Privacy statement

Your privacy on the Internet is of the utmost importance to us at WHO/Europe (the WHO Regional Office for Europe). Because we gather certain types of information about the users of the WHO/Europe site and services, we want to ensure that you fully understand the terms and conditions surrounding the capture and use of that information. This privacy statement discloses what information we gather and how we use it. This statement applies to the whole WHO/Europe web site – that is, everything covered by the euro.who.int domain name. WHO/Europe provides this web site as a public service.

Information collected and stored automatically

Under contract, we use a third-party online partner that collects information about your visit to the WHO/Europe web site. To do this, we use web cookies. Although the company logs the information coming from our site on our behalf, we control how it may be used. The type of information we collect includes: the Internet protocol (IP) address from which you access the Internet, the date and time, the Internet address of the web site from which you linked directly to our site, the name of the file or the words that you searched, and the browser used to access our site. We use this information to measure the number of visitors to the various sections of our site and system performance, and to identify problem areas. It helps us learn about the geographical distribution of our visitors and the technology they use to access our site. We also use this information to help us expand the coverage of the site and to make it more useful. This information is never connected with personal information.

Personally provided information

If you choose to provide us with personal information by sending an e-mail, or by filling out a form with your personal information and submitting it through our web site, we use that information to respond to your message and to help provide you with the information or material that you request. On occasion, we may study the types of questions sent to us. These studies help us to improve our web site to make it more responsive to the needs of our users. We do not give, share, sell or transfer any personal information to a third party.

If you don't want to share your information

Registering on our site is optional. If you choose not to register or provide personal information, you can still use the WHO/Europe web site. But you will not be able to register for a newsletter, forum, consultation or conference.

We at WHO/Europe view the information that we collect as a valued asset of which we take great care. We will not share, sell, distribute or rent your information – including but not limited to your e-mail address – to anyone.

Links to other sites

Some WHO/Europe web subsites provide links to other Internet sites that provide health information. Once you link to another site, you are subject to the privacy statement of the new site. WHO/Europe does not endorse the sites to which it links.

Security

WHO/Europe maintains this site and employs a range of technology to protect the information maintained on its systems from loss, misuse, unauthorized access or disclosure, alteration or destruction.

How to contact us

If you have any questions or concerns about the WHO/Europe privacy statement, please contact us at [email protected].

Notification of changes

If there are any changes to this privacy policy, we will post them on our home page, so that you are completely aware of how the changes will affect you.

Glossary

Cookie
A cookie is a small amount of data (which often includes an anonymous unique identifier) that is sent to your browser from a web site's computers and stored on your computer's hard drive. Each web site can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser's preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) your browser only permits a web site to access the cookies it has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other sites. Once the user has closed the browser, the cookie will no longer be accessed during that session.

Many sites do this whenever a user visits, to track online traffic flows.

Cookies record information about your online preferences. Users can set their computers to accept all cookies, to notify them when a cookie is issued, or not to receive cookies at any time. You can still use the WHO/Europe web site to its fullest advantage even if your browser's preference is set to reject cookies.

Internet protocol address

When your web browser or e-mail application requests a web page or e-mail from another computer on the Internet, it automatically gives that computer the address to which it should send the information. This is called your computer's Internet protocol (IP) address. IP address information helps us to gauge the geographical distribution of our visitors. It does not provide any personal information about the owner of the address.