Privacy Statement - Communication activities for the European Year of Youth 2022

1. Introduction

The European Commission (hereafter ‘the Commission’) is committed to protect your personal data and to respect your privacy. The Commission collects and further processes personal data pursuant to Regulation (EU) 2018/1725 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2018 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data by the Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies and on the free movement of such data (repealing Regulation (EC) No 45/2001).

This privacy statement explains the reason for the processing of your personal data, the way we collect, handle and ensure protection of all personal data provided, how that information is used and what rights you have in relation to your personal data. It also specifies the contact details of the responsible Data Controller with whom you may exercise your rights, the Data Protection Officer and the European Data Protection Supervisor.

The information in relation to processing operation DPR-EC-12988.2 for the communication activities under the European Year of Youth, undertaken by DG.EAC.B.3, is presented below. 
 

2. Why and how do we process your personal data? 

Purpose of the processing operation: We process the described (in section 4) personal data in order to illustrate and promote the below described communication activities undertaken for the European Year of Youth 2022 and its legacy period in 2023. 

After the European Year of Youth closing event in December 2022 the EYY entered into the legacy phase. The implementation report will be finalised be the end of 2023. The report will take stock of the results of the Year and assess them to be presented to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. On the one hand, the report will be a retrospective document reflecting on what has been achieved, what we have learned and what has worked well. On the other hand, the report will be a forward-looking document, also formulating ideas/proposals for the follow-up of the Year and ideas for future efforts in the youth field. To prepare for the final reporting, the EYY features as published on the European Youth Portal will remain accessible until June 2023.  To this regard, the collaboration and meetings with National Coordinators and EYY stakeholders shall continue in 2023.

We process this personal data based on the explicit consent received from the data subjects including for the publication of their personal data to the general public. 

The communication activities contain activities such as:

1. Interviews with different stakeholder groups, these interviews can be carried out by young people being part of the pool of young journalists or ad-hoc contributions from young people.
2. Photo or video for the purposes of a competition or accompanying an idea in the frame of the European Year of Youth 2022.
3. Self-recorded videos, as for example under the “#SHEU leads” campaign.
4. Contributions to the ideas (text) as submitted under the “views & hopes” section of the European Youth Portal.
5. Self-recording messages on ideas, hopes and opinions on the Youth Voice Platform.
6. Printed/online materials

2. 1. Pool of young journalists

Organised by Eurodesk, the pool of young journalists has been created in light of the European Year of Youth 2022. It gathers young European journalists coming from all over Europe, who provide their opinion-based content on various themes of interest for young people and through different types of formats (articles, videos, podcasts and other). The young European journalists are data subjects as their name and other personal information are published alongside their content. During their activities, the young journalists might have to gather the personal data of various people, who therefore will also become data subjects (e.g. when they conduct interviews with various stakeholders). 

Eurodesk will be in charge of collecting the data subjects’ consent. Based on the data subjects’ explicit consent, the contents will be published on the dedicated section of the European Year of Youth webpage on the European Youth Portal, and disseminated on the European Youth social media channels (Facebook: EuropeanYouthEU, Instagram: @european_youth_eu, Twitter: @EuropeanYouthEU) and any other relevant channel (see heading 7). 

Your personal data will not be used for an automated decision-making including profiling. 

2.2. Photo or video competition

To promote the European Year of Youth 2022, competitions including photo or video competitions might be organised. The data subjects will be asked to complete a consent form and a video/photo licence form, which will then be processed by the data controller. For minors, these forms will need to be completed by the holder of parental responsibility over the child. Based on the data subjects’ explicit consent, the contents will be published on the dedicated section of the European Year of Youth webpage on the European Youth Portal, and disseminated on the European Youth social media channels (Facebook: EuropeanYouthEU, Instagram: @european_youth_eu, Twitter: @EuropeanYouthEU) and any other relevant channel (see heading 7). 

Your personal data will not be used for an automated decision-making including profiling. 

2.3. Self-recorded videos, including the “#SHEU leads” campaign

Self-recorded audio-visual content, including pictures and videos depicting different stakeholders, will be used to promote communication activities under the European Year of Youth 2022, such as the “#SHEU leads” campaign. 

The “#SHEU leads” campaign will highlight the stories of girls and young women (under 30) in education, youth, culture, sport and research & innovation  fields (in a video story telling format), having a direct or indirect affiliation to the EU programmes. The candidates will self-record a video and provide a picture of themselves. 

