European Development Days 2022 Cookie Policy

What are cookies?

A cookie is a small text file that a website stores on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site.

• First party cookies are cookies set by the website you’re visiting. Only that website can read them. The EDD website currently does not use third party cookies.
• Persistent cookies are cookies saved on your computer and that are not deleted automatically when you quit your browser, unlike a session cookie, which is deleted when you quit your browser.

Every time you visit the European Development Days (EDD) website (eudevdays.eu), you will be invited to accept or refuse cookies. You also have the option to give your preferences regarding the use and type of cookies stored in your browser for a certain period of time. That way you don’t have to re-enter them when browsing around the site during the same visit.

Cookies can also be used to establish anonymised statistics about the browsing experience on our site.

How do we use cookies?

The 2 types of first-party cookie we use are to:

• store visitor preferences
• make our websites operational

Strictly necessary (visitor preferences)

These are set by us and only we can read them. They remember:

• if you have agreed to (or refused) this site’s cookie policy.
• server access activities from clients for security and performance reasons.

They are necessary for the website proper function and cannot be switched off in our system.

Performance (Analytics cookie)

We use these purely for internal research on how we can improve the service we provide for all our users.

The cookies simply assess how you interact with our website – as an anonymous user (the data gathered does not identify you personally).

Also, this data is not shared with any third parties or used for any other purpose. The anonymised statistics are shared with the contractors working on the EDD project under contractual agreement with the Commission.

However, you are free to refuse these types of cookies via the cookie banner you will see on the first page you visit.

Matomo analytics

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.

The EDD website uses Matomo Analytics. Matomo Analytics is a web analytics service self-hosted by the EDD website contractor. Its purpose is to analyse the traffic on our website. We use the collected data and information, inter alia, to evaluate the use of our website and to provide online reports, which show the activities on our websites.

The IP addresses of visitors are anonymised by the EDD website prior to their storage in the Matomo self-hosted database; this protects the anonymity of the visitors that have opted for the full website functionalities. Consequently, such data is stored on the website’s contractor servers located in the European Union. For details of location servers for the Matomo Cloud where data is stored, please visit https://matomo.org/privacy-policy/.

The self-hosted version of Matomo Analytics has a retention control feature. This feature provides website owners with the flexibility to define a retention period for the data stored within the database.

EDD has opted for a retention period of 12 months (retention period starts after collection of data); any data beyond this period is deleted from servers.

Matomo Analytics will by default track the following information:

• User IP address (anonymised)
• Optional User ID
• Date and time of the request (visit to the site)
• Title of the page being viewed (Page Title)
• URL of the page being viewed (Page URL)
• URL of the page that was viewed prior to the current page (Referrer URL)
• Screen resolution being used
• Time in local user’s timezone
• Files that were clicked and downloaded (Download)
• Links to an outside domain that were clicked (Outlink)
• Pages generation time (the time it takes for webpages to be generated by the webserver and then downloaded by the user: Page speed)
• Location of the user: country, region, city, approximate latitude and longitude (Geolocation)
• Main Language of the browser being used (Accept-Language header)
• User Agent of the browser being used (User-Agent header)

Do not track option

Do Not Track is a technology that enables visitors to opt out from being tracked by websites for whatever purpose, including the use of analytics services, advertising networks and social platforms. You can enable the 'Do not track' option directly in your web browser. Matomo will not track users who have enabled this option in their web browsers.

How can you manage cookies?

You can manage/delete cookies as you wish - for details, see www.aboutcookies.org .

Removing cookies from your device: You can delete all cookies that are already on your device by clearing the browsing history of your browser. This will remove all cookies from all websites you have visited.

Be aware though that you may also lose some saved information (e.g., saved login details, site preferences).

Managing site-specific cookies: For more detailed control over site-specific cookies, check the privacy and cookie settings in your preferred browser

Blocking cookies: You can set most modern browsers to prevent any cookies being placed on your device, but you may then have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site/page. And some services and functionalities may not work properly at all (e.g., profile logging-in).

On the https://eudevdays.eu/ website, you can either accept all cookies or opt-out from performance cookies. If you want to keep navigating on the website however, you will need to accept the strictly necessary cookies.

EDD 2022 Cookie Policy (PDF)