The present Privacy Statement describes how the European Ombudsman protects your personal data in the framework of the Ombudsman’s public consultation on the midterm review of the Strategy ‘Towards 2019’ and what rights you have as a data subject.

The European Ombudsman wishes to inform the public of the midterm review of the Strategy Towards 2019 and to invite feedback, through a public consultation, on the implementation of the Strategy, and ideas and suggestions for its future development.

The public is invited to participate in the consultation by completing an online questionnaire conducted through the web-based Lime Survey tool.

The survey website uses a session cookie which is essential for parts of the survey site to operate and which has already been set. It will be deleted when you submit the web survey.

The Ombudsman will keep the data for the time necessary for collection or further processing and subsequently archive them. The data will be deleted from the Survey tool once the survey is closed and the results of the survey have been extracted from the tool.

The personal data collected and further processed are data necessary for participation in the consultation, as follows: title, first name, surname, organisation, email, country of residence, language of the contribution, other language one would accept communications in, subject (the title of the consultation) and content (for the most part, the views of the individual on the various questions).

The replies are processed by staff in the Ombudsman's Office. The European Ombudsman may contact respondents to request clarifications and/or to disseminate the results of the consultation.

The contact details of the person responsible for the consultation are provided in the invitation to respond to the consultation published on the Ombudsman’s website.

In the interests of transparency, the Ombudsman normally publishes the respondents’ contributions with their personal information (except e-mail addresses) online. Respondents are given the option to state in the consultation form if they want their contribution to be published in an anonymous way.

Respondents are asked to avoid including unnecessary personal data in their replies, notably personal data of third parties. If such data are included, they will be redacted from the version that is published on the Ombudsman's website.

The legal basis for this processing operation is Article 11 TEU and the Statute of the Ombudsman. Your personal data are processed in accordance with Regulation (EC) N° 45/2001 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data by the EU institutions and bodies and on the free movement of such data.

You have the right to access your personal data and to correct any inaccurate or incomplete personal data, as well as to request their deletion.

To exercise your rights or to obtain any further information, you may apply directly to the Ombudsman. You may also apply to the Ombudsman's Data Protection Officer.

Finally, you have the right of recourse at any time to the European Data Protection Supervisor if you consider that your rights under Regulation (EC) N° 45/2001  have been infringed as a result of the processing of your personal data by the Ombudsman.