Privacy Policy

IFAC — the International Federation of Automatic Control — values the privacy of its members, affiliates and visitors to its website and is strongly committed to each visitor’s right to privacy. This privacy policy explains IFAC’s information gathering and handling practices. It describes how we gather and protect individually identifiable information (“Personal Information”), how we use, process, transfer, and share Personal Information, and sets forth your personal data privacy rights.

1 Data controller, data processing

Responsibility in accordance with applicable data protection laws lies with IFAC. Any reference in this policy statement to “we” or “us” refers to the organisation below.

If you have any questions regarding IFAC’s privacy policy or do not feel that your concerns have been otherwise addressed, please contact us at the above address.

2 Type of processed data

We process your Personal Information in accordance with applicable data protection laws only if applicable laws permit us to do so or if you have agreed to such processing. In case of any additional collection of Personal Information we will let you know whether providing such information is required by law or by any contractual obligation, or whether it is required for the purpose of entering into any contractual relationship.

If you have registered with us as an Affiliate at affiliates.ifac-control.org, the Personal Information collected and processed may include your title, full name, gender, disability information, affiliation, position, career stage, job description, country/region, selected fields of interest, contact details (email, phone and fax number, external web links) and addresses. Except for name, affiliation and country/region, all information is optional. Each item can have three different levels of privacy — Private (only accessible to the IFAC Secretariat), IFAC restricted (only visible to IFAC Affiliates), and Web public. The information can be changed by the affiliates themselves and shall be deleted upon request.

We may also store and process data provided to us when you contact us by email or in any other electronic form.

3 Data collection methods

You may access our website without disclosing any specific Personal Information to us (such as name, postal address or email address). Even if you do nothing during your visit other than navigate our website, read pages, or download information, we will automatically gather and store certain information about your visit in order to enable your access to our website.

We use “session cookies” if, in the course of your visit, you log in or fill out any form. Those cookies have only a limited validity. Please note that most web browsers have options that allow you to control whether or not to accept cookies and give you the option to delete all cookies. However, disabling them may prevent access to some parts of our website.

4 Data retention period

As a general rule your Personal Information will be stored by us as long as we have a legitimate interest in such storage, provided that your interest in the deletion of such information does not prevail. Furthermore, we may continue to store such information even in the absence of a legitimate interest if applicable laws require us to do so. We will delete your Personal Information — even in the absence of a request from you — as soon as knowledge of such information is no longer required for the purpose of processing it, or if continued storage would violate any applicable laws.

5 Place of storage

Your Personal Information will be stored and processed on an AWS server hosted in the European Union, with a copy on the premises of the IFAC Secretariat in Laxenburg, Austria. Access to the server, as well as handling and processing of data, is restricted to authorized personnel of the IFAC Secretariat only.

An up-to-date copy of the data stored on the IFAC server will also be stored on the web server of IFAC with the Data Processing Service Centre of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Austria (“Rechenzentrum” der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften). Read-only access to such stored data is permitted only to routines automatically started by a visit to a website.

6 Transfer of data

Your Personal Information will be processed only within our organisation and only for its purposes, including National Member Organisations and Technical Committees of IFAC.

Your data will also be used to provide you with information about events such as congresses and conferences. The data will, however, not be transferred to organizers of such events.

We reserve the right to pass on Personal Information to publication partners of IFAC for direct mailing to IFAC Affiliates of issues of the IFAC journals and online access and subscription matters.

7 Your personal data privacy rights

1. You have the right at any time to request that we stop processing your Personal Information. We will promptly adhere to such request unless we can establish legitimate reasons for continuing the processing which prevail over your interests and rights, or unless the processing is necessary to enforce or defend our rights and interests in law.
2. In case you have explicitly agreed to our storing and processing of your Personal Information — e.g. by agreeing to receive information by email — you can revoke the consent at any time (this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing based on the consent given before the revocation).
3. You have the right to request:
   • access to your Personal Information,
   • rectification and/or erasure of the same, or
   • restriction of the processing thereof.
4. You can access your Personal Information through the affiliates portal and make changes/updates.
5. You have the right to ask the data controllers, at any time, for information about the data processors and the persons authorized by the data controllers to process your data.

You can exercise your rights by contacting IFAC via email at [email protected] or by writing to the address indicated above.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the authority for the protection of personal data, which in Austria is the “dsb — Datenschutzbehörde der Republik Österreich”.

8 Update of privacy policy

We may introduce changes to our privacy policy. We will notify you of these changes by publishing an updated version on our website. It will have a different date than the one shown at the start of this document. Please visit the website periodically for updates.