you with information you have requested (newsletter subscription) or providing you with information relevant to your interests (event invitations and targeted communication such as EU projects-related newsletters). These are targeted, never commercial and sent only sporadically.

The specific case of surveys and interviews will ensure that you are only contacted if you agreed to by giving your explicit consent or allowing you to unsubscribe or to not be further contacted. We use industry standard practices to review data quality and confirm that your information is updated. We also keep data you voluntarily provide at events (through business cards or registration) in order to keep you informed about other similar events. This data is stored on the project dedicated repository within the MS SharePoint Workspace of IEECP owned by the Project Coordinator (IEECP) and accessed by the DEC Manager (PwC).
We provide newsletter subscribers the opportunity to opt out from our mailing list through an “unsubscribe” button available in all newsletters. They can also write at any time to the DeCO2 contact email (deco2@IEECP.ORG) or our project DPO. Registration to the said newsletter is done through a double opt-in process to ensure data security and informed consent. All personal and sensitive information provided through a GDPR-compliant newsletter form are stored on the MailChimp database.

The DeCO2 website uses cookies (files with a small amount of data which may include an anonymous unique identifier, used for the technical functioning of a website or for gathering statistics) to track general data about how you “use” our website (length of stay and number of visits for instance). Cookies do not identify an individual user, only the computer used. Cookies record areas of the website visited and for how long. This information allows us to understand how our website is used so we can improve it by focusing on content interesting for our users.

Using cookies will not mean we get access to other information or data from your computer and the data allowed will not be used to track your online activity after you leave our website.
Should you wish not to have cookies stored on your computer, please change your settings asking your web browser to refuse them. Refusing cookies, however, can restrict your use of this website. To visit the website and benefit from all its functions, we recommend you leave cookies switched on.  You can find out more about cookies and how to control them on www.allaboutcookies.org.
 
Visitor’s data storage
We securely store visitors’ data in the project dedicated repository (DeCO2 SharePoint) and on the project website back office.
The website is hosted on WiX platform and their GDPR compliance and privacy policy is available here: https://support.wix.com/en/privacy-gdpr

We will keep visitors’ Personal Information for the entire 48-month long period of the project (June 2024- May 2028) and for 5 additional years as required by law for controls on Horizon Europe projects. Data will, therefore, be available to the relevant European Commission Agency. Once this period has expired, we will delete visitors’ data from the databases.

Your rights

Under European data protection laws, you may exercise the following rights at any time:

Right for transparency and right to information: we provide notice to all website visitors of how we use Personal Data in our everyday operations at the time of collecting Personal Data, or as soon thereafter as possible. This privacy and cookie policy is published to ensure information and transparency.

Right to be informed about the purposes of processing your data and the identity of the data controller.

Right to get confirmation of whether or not your personal data is being processed by us and access the data.

Right to have it rectified, erased or to request restriction of processing or to object to the processing if applicable.

Right to object and withdraw consent at any time: for all marketing materials, you can opt-out anytime, and free of charge.

Right to data portability: based on your specific situation, we provide data subjects with the right to obtain and reuse your data across different services and include transferring of your data to you, another controller or a trusted third party.

Access, erasure and rectification: You may exercise your right to access, erase and rectify any of your personal data at any time. You can request this by contacting our Data protection officers (Table 1) by email or writing to IEECP, Amsterdam Sloterdijk Teleport Towers – Kingsfordweg 151, Amsterdam, 1043GR, The Netherlands.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your national Data Protection Authority. You can find the contact details of all national data protection authorities here.
The only exception to these rights is for data which IEECP has a legal obligation to keep on record.

Service providers or third-party services for analytics and others
We may disclose your information to service providers under contract who help with our business operations (such as, but not limited to, fraud investigations, software development, email delivery, marketing communications, bill collection, payment processing, and site analytics and operations). These third parties are authorized to use your Personal Data only as necessary to provide these services to IEECP, for example, the purposes for which the visitor has submitted the information and for the administration of our system or site and/or other internal, administrative purposes. Personal Data may also be transferred to third party service providers of identity management, website hosting and management, data analysis, data backup, security and storage services.

The third-party Service Providers IEECP mostly uses are to monitor and analyse the use of our websites and send newsletters.

We will only transfer your Personal Data to any third-party suppliers if and to the extent we are permitted to do so by law or if you have provided your prior consent.

Newsletter
If you have subscribed to DeCO2 email newsletters, you will be sent (via email) newsletters, updates and targeted invitations to events related to the project. We will only send this information occasionally and you will have the opportunity to opt-out of these email communications at any time.

The registration is done via a double opt-in procedure: after entering your information on our website, you will receive an email where you should click to confirm your subscription.
Our mailing system is MailChimp, a GDPR-compliant system. You can access on this page their Data Processing Agreement, privacy policy and contact them.

When you submit a newsletter subscription form, the information you provide will be transferred to DeCO2 distribution list for processing in accordance with MailChimp and DeCO2 privacy policy and terms.

Analytics
We use Google Analytics, a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. For information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy Terms web page.

Social media
When interacting on DeCO2 social media accounts (i.e., X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube), your personal data consent and use are covered by the terms and conditions of the relevant social media platforms.

Links to Third-Party Sites
DeCO2 Data Privacy Policy applies only to DeCO2 website. When you land on external websites or platforms of third parties, even by way of links provided on DeCO2 channels, DeCO2data privacy policy ceases to apply. Please, refer to the privacy & cookies policies of these websites directly.

Do not track
Please, note that we do not alter our website data collection and use practices when we see a Do Not Track signal from a visitor’s browser.
European residents visiting the website have the right to access personal information we hold about them and to ask that their personal information be corrected, updated, or deleted. If visitors would like to exercise this right, they can directly contact us by email: info@deco2-project.eu  

Children’s Privacy
Our website does not address anyone under the age of 18 (“Children”).
We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 18. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your Child has provided us with Personal Data, please contact us. If we become aware that we have collected Personal Data from Children without verification of parental consent, we will take steps to remove that information from our servers.

Changes
We may update this privacy policy from time to time to reflect, for example, changes to our practices or for other operational, legal or regulatory reasons. The latest update to the document was made in August, 2024.

Contact
The controller of the DeCO2 project data, under applicable data privacy legislation and in regard to the processing of personal information, is:
IEECP – The Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy
Amsterdam Sloterdijk Teleport Towers
Kingsfordweg 151,
Amsterdam, 1043GR,
The Netherlands.
Email: info@ieecp.org
IEECP is the DeCO2 project Coordinator, a foundation with a registered office at Kingsfordweg 151, 1043GR, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, registered in the Dutch Commercial Register of the Chamber of Commerce under number 64602214.