Privacy

All information collected on this site will be kept strictly confidential and will not be sold, leased or rented to parties outside MESOC consortium. We will not disclose your information to third parties not involved in any transaction process, or use it for other purposes, such as unsolicited mailings. A more detailed explanation about how we safeguard your personal information is described below. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

What data do we collect?

MESOC consortium collects the following information regarding visitors to our website: IP address, pages accessed, date, time and further information volunteered by you. MESOC consortium will analyse website data to improve regularly the value of the materials available online.

If you subscribe to the Newsletter, we collect your e-mail address and you name. By signing up to the MESOC newsletter, you agree to our privacy policy. 

How do we collect your data?

You directly provide MESOC consortium with most of the data we collect. We collect data and process data when you:

  • Register online for our Newsletter. 
  • Use or view our website via your browser’s cookies.

How will we use your data?

MESOC collects your data so that we can:

  • Email you updates on the MESOC project in the form of newsletters.

What are your data protection rights?

MESOC consortium would like to make sure you are fully aware of all of your data protection rights. Every user is entitled to the following:

The right to access – You have the right to request MESOC consortium for copies of your personal data. We may charge you a small fee for this service.

The right to rectification – You have the right to request that MESOC consortium correct any information you believe is inaccurate. You also have the right to request MESOC consortium to complete the information you believe is incomplete.

The right to erasure – You have the right to request that MESOC consortium erase your personal data, under certain conditions.

The right to restrict processing – You have the right to request that MESOC consortium restrict the processing of your personal data, under certain conditions.

The right to object to processing – You have the right to object to MESOC consortium’s processing of your personal data, under certain conditions.

The right to data portability – You have the right to request that MESOC consortium transfer the data that we have collected to another organization, or directly to you, under certain conditions.

If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you. If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact us at our email: info@mesoc-project.eu

Cookies

Cookies are text files placed on your computer to collect standard Internet log information and visitor behavior information. When you visit our websites, we may collect information from you automatically through cookies or similar technology

For further information, visit allaboutcookies.org.

Privacy policies of other websites

The MESOC website contains links to other external websites. Our privacy policy applies only to our website, so if you click on a link to another website, you should read their privacy policy.

Google Analytics 

MESOC consortium uses Google Analytics to track website visits in order to achieve our traffic objectives.

Google Analytics cookies and identifiers

Google Analytics mainly uses first-party cookies to report on visitor (aka. user) interactions on Google Analytics customers’ websites. Users may disable cookies or delete any individual cookie. Learn more

In addition, Google Analytics supports an optional browser add-on that - once installed and enabled - disables measurement by Google Analytics for any site a user visits. Note that this add-on only disables Google Analytics measurement.

Where a site or app uses Google Analytics for Apps or the Google Analytics for Firebase SDKs, Google Analytics collects an app-instance identifier — a randomly generated number that identifies a unique installation of an App. Whenever a user resets their Advertising Identifier (Advertising ID on Android, and ID for Advertisers on iOS), the app-instance identifier is also reset.

Where sites or apps have implemented Google Analytics with other Google Advertising products, like Google Ads, additional advertising identifiers may be collected. Users can opt-out of this feature and manage their settings for this cookie using the Ads SettingsLearn more

Google Analytics also collects Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to provide and protect the security of the service, and to give website owners a sense of which country, state, or city in the world their users come from (also known as "IP geolocation"). Google Analytics provides a method to mask IPs that are collected (detailed below) but note that website owners have access to their users’ IP addresses even if the website owners do not use Google Analytics.

Data Collected by Google Analytics

First-party Cookies

Google Analytics collects first-party cookies, data related to the device/browser, IP address and on-site/app activities to measure and report statistics about user interactions on the websites and/or apps that use Google Analytics.
 

IP Address

Google Analytics uses IP addresses to derive the geolocation of a visitor, and to protect the service and provide security to our customers. Customers may apply IP masking so that Google Analytics uses only a portion of an IP address collected, rather than the entire address.
 

What is the data used for?

Google uses Google Analytics data to provide the Google Analytics measurement service to customers. Identifiers such as cookies and app instance IDs are used to measure user interactions with a customer’s sites and/or apps, while IP addresses are used to provide and protect the security of the service, and to give the customer a sense of where in the world their users come from. 

Data privacy and security

Certifications

ISO 27001

Google has earned ISO 27001 certification for the systems, applications, people, technology, processes, and data centers serving a number of Google products, including Google Analytics. Learn more about our ISO compliance, and download our certificate (PDF) or learn more about ISO 27001.