The data subjects will be asked to complete a consent form and a video/photo licence form, which will then be processed by the data controller. Based on the data subjects’ explicit consent, the content will be used in the frame of the communication activities for the EYY2022, including the “#SHEU leads” campaign, and will be published on various media platforms (see heading 7). 

Your personal data will not be used for an automated decision-making including profiling. 

2.4. Contribution to the views & hopes section

Young people, including minors, share short written stories on their hopes, aspirations, and dreams about their future, as well as a picture of themselves to accompany their written input. This activity is set-up in collaboration with the JRC and the input received for the Conference on the Future of Europe/ #OurFutures. The contents received for the Conference on the Future of Europe will be provided to DG.EAC.B.3 by the JRC. 

JRC will be in charge of collecting the data subjects’ consent. Based on the data subjects’ explicit consent, the contents will be published on the dedicated section of the European Year of Youth webpage on the European Youth Portal, and disseminated on the European Youth social media channels (Facebook: EuropeanYouthEU, Instagram: @european_youth_eu, Twitter: @EuropeanYouthEU), and any other relevant channel (see heading 7). 

Your personal data will not be used for an automated decision-making including profiling. 

2.5. Self-recording messages on ideas, hopes and opinions the Youth Voice Platform

We collect and further process your personal data to provide you with information on what the large part of the young generation thinks and to convey all opinions and contributions from young people that are not listened to enough by policy decision-makers, by recording and publishing your voice on the platform.

The Youth Voice Platform, as part of the European Year of Youth, is an open tool that invites young Europeans to put forward their collective and individual voices. When sending and recording their voices, the participants will speak in their own language and the platform will automatically adapt their messages into English transcripts by using automated software. A profanity filter service will also be used to verify the language’s compliance with decency. A natural language understanding service will be used, where the text is analysed, to extract metadata from content such as concepts, entities, keywords, categories, sentiment, emotion, relations, semantic roles, and syntax.  All generated metadata will be made available for each recording within the backend dashboard. 

Once the voice note is recorded, moderators will evaluate its content and you will receive a message as soon as the content has been approved and published. Once the voice recording is approved and published in the platform, visitors will be able to listen to the voice note.
Upon receiving the consent from the data subjects, the audio files could be extracted and used by EAC’s Social Media Team to share on social media, and any other relevant channels (see heading 7). Furthermore, once the voice recording is approved and published in the platform, visitors can share the voice recording externally (to other channels such as social media channels). 

The contractor Rainbow Consortium (formed by ICF NEXT S.A and MEDIABRANDS) will be in charge of collecting the data subjects’ consent. It will be done through the platform Youthvoices.eu, right before the data subjects submit their content, by ticking the box(es) on the online registration form.

You can withdraw your consent for these services at any time by contacting the controller at the contact details below (see heading 9) or via the form available on the Youthvoices.eu website. 

Your personal data will not be used for an automated decision-making including profiling.

2.6. Printed/physical and online materials

To promote the European Year of Youth 2022, various types of physical and online materials might be created. Those might be shared through the relevant promotional channels (see heading 7). The contractor Rainbow Consortium (formed by ICF NEXT S.A and MEDIABRANDS) will be in charge of collecting the data subjects’ consent.

Your personal data will not be used for an automated decision-making including profiling.

3. On what legal ground(s) do we process your personal data

We process your personal data, because:

(d) the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes;

As per Article 8(1) of the Regulation 2018/1725 on children’s consent, in relation to offer of information society services directly to a child, the processing shall be lawful where the child is at least 13 years old. In case of children below 13 years, the consent will be given or authorised by the holder of parental responsibility over the child.
 

4. Which personal data do we collect and further process? 

In order to carry out these processing operations DG.EAC.B.3 might collect, directly from the data subject or through third parties (i.e. the contractor, JRC, Eurodesk and journalists), the following categories of personal data. Depending on the type of the activity, all or some of the personal data below will be collected and further processed: 

• First and last name;
• Function;
• Contact details (e-mail address, telephone number, mobile telephone number, company and department, country of residence, IP address, social media); 
• Information for the evaluation of selection criteria or eligibility criteria: age, gender, expertise, technical skills and languages, educational background, professional experience, including details on current and past employment;
• Country of origin;
• Nationality;
• Language;
• Audio-visual content: photograph/video of the subject or any other content from which the subject can be visually recognized;
• Audio content: voice recording;
• Written content: news items, articles, opinion papers, quotes, biographies, views, essays, research papers, press releases, reports, autobiographies, stories, translations, transcripts. 

