Privacy statement

• Provide you with information on developments, activities, events, initiatives or thematic issues related to the Long-term vision for the EU’s rural areas (COM(2021)345 final) in general, and to the Rural Pact more specifically, in particular through articles, surveys, reports, interviews, newsletters, notifications for the Community Groups, email invitations, as well as visual content. This may include information on events or activities that are not organised directly by the Commission and its RPSO contractor.
• Allow you to network with peers and share relevant content: the platform has an interactive component allowing participants to present their activities (user-generated content), report on activities and exchange information online (e.g. community groups, user search, online fora).
• Collect your commitments as a stakeholder or an individual, allowing you to update those commitments, and report on general trends concerning commitments.

Data of staff of the European Commission and its contractors is collected when necessary to allow them to interact with, and manage, the Rural Pact Community Platform.

Specific information on the processing activities can be found in the following sections.

Your personal data will not be used for an automated decision-making including profiling.

• Processing your personal data in order to allow you to join the platform. This includes the sharing of select personal data (see section 7 for more details) on the Rural Pact Community Platform via a ‘member search’ page only visible to other Community members (to enable peer networking);
• Making a commitment;
• Processing your personal data for inviting you to future events, activities and initiatives the data controller may undertake;
• Subscribing to the newsletter;
• Subscribing to the Community Groups notifications.

• Name, surname, email address (collected automatically from EU login: more information is available in the corresponding record, DPR-EC-03187)
• country of residence,
• thematic areas of interest,
• focus (either Rural Pact or rural revitalisation platform),
• support to the ten shared goals of the long-term vision for EU's rural areas and your wish to join the Rural Pact community to reflect on how to build the Rural Pact.

Additionally, the following personal data is needed for providing you with a more personalized experience (i.e. better targeting the content of the information), and for generating anonymized statistics.

Optional data:

• job title,
• birth date,
• organisation/company name,
• organisation type, 
• interest in specific EU funds,
• is your organisation an umbrella organisation (if applicable), 
• are you interested or working to support rural areas suffering from rural depopulation and economic decline,
• geographical scope (international, European, national, local),
• location (Urban area, Peri-urban area, Rural area, Remote rural area),
• postal code,
• geography (coasts, mountains, etc), 
• picture,
• biography,
• notification preferences.

The provision of your personal data is not mandatory, however, the provision of minimum necessary data is needed to create a profile to interact with other members, as well as to join the Rural Pact community.

Your activities on the platform will also be recorded (this includes content that you may choose to upload, as well as your interaction with other forms of content on the platform).

EC staff and contractors could be required to maintain a profile on the platform in connection to their duties. If this is the case, the same categories of personal data listed above may be collected.

• Rural Pact Support Office - Association Européenne pour l'Information sur le Développement Local (AEIDL) - Chaussée Saint-Pierre 260, 1040 Brussels, Belgium

Additionally, users of the platform are allowed access to a subset of the personal data of other users. More specifically, they have access to:

Minimum necessary data: first name, last name, country, topics and focus.

Optional data: picture, job title, relevant EU fund, location, geography, biography and organisation.

Use of social media:

Due to the nature of the Rural Pact Community Platform, users are allowed to post links to other websites (such as social media websites) to share content that they believe others may be interested in. We may also use this possibility to share links to official Commission social media posts.

In order to view such third-party content on these websites, a message will alert you that you need to accept those third parties’ specific Terms and Conditions, including their cookie policies, over which the Commission has no control.

We recommend that you read carefully the privacy policies of the social media tools you use. These explain each company’s policy of personal data collection and further processing, their use of your data, your rights and the ways in which you can protect your privacy when using those services.

The use of a third-party IT tool does not in any way imply that the European Commission endorses them or their privacy policies. In the event that one or more third party IT tools are occasionally unavailable, we accept no responsibility for lack of service due to their downtime.

International transfers of personal data:

The controller will transfer your personal data to the following recipients in a third country or to an international organisation in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2018/1725. Your data will be made available to other users of the community platform, in order to allow for engagement between users.

The controller will transfer your personal data based on:

• adequacy decisions of the Commission for the covered countries (Article 47 of Regulation (EU) 2018/1725), a list of which can be found on the dedicated Europa page;
• the derogation set out in Article 50(1)(d) of Regulation (EU) 2018/1725.

At this time, we will not allow people from States that are not covered by EU legislation or that are not covered by an adequacy decision to create a profile on the website, in order to ensure your data is not shared without a clear legal basis to do so.

Employees of international organisations residing in the EU/EEA, or in any of the third countries covered by an adequacy decision may decide to register a profile on the platform. They will be able to see your personal data hosted on the platform like any other register user: this exceptional situation constitutes an international transfer. International organisations are not covered by adequacy decisions, and no appropriate safeguards can be utilised. However, DG AGRI has cooperated with international organisations such as OECD, WHO, or ILO, on topics relating to rural development in the past. The continuation of these exchanges is considered essential to the fulfilment of one of the Rural Pact’s objectives: “Structuring and enabling networking, collaboration & mutual learning”. Similarly essential to this objective is allowing the users of the platform to be able to interact with relevant content and actions presented by such international organisations.

Therefore, we consider these exceptional transfers of your personal data to be covered by the derogation set out in Article 50(1)(d) of Regulation (EU) 2018/1725: the transfer is necessary for important reasons of public interest.

• The Data Controller

If you would like to exercise your rights under Regulation (EU) 2018/1725, or if you have comments, questions or concerns, or if you would like to submit a complaint regarding the collection and use of your personal data, please feel free to contact the Data Controller, AGRI D.1, at EC-VISION-RURAL-AREAS@ec.europa.eu.

• The Data Protection Officer (DPO) of the Commission

You may contact the Data Protection Officer (DATA-PROTECTION-OFFICER@ec.europa.eu) with regard to issues related to the processing of your personal data under Regulation (EU) 2018/1725.

• The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS)

You have the right to have recourse (i.e. you can lodge a complaint) to the European Data Protection Supervisor (edps@edps.europa.eu) if you consider that your rights under Regulation (EU) 2018/1725 have been infringed as a result of the processing of your personal data by the Data Controller.