Information security

In web-based computing, security of both data and applications is critical. Google dedicates significant resources towards securing applications and data handling to prevent unauthorized access to data.

Data is stored in an encoded format optimized for performance, rather than stored in a traditional file system or database manner. Data is dispersed across a number of physical and logical volumes for redundancy and expedient access, thereby obfuscating it from tampering.

Google applications run in a multi-tenant, distributed environment. Rather than segregating each customer's data onto a single machine or set of machines, data from all Google users (consumers, business, and even Google's own data) is distributed among a shared infrastructure composed of Google's many homogeneous machines and located in Google's data centers.

In addition, Google Analytics ensures secure transmission of its JavaScript libraries and measurement data. Google Analytics by default uses HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), which instructs browsers that support HTTP over SSL (HTTPS) to use that encryption protocol for all communication between end users, websites, and Google Analytics servers. Learn more

Google Analytics Cookie Usage on Websites

This document describes how Google Analytics uses cookies to measure user-interactions on websites that use analytics.js and gtag.js. 

Overview

Google Analytics is a simple, easy-to-use tool that helps website owners measure how users interact with website content. As a user navigates between web pages, Google Analytics provides website owners JavaScript tags (libraries) to record information about the page a user has seen, for example the URL of the page.

The Google Analytics JavaScript libraries use HTTP Cookies to "remember" what a user has done on previous pages / interactions with the website.

 

Note: Read the Google Analytics privacy document for more details about the data collected by Google Analytics.

Google Analytics supports three JavaScript libraries (tags) for measuring website usage: gtag.jsanalytics.js, and ga.js. The following sections describe how each use cookies.

gtag.js and analytics.js - cookie usage

The analytics.js JavaScript library is part of Universal Analytics and uses first-party cookies to:

  • Distinguish unique users
  • Throttle the request rate

When using the recommended JavaScript snippet cookies are set at the highest possible domain level. Setting cookies on the highest level domain possible allows measurement to occur across subdomains without any extra configuration.

Note: gtag.js and analytics.js do not require setting cookies to transmit data to Google Analytics.

gtag.js and analytics.js set the following cookies:

Cookie Name

Expiration Time

Description

_ga

2 years

Used to distinguish users.

_gid

24 hours

Used to distinguish users.

_gat

1 minute

Used to throttle request rate. If Google Analytics is deployed via Google Tag Manager, this cookie will be named _dc_gtm_<property-id>.

AMP_TOKEN

30 seconds to 1 year

Contains a token that can be used to retrieve a Client ID from AMP Client ID service. Other possible values indicate opt-out, inflight request or an error retrieving a Client ID from AMP Client ID service.

_gac_<property-id>

90 days

Contains campaign related information for the user. If you have linked your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts, Google Ads website conversion tags will read this cookie unless you opt-out. Learn more

ga.js - cookie usage

The ga.js JavaScript library uses first-party cookies to:

  • Determine which domain to measure
  • Distinguish unique users
  • Throttle the request rate
  • Remember the number and time of previous visits
  • Remember traffic source information
  • Determine the start and end of a session
  • Remember the value of visitor-level custom variables

By default, this library sets cookies on the domain specified in the document.host browser property and sets the cookie path to the root level (/). This library sets the following cookies:

Cookie Name

Default Expiration Time

Description

__utma

2 years from set/update

Used to distinguish users and sessions. The cookie is created when the javascript library executes and no existing __utma cookies exists. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.

__utmt

10 minutes

Used to throttle request rate.

__utmb

30 mins from set/update

Used to determine new sessions/visits. The cookie is created when the javascript library executes and no existing __utmb cookies exists. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.

__utmc

End of browser session

Not used in ga.js. Set for interoperability with urchin.js. Historically, this cookie operated in conjunction with the __utmb cookie to determine whether the user was in a new session/visit.

__utmz

6 months from set/update

Stores the traffic source or campaign that explains how the user reached your site. The cookie is created when the javascript library executes and is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.

__utmv

2 years from set/update

Used to store visitor-level custom variable data. This cookie is created when a developer uses the _setCustomVar method with a visitor level custom variable. This cookie was also used for the deprecated _setVar method. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.

Google Analytics user and event data retention

The retention period applies to user-level and event-level data associated with cookies, user-identifiers (e.g., User-ID). Google Analytics retains data during 26 months before automatically deleting it. 

How to contact us

If you have any questions about MESOC’s privacy policy, the data we hold on you, or you would like to exercise one of your data protection rights, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Email us at: info@mesoc-project.eu