Herewith we commit ourselves to the privacy regulations of the European Union, entered into force on 25th May 2018

 

How We Use Your Information:

  • Personalization: We use the information you provide to personalize your experience on DISCUSS, such as suggesting relevant content and connecting you with other members who share similar interests.
  • Communication: We may use your contact details to send you important updates and announcements related to the Community of Practice
  • Community Interaction: Your professional information and communication data are used to facilitate interaction, networking, and collaboration within the Community of Practice
  • Improve Services: We may analyze the usage patterns and feedback provided by members to improve and enhance the features and functionalities of the Community of Practic
  • Legal Obligations: We may disclose your information if required by law, in response to a valid legal request, or to protect our rights, safety, or the rights and safety of others.
  • Anonymized Data: We may aggregate and anonymize data for analytical purposes or share anonymized statistics with third parties, without revealing any personally identifiable information.

 

On registration users are presented a registration form, which requests for some basic details. Mandatory fields are: name, email, country of residence and current location of the user. Moreover, users are requested to indicate at least one area of interest. Users are free to provide additional information, that might be of interest for other community members. At the end of the registration process users are provided with the option to upload a profile image of their choice.

The user details provided during registration are stored in the database, and by users can be retrieved, modified or deleted at any time from their profile page. User details are only visible to members of the DISCUSS community. Moreover, users by adjusting the privacy settings, can hide their user details from other community members. In addition, they can specify the notifications and messages they want to receive from other members or the community moderators. All privacy settings are available from users' profile pages.

If users register through their accounts on third party social networks, such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn or Twitter, only their name and email are transferred to DISCUSS. However, in any case users must consent the exchange of data ahead of the transfer process.

All user activities are stored in the database, such as blog posts, stream posts or comments. However, users at any time can delete their contributions or communications. All related database entries then will be permanently removed from the database. Private messages will be stored for 100 days, and after this period automatically deleted from the database.

Users for each activity are awarded with points. From the points overall scores are calculated, and highest ranking members are presented on the frontpage of the community. On deletion of a user's profile, all points will be removed from the database.

All personal data, gathered by DISCUSS are visible from the user's profile page. DISCUSS does not collect any other personal data from users, and as a general policy, DISCUSS does not claim any ownership of the data or items provided by users.

 

Termination of DISCUSS membership

At any time, you can terminate your Membership Account which will remove your profile and other personal information from view. To delete your profile, please proceed to profile > edit profile. Push the button "Delete profile" at the end of the page. Please, note that all personal data will be deleted physically from the database and after that, you don't have access to the community anymore.

Where reasonably possible, DISCUSS will use reasonable efforts to give Members fair notice of termination or suspension of their access to DISCUSS. However, we may suspend or terminate your DISCUSS Membership immediately at any time without notice, without providing any reasons and without further liability or responsibility to you. Accordingly, you should not use DISCUSS as a depository for information where you have no other means of accessing it.

Once your DISCUSS Membership terminates, you will have no right to access or use DISCUSS. Our proprietary rights, disclaimer of warranties, indemnities, limitations of liability and miscellaneous provisions shall survive any termination of your DISCUSS Membership.

 

The DISCUSS management has committed itself to protect users' data to the utmost extent against spammers, hackers and other attackers, who aim at hi-jacking and exploiting personal information. To this reason DISCUSS has implemented latest encryption methods and a firewall, which in combination ensure high-level protection against most known attacks.

Last but not least, it's noteworthy to mention that DISCUSS does not sell or pass on any data to third parties, nor does it use google analytics or similar software to track users' behaviour. We however reserve the right, to closer inspect cases of potential copyright infringement, offending or fraudulent behaviour, as far as this should have been brought to our attention.