Privacy Statement
Preliminary remarks
How We Use Your Information:
- Personalization: We use the information you provide to personalize your experience on DISCUSS, such as suggesting relevant content and connecting you with other members who share similar interests.
- Communication: We may use your contact details to send you important updates and announcements related to the Community of Practice
- Community Interaction: Your professional information and communication data are used to facilitate interaction, networking, and collaboration within the Community of Practice
- Improve Services: We may analyze the usage patterns and feedback provided by members to improve and enhance the features and functionalities of the Community of Practic
- Legal Obligations: We may disclose your information if required by law, in response to a valid legal request, or to protect our rights, safety, or the rights and safety of others.
- Anonymized Data: We may aggregate and anonymize data for analytical purposes or share anonymized statistics with third parties, without revealing any personally identifiable information.
On registration users are presented a registration form, which requests for some basic details. Mandatory fields are: name, email, country of residence and current location of the user. Moreover, users are requested to indicate at least one area of interest. Users are free to provide additional information, that might be of interest for other community members. At the end of the registration process users are provided with the option to upload a profile image of their choice.
The user details provided during registration are stored in the database, and by users can be retrieved, modified or deleted at any time from their profile page. User details are only visible to members of the DISCUSS community. Moreover, users by adjusting the privacy settings, can hide their user details from other community members. In addition, they can specify the notifications and messages they want to receive from other members or the community moderators. All privacy settings are available from users' profile pages.
If users register through their accounts on third party social networks, such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn or Twitter, only their name and email are transferred to DISCUSS. However, in any case users must consent the exchange of data ahead of the transfer process.
All user activities are stored in the database, such as blog posts, stream posts or comments. However, users at any time can delete their contributions or communications. All related database entries then will be permanently removed from the database. Private messages will be stored for 100 days, and after this period automatically deleted from the database.
Users for each activity are awarded with points. From the points overall scores are calculated, and highest ranking members are presented on the frontpage of the community. On deletion of a user's profile, all points will be removed from the database.
All personal data, gathered by DISCUSS are visible from the user's profile page. DISCUSS does not collect any other personal data from users, and as a general policy, DISCUSS does not claim any ownership of the data or items provided by users.
Termination of DISCUSS membership
At any time, you can terminate your Membership Account which will remove your profile and other personal information from view. To delete your profile, please proceed to profile > edit profile. Push the button "Delete profile" at the end of the page. Please, note that all personal data will be deleted physically from the database and after that, you don't have access to the community anymore.
Where reasonably possible, DISCUSS will use reasonable efforts to give Members fair notice of termination or suspension of their access to DISCUSS. However, we may suspend or terminate your DISCUSS Membership immediately at any time without notice, without providing any reasons and without further liability or responsibility to you. Accordingly, you should not use DISCUSS as a depository for information where you have no other means of accessing it.
Once your DISCUSS Membership terminates, you will have no right to access or use DISCUSS. Our proprietary rights, disclaimer of warranties, indemnities, limitations of liability and miscellaneous provisions shall survive any termination of your DISCUSS Membership.
The DISCUSS management has committed itself to protect users' data to the utmost extent against spammers, hackers and other attackers, who aim at hi-jacking and exploiting personal information. To this reason DISCUSS has implemented latest encryption methods and a firewall, which in combination ensure high-level protection against most known attacks.
Last but not least, it's noteworthy to mention that DISCUSS does not sell or pass on any data to third parties, nor does it use google analytics or similar software to track users' behaviour. We however reserve the right, to closer inspect cases of potential copyright infringement, offending or fraudulent behaviour, as far as this should have been brought to our attention.
Privacy Policy
1. Introduction
This website is operated by the European DISCUSS partnership, which is coordinated by the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, and represented by PW Projekt GmbH. lt is very important to us to handle the data of our website visitors with confidence and to protect them in the best possible way. For this reason, we make every effort to comply with the requirements of the GDPR. In the following, we explain how we process your data on our website. To do this, we use the clearest and most transparent language possible so that you really understand what happens with your data.