The provision of personal data is not mandatory. 

5. How long do we keep your personal data?

The data controller only keeps your personal data for the time necessary to fulfil the purpose of collection or further processing, namely for 2 years after the end of the European Year of Youth 2022 and its legacy period which will be closed on 31.12.2023. Personal data will hence be kept until 31.12.2025. 

The European Commission’s contractors are contractually bound to process personal data on behalf of and in line with the instructions of the data controller, to keep confidential any data they process and to protect it from unauthorised access, use and retention.

6. How do we protect and safeguard your personal data?

All personal data in electronic format (e-mails, documents, databases, uploaded batches of data, etc.) are stored either on the servers of the European Commission and/or of its contractor – Rainbow Consortium (formed by ICF NEXT S.A and MEDIABRANDS) – until the end of their retention period. All processing operations are carried out pursuant to the Commission Decision (EU, Euratom) 2017/46 of 10 January 2017 on the security of communication and information systems in the European Commission.

The Commission’s contractors are bound by a specific contractual clause for any processing operations of your data on behalf of the Commission, and by the confidentiality obligations deriving from the transposition of the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU Member States (‘GDPR’ Regulation (EU) 2016/679.) 

In order to protect your personal data, the Commission has put in place a number of technical and organisational measures in place. Technical measures include appropriate actions to address online security, risk of data loss, alteration of data or unauthorised access, taking into consideration the risk presented by the processing and the nature of the personal data being processed. Organisational measures include restricting access to the personal data solely to authorised persons with a legitimate need to know for the purposes of this processing operation.

7. Who has access to your personal data and to whom is it disclosed?

7.1. Disclosure of personal data

Access to your personal data is provided to the European Commission’s services (involved in the implementation of the European Year of Youth 2022) and the contractor’s staff responsible for carrying out these processing operations and to authorised staff according to the “need to know” principle. Such staff abide by statutory, and when required, additional confidentiality agreements. 

The category of recipients of the data might be (non-exhaustive list, depending on the processing operation):

• Staff from the European Commission (European Commission services and DGs involved in the implementation of the European Year of Youth 2022); 
• European youth stakeholders; 
• Staff from the European Parliament, the Committee of the Regions, the European Economic and Social Committee; 
• EU Agencies;
• the communication contractor in charge of communication activities linked to the European Year of Youth 2022: Rainbow Consortium formed by ICF NEXT S.A and MEDIABRANDS; 

The described data (see heading 4) is retained for the sole purpose of illustrating or promoting communication activities under the European Year of Youth 2022. Depending on the communication activity undertaken for the European Year of Youth 2022, the general public and the above categories of data recipients will see the relevant personal data of any people added by authorised editors to articles, news items, etc. (see heading 2), for instance the name of a contributor for a news item.

Publication of the personal data will not exceed the frame of the operation to which the data subject has agreed to participate. Only the personal data for which the subject has provided his/her consent will be published. Other personal data, apart from those published for the communication activities, might be processed for the successful development of the activities (e.g. during a selection procedure). Only the European Commission’s and the contractor’s staff responsible for carrying out these processing operations and to authorised staff according to the “need to know” principle, will have access to such personal data. The provided data for which the data subject has agreed to its publication, might be published on the below platforms.  

The personal data of the data subject might be published on the European Commission’s platforms and promotional channels such as its social media accounts that, even if using third party tools, lawfully fall under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when processing personal data about individuals in the EU. More specifically, the data may be published via the European Year of Youth webpage and the European Youth Portal, the Youth Voice Platform, the European Commission’s social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube), the European Commission’s Intracomm, the European Commission’s Social Media Wiki, and any other European Commission platform(s) and third parties website(s) or media platform(s) that may be relevant for promotion.

7. 2. Cookies

Cookies are short text files stored on a user’s device (such as a computer, tablet or phone) by a website. Cookies are used for the technical functioning of a website (functional cookies) or for gathering statistics (analytical cookies).

Cookies are stored by Europa Analytics, the corporate service which measures the effectiveness and efficiency of the European Commission's websites on EUROPA.

More information is available in the Record of Processing DPR-EC-00685 (Europa Analytics).

Enabling these cookies is not strictly necessary for the websites to work but it will provide you with a better browsing experience. You can delete or block these cookies, but if you do that, some features of the websites may not work as intended.

