Privacy Policy

LAST UPDATED  2 December 2022

Thank you for visiting the PREPARED website.

Who we are

PREPARED is an EU-funded project (Grant Agreement no: 101058094) that began September 2022 and ends in August 2025. For further information, we can be contacted at: [info@prepared-project.eu]

Scope of this privacy policy

The PREPARED consortium has prepared this privacy policy to inform website visitors, our partners and other stakeholders about how we process personal data. We are committed to processing personal data responsibly, securely, and proportionally throughout our activities in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 2016/679 [1].

How we collect your personal data

We collect personal data both directly and indirectly from individuals.

• Directly:
  • We obtain personal data directly from individuals when: you subscribe to our newsletter/s 
• Indirectly:
  • We obtain personal data indirectly about individuals by anonymised website data collected and analysed by Matomo Analytics  

The personal data types we collect

We collect the following types of personal data about individuals, including:

General personal data types, such as: 

• Contact details (e.g., email when you sign up for our newsletter)  
• Anonymised information (e.g., country of residence, web visitor profile) that is collected for research purposes to understand who is accessing the PREPARED website and what content they are engaging with 

The lawful bases for processing personal data 

During the PREPARED research project, each of the partners will act as the data controller and therefore will be responsible for the implementation of data protection rules in relation to the processing operations it will perform. PREPARED partners will be considered as joint controllers when they jointly determine the purposes and means, or at least the essential elements of these purposes and means, for data processing operations that will be performed within the PREPARED project. For the personal data processed by any partner in the PREPARED consortium, the applicable legislation is the GDPR. 

There are different bases on which the consortium processes personal data: 

• Consent – When you provide us with your personal data directly, for example, when you subscribe to our newsletter [3]. 
• Legal obligations– We may process personal data in order to meet a legal obligation [4], e.g., reporting to the European Commission and promoting project results to multiple audiences, including the media and the public. 

• Legitimate interests – We process personal data when it is necessary for us to achieve the following legitimate interests [5]: 
  • Enhancing our research delivery; and 
  • Undertaking dissemination activities 

What we do with personal data

The PREPARED consortium processes personal data from our website with the purpose of: 

• Promoting our research to different types of stakeholders 
• Processing online requests or queries, including responding to communications from individuals 
• Complying with legal and regularity obligations. 

How we secure your personal data when we process it

We have put technical and organisational security policies and procedures in place to protect personal data (including sensitive personal data) from loss, misuse, alteration, or destruction. We aim to ensure that access to your personal data is password protected. Data is restricted only to a limited number of individuals who need to access it. Those individuals who have access to the data are required to maintain the confidentiality of such information. We install and regularly update all security and anti-virus software in use on all of our systems, nevertheless the security of data transmitted over the internet cannot be completely guaranteed. In addition, the consortium is conducting a privacy and ethics impact assessment (in line with GDPR Art. 35) over the duration of the project, wherein the consortium will identify and assess any ethical or data protection risks and find solutions to overcome any such risks. 

Please be aware that transmissions over the Internet are never completely private or secure.

Do we share personal data with third parties?

The PREPARED consortium will generally not share personal information with anyone except the European Commission, if it so requests. All partners will treat information received from other partners as confidential and will not disclose it to third parties, unless it is obvious that the information is already publicly available or there is a legal obligation to do so. The partners will impose the same obligations on their employees and suppliers.

We may occasionally share personal data with trusted third parties, such as those listed below, to help us deliver efficient and quality services. When we do so, we ensure that recipients are contractually bound to safeguard the data we entrust to them before we actually share the data. We may engage with several or all of the following categories of recipients:

• Parties that support us as we provide our services (e.g., cloud-based software services such as Dropbox, Microsoft Sharepoint, Matomo Analytics)
• Our professional advisers, including lawyers, auditors and insurers
• Payment services providers
• Marketing services providers (e.g., Hootsuite, Zoho)
• Law enforcement or other government and regulatory agencies (e.g., tax authorities) or to other third parties as required by, and in accordance with applicable law or regulation
• The European Commission when we are required by them to do so in relation to our work with them on EC-funded Horizon Europe projects.

Do we transfer your personal data outside the EU?

We store personal data on servers located in the EU, however, we transfer personal data to reputable third-party service providers, notably OneDrive and The Embassy of Good Science, who may be located outside of the EU.  

Matomo Analytics stores all anonymised web analytics on the PREPARED servers, based in the EU.  

All project partners are required to safeguard personal data in accordance with our contractual obligations and data protection legislation. 

Do we use cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer in order to make websites work better and to provide information to the owners of the website about its use by visitors. We only use third-party cookies on our website.

Where cookies are used, a statement will be sent to your browser explaining the use of cookies. To learn more, please refer to our cookie policy. We give visitors the option of not having cookies from our website.

Your data protection rights 

You have the following rights regarding our processing of your personal data. You can exercise your rights by emailing us (see below) including:

• Right to withdraw consent – You can withdraw consent that you have previously given to one or more specified purposes to process your personal data. This will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent.
• Right of access – You can ask us to verify whether we are processing personal data about you and if so, to have access to a copy of such data.
• Right to rectification and erasure – You can ask us to correct our records if you believe they contain incorrect or incomplete information about you or ask us to erase your personal data after you withdraw your consent to processing or when we no longer need it for the purpose it was originally collected.
• Right to restriction of processing – You can ask us to temporarily restrict our processing of your personal data if you contest the accuracy of your personal data, prefer to restrict its use rather than having us erase it, or need us to preserve it for you to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim. A temporary restriction may apply while verifying whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to process it. You can ask us to inform you before we lift that temporary processing restriction.
• Right to data portability – In some circumstances, where you have provided personal data to us, you can ask us to transmit that personal data (in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format) directly to another company.
• Right to object – You can object to our use of your personal data for direct marketing purposes, including profiling or where processing has taken the form of automated decision-making. However, we may need to keep some minimal information (e.g., e-mail address) to comply with your request to cease marketing to you.
• Right to make a complaint to your local Data Protection Authority (DPA) (see https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/structure/data-protection-authorities/index_en.htm) regarding any concerns you may have about our data handling practices.

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information or to exercise any of your other rights. This helps us to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. No fee is required to make an initial request unless your request is clearly unfounded or excessive. Depending on the circumstances, we may be unable to comply with your request based on other lawful grounds.

How long do we retain personal data?

We retain personal data to provide our services, stay in contact with you and to comply with applicable laws, regulations and professional obligations to which we are subject. Please note that we have an obligation to retain data concerning European Union research projects (Horizon Europe) for up to five years after the end of the project (unless further retention is requested by auditors).

As the records and documentation containing personal data have been collected within the delivery of an EC project, we expect that the Commission will process it in compliance with Regulation No 2018/1725. After the expiry of the retention period, and unless further legitimate grounds for retention arise, we will dispose of personal data in a secure manner.

Do we change this privacy policy?

We regularly review this privacy policy and will post any updates to it on this webpage. This privacy policy was last updated on 12 December 2022.

Contact us

If you have any concerns as to how your data is processed or if you have some issues or queries concerning the PREPARED website, you can contact us at: [info@prepared-project.eu]

[1] Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation).

[2] Directive (EU) 2016/680 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data by competent authorities for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offenses or the execution of criminal penalties, and on the free movement of such data.

[3] Article 6.1.a of GDPR states that processing is lawful if the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data, for one or more specific purposes.

[4]  Article 38.1 of the project’s Grant Agreement between the European Commission and the project states that beneficiaries of Horizon Europe projects have an obligation to promote the project and its results.

[5] Article 6.1.f of GDPR states that “processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child”.