2. General information
Processing of personal data and other terms
Data protection applies to the processing of personal data. Personal means all data with which you can be personally identified. This is, for example, the IP address of the device (PC, laptop, smartphone, etc.) in front of which you are currently sitting. Such data is processed when 'something happens to it'. Here, for example, the IP is transmitted from the browser to our provider and stored there automatically. This is then a processing (according to Art. 4 No. 2 GDPR) of personal data (according to Art. 4 No. 1 GDPR). These and other legal definitions can be found in Art. 4 GDPR.
Applicable regulations/laws - GDPR, BDSG and TDDDG
The scope of data protection is regulated by laws. In this case, these are the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) as a European regulation and the BDSG (Federal Data Protection Act) as a national law. In addition, the TDDDG supplements the provisions of the GDPR as far as the use of cookies is concerned.
The responsible
The controller within the meaning of the GDPR is responsible for data processing on this website. This is the natural or legal person who alone or jointly with others determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data. You can reach the person in charge at:
PW Projekt GmbH,
Kanalstr. 5
85049 Ingolstadt
[info]@discuss-community.eu
This is how data is basically processed on this website
As we have already established, there are data (e.g. IP address) that are collected automatically. This data is mainly required for the technical provision of the homepage. lnsofar as we use personal data or collect other data, we will inform you of this or ask for your consent. Other personal data you share with us knowingly. Detailed information on this can be found below.
Your Rights
The GDPR provides you with comprehensive rights. These are, for example, the free information about the origin, recipient and purpose of your stored personal data. In addition, you can request the correction, blocking or deletion of this data or complain to the competent data protection supervisory authority. You can revoke any consent you have given at any time. You can find out in detail what these rights are and how to exercise them in the last section of this Privacy Policy.
Data protection - Our view
Data protection is more than just a chore for us! Personal data has a great value and mindful handling of this data should be a matter of course in our digitalized world. In addition, you as a website visitor should be able to decide for yourself what "happens" to your data, when and by whom. Therefore, we undertake to comply with all legal provisions, collect only the data necessary for us and, of course, treat them confidentially.
Disclosure and deletion
The transfer and deletion of data are also important and sensitive topics. Therefore, we would like to briefly inform you in advance about our general approach to this. A transfer of data only takes place on the basis of a legal basis and only if this is unavoidable. This may be the case in particular if it is a so-called Data Processor and a Data Processing Agreement has been concluded in accordance with Art. 28 GDPR.
We delete your data when the purpose and the legal basis for processing cease to apply and the deletion does not conflict with any other legal obligations. A 'good' overview of this is also provided by Art. 17 GDPR. For all further information, please refer to this Privacy Policy and contact the responsible person if you have any specific questions.
Hosting
This website is hosted externally. The personal data collected on this website is stored on the hoster's servers. This is on the one hand the automatically collected and stored log files (see below for more details), as weil as all other data provided by website visitors. The external hosting is carried out for the purpose of a secure, fast and reliable provision of our website and serves in this context the fulfillment of contracts with our potential and existing customers.
The legal basis for the processing is Art. 6 paragraph 1 lit. a, b and f GDPR, as well as 25 paragraph 1 TDDDG, insofar as consent includes the storage of cookies or access to information in the terminal device of the website visitor or user within the meaning of the TDDDG. Our hoster only processes data that is necessary for the fulfillment of its service obligation and acts as our Data Processor, which means that it is subject to our instructions. We have concluded a corresponding Data Processing Agreement with our hoster:
Hetzner Online GmbH, Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen, Germany.
https://www.hetzner.com/de/rechtliches/datenschutz.
Legal basis
The processing of personal data always requires a legal basis. The GDPR provides for the following possibilities in Art. 6 (1) Sentence 1:
- The data subject has given his/her consent to the processing of personal data concerning him/her for one or more specific purposes;
- the processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or for the implementation of pre-contractual measures taken at the data subject's request;
- processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the responsible person is subject to;
- the processing is necessary in order to protect the vital interests of the data subject or another natural person;
- processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the responsible was transferred;