The cookie-related information is not used to identify data subjects personally and the pattern data is fully under the Commission’s control. These cookies are not used for any purpose other than those described here.

Should you wish to opt your personal data out of our anonymised, aggregated statistics, you can do so on the cookies page. In particular, you can control and/or delete those cookies as you wish.

      a) On the Youth Voice Platform

Analytics cookie - The contractor will use analytics cookies purely for internal research on how they can improve the service they provide for all our users.

The cookies simply assess how you interact with the 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 anonymized statistics are shared with the contractors working on the Copernicus project under contractual agreement with the Commission.

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

Name	Service	Purpose	Cookie type and duration
_pk_id*	Matomo	This cookie is installed by Matomo. The cookie is used to store a unique user ID, keep track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookies store information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to identify unique visitors.	First-party persistent cookie, 13 months
_pk_ses*	Matomo	This cookie is installed by Matomo. The cookie is used to store information of how visitors use a website and helps in creating an analytics report of how the website is doing. The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages visited in an anonymous form.	First-party session cookie, 30min

7. 3. Third party IT tools, including social media

We may use third party IT tools to inform about and promote the above describe activities (see heading 2) through widely used communication channels, including the social media. For detailed information about the use of social media by the European Commission, see the Record of Processing DPR-EC-00073 (Social Media Use by the European Commission).

In order to protect your privacy, our use of third-party IT tools to connect to those services does not set cookies when our website(s) pages are loaded on your computer (or other devices), nor are you immediately redirected to those social media or other websites. Only in the event that you click on a button or “play” on a video to watch it, a cookie of the social media company concerned will be installed on your device. If you do not click on any social media buttons or videos, no cookies will be installed on your device by third parties.

In order to view such third-party content on our website(s), a message will alert you that you need to accept those third parties’ specific Terms and Conditions, including their cookie policies, over which the Commission has no control.

We recommend that users carefully read the relevant privacy policies of the social media tools used. These explain each company’s policy of personal data collection and further processing, their use of data, users' rights and the ways in which users can protect their privacy when using those services.

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.
 

8. What are your rights and how can you exercise them? 

You have specific rights as a ‘data subject’ under Chapter III (Articles 14-25) of Regulation (EU) 2018/1725, in particular the right to access, your personal data and to rectify them in case your personal data are inaccurate or incomplete. Where applicable, you have the right to erase your personal data, to restrict the processing of your personal data, to object to the processing, and the right to data portability.

You have consented to provide your personal data to DG.EAC.B.3 for the present processing operation. You can withdraw your consent at any time by notifying the Data Controller. The withdrawal will not affect the lawfulness of the processing carried out before you have withdrawn the consent.

You can exercise your rights by contacting the Data Controller, or in case of conflict the Data Protection Officer. If necessary, you can also address the European Data Protection Supervisor. Their contact information is given under Heading 9 below. 

Where you wish to exercise your rights in the context of one or several specific processing operations, please provide their description (i.e. their Record reference(s) as specified under Heading 10 below) in your request.

Once ready and published, this privacy statement can be consulted on the European Year of Youth webpage on the European Youth Portal, in the "Privacy" section in the footer. Furthermore, the privacy statement will be shared with the data subjects immediately once their e-mail address is known. 

9. Contact information

• The Data Controller

If you would like to exercise your rights under Regulation (EU) 2018/1725, or if you have comments, questions or concerns, or if you would like to submit a complaint regarding the collection and use of your personal data, please feel free to contact the Data Controller, DG.EAC.B.3 via EYY2022@ec.europa.eu 

• The Data Protection Officer (DPO) of the Commission

You may contact the Data Protection Officer (DATA-PROTECTION-OFFICER@ec.europa.eu) with regard to issues related to the processing of your personal data under Regulation (EU) 2018/1725.

• The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS)

You have the right to have recourse (i.e. you can lodge a complaint) to the European Data Protection Supervisor (edps@edps.europa.eu) if you consider that your rights under Regulation (EU) 2018/1725 have been infringed as a result of the processing of your personal data by the Data Controller.

10. Where to find more detailed information?

The Commission Data Protection Officer (DPO) publishes the register of all processing operations on personal data by the Commission, which have been documented and notified to him. You may access the register via the following link: http://ec.europa.eu/dpo-register.

This specific processing operation has been included in the DPO’s public register with the following Record reference: DPR-EC-12988.2