Data Protection

We treat your data as confidential. ETH Zurich endeavours only to collect personal data that is absolutely necessary for carrying out its tasks (data minimisation).

General information

We handle the data we store with care and protect it from misuse. We also choose not to share usage data about our web presence with third parties without your consent. In accordance with Article 13 of the Swiss Federal Constitution and data protection regulations, every person is entitled to have their privacy protected and to have their personal data protected against misuse. ETH Zurich upholds this principle on its web presence.

This Privacy Policy applies for web presence of the SCINE project under the domain "scine.ethz.ch" and personal data collected there, as well as for all subdomains, provided they explicitly refer to this Privacy Policy. For all other subdomains or websites connected with ETH, different or additional privacy policies and notices may apply and, in this case, we refer you to the creators of the websites in question for more precise information. Individual departments, projects or teams at ETH Zurich operate applications that can be used via the web or smartphones. In these cases, different or additional data protection regulations may apply for specific use cases.

This privacy policy may be amended at any time without advance notice.

Hyperlinks

ETH Zurich does not have any influence over external pages to which it shares hyperlinks, nor over external pages that share hyperlinks to the content of ETH Zurich. By extension, we cannot guarantee in respect of external pages that the information and services they contain are correct or that they are free of malware (such as viruses). The respective external service provider bears full responsibility for these and we therefore do not accept any responsibility for such websites or web services.

What happens to your data?

  • Storage and deletion: Where possible, we try to limit the processing of personal data on the SCINE web pages to data that is required to provide a functioning, user-friendly internet presence and to fulfil our statutory duty, and, in addition, to data that you provide us with of your own accord. Personal data that we collect is only stored for as long as required to fulfil the purpose in question. Legal requirements or other obligations may result in longer periods of storage.
  • Storage of data when filling in a form: If you fill in a form on a SCINE web page, we will collect the data that you enter. This data may also be shared with third parties to fulfil the purpose in question. In addition, we store metadata (IP address, timestamp, browser) in order to trace abuse or for troubleshooting and bug fixing.
  • Cookies: We use cookies on our website. Cookies are small text files that are stored on your computer for a set period of time when you visit a SCINE page. You can deactivate some or all cookies at any time by adjusting your browser settings or you can delete them manually. If cookies are deactivated, you may no longer be able to use all the features of our website. Moreover, we only use first-party cookies. We do not use cookies from third-party services, such as advertising networks or social media platforms.
  • Social networks and other third-party services: We do not host any advertising on the SCINE web pages. For this reason, we do not store or transfer any personal data to advertising services (such as advertising networks, advertising brokers or exchanges).
  • Logs: We save certain metadata about your user behaviour in log files for troubleshooting purposes and to trace abuse of our web presence. This data includes the IP address, date, time, browser request and information transmitted about the device used, including the operating system and browser. We do not use log files to analyse your user behaviour or associate it with other collected data. We periodically delete this type of data.

Your rights

You have the right to request information about the processing of your personal data at no cost and at any time. To do this, get in touch with your direct point of contact or with the contact named in the legal notice. Additional rights such as the right to data erasure, data rectification, restriction of data processing and the right to data portability are in place as prescribed by law.

The collection of certain data for the purpose of making the website available and the storage of data in log files is strictly necessary to operate our website. As such, there is no right to object to this on the part of users of our website. We do not use log files to analyse your user behaviour or associate it with other collected data.

Data security

During website visits, we use encrypted data communication based on TLS in conjunction with the highest level of encryption supported by your browser. You will recognise whether a particular web page is being transmitted over an encrypted connection by the closed key or lock symbol in your browser’s address bar.

When processing your data, we also take appropriate technical and organisational security measures in general to protect your data against accidental or intentional tampering, partial or complete loss, destruction and any unauthorised access by third parties. Our security measures are in line with the current state of technology and are improved accordingly on an ongoing basis.

Operation

The web servers for operating the SCINE website are generally managed by the IT Services department of ETH Zurich itself. Certain services may also be operated by external partners. In these cases, it is particularly important to us that data is processed within Switzerland or the EU and that no data is transferred to countries with an inadequate level of data protection (in accordance with Annex 1 of the Data Protection Ordinance5 [DPO; SR 235.1]) The same data protection requirements apply to external partners as to internally operated applications.