Privacy Policy

EUobserver is committed to protecting our users' privacy. We seek to be fully transparent about our data practices and their privacy implications.

We believe the following to be the most relevant and practical things you need to know.

General

When visiting EUobserver, general access information such as your IP address and browser details are logged for technical purposes. These log files are permanently deleted after four weeks.

EUobserver uses Google Analytics (GA) for readership statistics and event tracking. GA uses multiple first-party cookies to measure user-interactions.

EUobserver may display banners or other widgets from selected third parties. This includes Google Ad Manager for serving limited non-personalised ads — we do not participate in any ad networks — and embeds from Twitter (do-not-track enabled) and YouTube (in privacy-enhanced mode).

As an additional privacy measure, we recommend you set your browser to block all third-party cookies.

Newsletter

You may choose to sign up for our newsletter by providing your email address and, optionally, your name. The sign-up process uses double opt-in. We provide direct unsubscribe links in all of our newsletters for easy removal.

Newsletter subscriptions are managed by EUobserver using the MailChimp platform.

Membership

You may choose to join EUobserver to get instant access to articles. When you do so, you must provide your email address, name, billing details, and a password. You may opt-in to our newsletter.

Very occasionally, we may contact members with membership benefits and offers. You can easily unsubscribe from these mailings.

Membership data is managed by EUobserver using Stripe for secure payment processing. Stripe collects identifying information about the devices that connect to its services. Stripe uses this information to operate and improve the services it provides to us, including for fraud detection. To ensure PCI compliance EUobserver does not store your original credit card details, instead tokenisation is used.

Passwords are securely hashed using bcrypt and a random salt to avoid leakage of passwords in plain text.

Payments are recurring at monthly or yearly intervals, depending on the plan picked on registration, and will be charged automatically to your credit card until the subscription is cancelled.

You may cancel anytime.

We use multiple technical cookies, as well as browser local storage, to manage our membership system. We include your customer number in requests to GA for membership usage statistics.

We will never trade your newsletter or membership details.

Other

The EUobserver website uses TLS throughout to help ensure service authentication, data confidentiality and integrity.

EUobserver has processes in place for timely patching of its platform and software. We are hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and data is primarily processed and stored in the AWS Frankfurt region.

We aim at privacy awareness across all of our staff. We use two-factor authentication internally, in all places practically possible, to help safeguard access to systems and data.

You may contact us for data deletion requests. Under Belgium law we are required to retain accounting documents, such as invoices, for seven years.

Questions

EUobserver operates with Belgium as our lead data-protection supervisory authority.

We welcome your questions regarding privacy. Please contact us electronically or via postal mail. We will reply immediately.