Legal

Legal Notice Personal Data Protection

The ECR Group in the European Committee of the Regions is committed to users' privacy. Our privacy policy is based on Regulation (EC) No 2018/1725 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2018 on the protection of natural persons about the processing of personal data by the Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Regulation (EC) No 45/2001 and Decision No 1247/2002/ECText with EEA relevance.

One of your rights under EU law is that you must be informed when your data is processed (collected, used, stored) by any organisation, including one of the EU institutions and bodies. You also have the right to know the details and purpose of that processing.

Our website is mainly used as a communication tool.

Please find below a general overview of some of how this website processes your data, including cookies and social media.

Your data and our website

We collect your data only to the extent necessary to fulfil a precise purpose related to the Group's function, in line with the relevant provisions of the Rules of Procedure of the European Committee of the Regions, its internal regulations and decisions and the Group's Rules of Procedure.

We do not reuse the information for another purpose that is different from the one stated.

We put in place measures to guarantee that your data are kept up-to-date and processed securely.

Only a limited number of staff members of the Group's Secretariat, chosen on a "need to know" basis, have access to your data.

Under certain conditions outlined in law, we may disclose your information to third parties (such as the European Anti-Fraud Office, the Court of Auditors, or law enforcement authorities) if necessary and proportionate for lawful specific purposes.

We will never divulge your data for direct marketing purposes.

You have the right to access your data to have it corrected by sending an email to the data controller at the address ecr@cor.europa.eu. You may also contact the CoR data protection officer at data.protection@cor.europa.eu, and you may have recourse at any time to the European Data Protection Supervisor at the address edps@edps.europa.eu.

The data controller, responsible for personal processing data concerning this website, is the Secretary-General of the Group.

We do not keep your data for longer than necessary for the purposes for which we collected it.

However, we may keep your data for a longer period for historical or statistical purposes with the appropriate safeguards in place.

As a data subject, you have the right to object to the processing of your data on legitimate compelling grounds relating to your particular situation except when these data are collected to comply with a legal obligation or are necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are a party, or are to be used for a purpose for which you have given your unambiguous consent.

Cookies

A cookie is a data or text file that contains small parts of text that a web server sends to your browser when you visit a website. This cookie is stored temporarily or permanently on the equipment you use, whether it be a computer, tablet, smartphone, etc.

When you visit our website, we may collect some data on your browsing experience, such as your IP address, the webpage you visited, when you visited it and the website page you were redirected from.

This information is used to gather aggregated and anonymous statistics to improve our services and enhance your user experience.

Cookies do not have access to information and files on your computer, nor are they likely to install a virus or other harmful file on your computer.

There are two types of cookies on our site:

• Session cookies: these are cookies that are essential for the operation of the site, allowing good communication and intended to facilitate navigation;
• Analytical and tracking cookies: these allow us to anonymously count the number of visitors and see their browsing behaviour when they visit the site.

Our site uses the following cookies:

• The session cookie, which maintains the connection between your computer and the server for the duration of your browsing. The main purpose of this cookie is to simplify your use of our site, making your interaction with our site faster and easier, for example, by remembering your language preferences. It is also used to verify that you are not a robot when using the contact form.

• Warning: the first cookie is essential for the use of our site. It is, therefore, impossible to deactivate it. The same applies to the second cookie, which records your preferences regarding cookies.
• Cookies from Google Analytics enable us to analyse the audience of our website and its pages and the browsing behaviour of its visitors. They help the data controller measure how visitors interact with the content of our site through visit statistics that remain strictly anonymous. These statistics allow us to continuously improve the website and provide the user with relevant content. This means that Google acts as a subcontractor. The information collected by Google Analytics does not make it possible to identify the people who visit our website. For further details, please refer to the Google data protection policy. To stop being tracked by Google Analytics on our site, we invite you to visit https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

policy

When you visit the Group's website, we will keep the browser history of your visit for a maximum of 12 months. This information will then be deleted.

Note that most browsers (Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari) are set to accept cookies automatically. However, you can manage or delete cookies by modifying your browser settings. 

You can also set your browser to notify you when a cookie is sent, and you can then decide whether to reject or accept it. If you wish to block and/or manage cookies, you can do so from the following link, depending on your browser:

Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer
Google Chrome
Firefox
Safari

The collection, aggregation and anonymising operations are performed under adequate security measures.

Social Media

We use social media to present our work through widely used and contemporary channels.

Our use of social media is highlighted on this website.

For instance, you can watch videos, which we upload to our YouTube page and follow links from our website to Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Our display of social media buttons does not set cookies to connect to those services when our website pages are loaded on your computer (or other devices) or from components from those services embedded in our web pages.

Each social media channel has its policy on how they process your data when you access their sites. For example, if you choose to watch one of our videos on YouTube, you will be asked for explicit consent to accept YouTube cookies; if you look at our Twitter activity on Twitter, you will be asked for explicit consent to accept Twitter cookies; the same applies for Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you have any concerns or questions about using your data, you should read their privacy policies carefully before using them.

We wish you good navigation on our site.