In principle, the Internet Rights Observatory does not build personal files. If for a particular application such files would be used, the correspondent would be informed beforehand and the operation would be carried out in compliance with the Act of 8 December 1992 as modified by the Act of 11 December 1998 transposing EC Directive 95/46 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (Belgian Official Gazette of 3 February 1999).
When consulting information or downloading files on our website, the following data are automatically collected :
This information is only used for measuring the number of visitors in the different sections of our site and helps us to improve the contents.
When consulting information filed in a data base, an elementary form of cookies is used in order to transmit the answer to a question the user has asked. These cookies are absolutely inoffensive and disappear at the end of the session. Nowhere on the site do we use cookies containing information about the internaut.
The cookies in question are functional cookies. They are random hexadecimal numbers generated by an Internet Information Server and filed in the browser’s memory, which means that they disappear once the browser has been turned off. Consequently, they are no real cookies.
Functional cookies are in fact used to recognise internauts and to determine which information is sent to whom. So, there must be dialogue between internauts and the Internet Information Server, which is only possible when consulting dynamic pages of any site. So, these functional cookies only work with asp pages linked to the various data bases of the consulted website. In other words, it is only an internal session number allowing the personal management of the various consultations done by an internaut of one and the same data base. This appears to be very useful when the internaut concerned clicks one or several times on the back button of his browser. Without this internal management the Internet Information Server would have the impression that each consultation carried out by this internaut is in fact done by different internauts. The management of the answers (contained in the consulted data base) to the questions asked by our internaut would not be possible at all.
An e-mail that is sent in order to get information may contain some identification data. We use those data for answering your message. They may also be registered in a users data base to which the provisions of the privacy protection act apply : You have the right to consult and to modify your data or to have them removed.
If the public is asked to comment on a proposal that is submitted for consultation, a notice will be inserted in order to explain the Internet Rights Observatory’s intentions with regard to the processing of those data.
Internet users can receive on request a newsletter in French or Dutch. The subscription is free and may be cancelled at any time by the subscriber.
The newsletter contains a list of the novelties (current issues, updates, …) available on the website of the Internet Rights Observatory : http://www.internet-observatory.be. It is sent by e-mail at varying intervals according to the updating of information.
In practical terms, Internet users can subscribe by sending an e-mail to the Secretariat of the Internet Rights Observatory. On receiving such a request, the Secretariat fills in an electronic sheet (in Lotus Notes) with the e-mail address of the new subscriber and, if communicated, his surname, first name, quality, body or company, address, telephone and fax numbers, ….
The information provided is used for the following purposes. The e-mail address is required to send the newsletter. The remaining information serves to contact the subscribers in the event of problems with the sending of the newsletter. Some of these data are sometimes also used (without mention of any names) with a view to statistics (number of subscribers per language, ...) in order to get a picture of the public interested in this service.
Personal data are only accessible to the Secretariat of the Internet Rights Observatory and are never communicated to third parties. Statistical data are transmitted to the Chairman of the Observatory and to the members of staff of the Federal Public Service Economy, SMEs, Self-Employed and Energy, which hosts the website and sees to its technical management as well as to the management of the electronic mail.
Subscribers may at any time ask by e-mail to the Secretariat to consult the content of the sheet comprising their personal data and, if need be, put right any mistakes.
Subscribers may cancel their subscription when they so wish. They must send their request by e-mail to the Secretariat, which will in such a case delete the sheet in question as soon as possible.
Our site contains links to other sites of the public or private sector. When clicking on one of those links, we cannot guarantee the observance of a privacy policy that is identical to that defined in this section.