This privacy statement describes what information we at Science|Business collect as part of our and how we use this information.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force on 25 May 2018, requires us to let you know the legal basis on which we process information; in our case, this is because it is in our legitimate interest as an company providing news, event and networking services, or because you have requested to be on a mailing list, or because we need to comply with legal or regulatory obligations.
How we collect personal information
You do not have to give us any personal information – such as your email address, contact information or areas of interest – in order to use our website. However, if you wish to take advantage of some of the more special, personalised services that we offer, you will need to provide us with certain information about yourself.
For example, if you wish to subscribe to our news service or purchase products from us we will collect some or all of the following personal data from you: name, address, e-mail, daytime telephone number, job title, company/employer and your bank details in order to process payment.
We also collect information when you voluntarily complete customer surveys, provide feedback and participate in competitions.
Website usage information is collected using cookies (see below).
How we use your information and how and when we might share it
We will use your personal information to manage your registration and allow you to benefit from our web services. Our own employees may only see information relevant to their work, and have been made aware of the need for strict confidentiality.
We may employ the services of a third party to help us in certain areas, such as website hosting, web analytics, distribution of our online newsletter, or management of event bookings. In some cases the third party may receive your information. All our third party providers are compliant with EU data privacy regulations. However, at all times, we will control and be responsible for the use of your information.
We may use aggregated information for the purposes of tracking usage of the website and in order to help up improve our website as well as for research and analysis purposes. This includes:
- Any email address, contact information or other information that you have supplied to us in the context of obtaining a service.
- How our users connect to the Internet, including their IP address, the search engine they use and whether they are using a desktop, mobile or tablet device.
- The time and date of access to individual pages on our site.
We may pass this information to third parties but only in aggregated and anonymous form.
We do record, through our newsletter service provider, information on who opens newsletters and who clicks on which stories. Our provider will only access this data if we ask them for help in a technical query. We use this information to improve and focus our news coverage; we will not pass this information to anyone else except in aggregated and hence anonymous form.
Except as set out in this statement, or to fulfil a legal obligation, we do not share, sell or transfer your information to anyone else.
How long do we keep your personal data?
Only for as long as we need to.
Our third-party providers hold information for the following periods of time:
- Newsletter usage data: 24 months
- Web usage data: 50 months
Marketing
We would like to keep you up to date, by email, with details of our services, or those of carefully selected third parties, using the information that you have supplied, but only with your permission.
If you have consented to receive information from third parties, you may opt out at a later date.
You have a right at any time to stop us from contacting you for marketing purposes – just click the Unsubscribe button at the foot of all our marketing emails.
Use of Cookies
A cookie is a text-only string of information that a website transfers to the cookie file of your computer's hard drive. A cookie will typically contain the name of the domain from which the cookie has come, the "lifetime" of the cookie, and a value, usually a randomly generated unique number.
Two types of cookies may be used on this website, session cookies, which are temporary cookies that remain in the cookie file of your browser until you leave the site, and persistent cookies, which remain in the cookie file of your browser for much longer (though how long will depend on the lifetime of the specific cookie).
When you visit our website we send you a cookie. Cookies may be used in the following ways:
Essential cookies:
- To help us know when a visitor returns to our website. Visitors are identified by an ID number only; we cannot identify you personally in this way.
- To compile anonymous, aggregated statistics about traffic that allow us to understand how users use our site and to help us improve the structure of our website. We cannot identify you personally in this way.
Functional cookies:
- To allow us to tailor content or advertisements to match your preferred interests or to avoid showing you the same adverts repeatedly.
- To help us improve our performance, we may use these cookies to collect information about how you interact with certain pages. This is done in connection with our Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Third Party Advertising
We may use a third party to serve advertisements on our site. Cookies may be associated with these advertisements to enable the advertiser to track the number of anonymous users responding to the campaign. We do not have access to or control of cookies placed by third parties.
Disabling/Enabling Cookies
You have the ability to accept or decline cookies by modifying the settings in your browser. However, you may not be able to use all the interactive features of our site if cookies are disabled.
Links
Our site and our newsletters contains links to other websites over which we have no control. We are not responsible for privacy policies or practices of other websites to which you choose to link from this site. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of those other web sites so you can understand how they collect, use and share your information.
Security
We have implemented reasonable technical and organisational measures designed to secure your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorised access, use, alteration or disclosure. However, the Internet is an open system and we cannot guarantee that unauthorised third parties will never be able to defeat those measures or use your personal information for improper purposes.
Sale of the Business
In the event that our business is sold or integrated with another business, your details may be disclosed to our advisers and any prospective purchaser's advisers and may be passed to the new owners of the business.
Your rights
You are entitled to see the information held about you. If you wish to do this, please contact us at [email protected]. Please note that in certain circumstances we may withhold access to your information where we have the right to do so under current data protection legislation.
You may ask us to delete your personal data. We will then do so, except in circumstances where we are legally entitled or required to retain it.
At any time you may unsubscribe from our newsletter and email services.
If you are unhappy with our privacy procedures we would encourage you to get in touch with us so that we can try to resolve the issue. Of course, you also have the right at any time to refer any issue regarding data protection to the national data protection authority; since our business is conducted primarily from our Brussels office, the relevant authority (under the EU General Data Protection Regulation) is the Belgian Commission for the Protection of Privacy.
Updating your information
You may review, correct, update or change your personal information at any time by contacting us at [email protected].
Changes to this privacy policy
If our privacy policy changes in any way, we will place an updated version on this page. Regularly reviewing this page ensures that you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances, if any, we will share it with other parties.
Contacting us
If you have any questions about this statement or your personal information, please contact us at [email protected].
Receive the Funding Newswire [full access requires a subscription] each Tuesday, our Policy Bulletin each Thursday, and news about bridging Europe’s east-west innovation gap twice a month in The Widening. 
A unique international forum for public research organisations and companies to connect their external engagement with strategic interests around their R&D system.
