Privacy & GDPR Statement

The Aquila Consortium is the data controller for personal data processed through this website. This statement explains what data we collect, why, and how you can exercise your rights under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

1. Data we collect and why

1.1 Contact form

When you use the contact form, we collect your name, email address, subject, and message. This data is transmitted by email to consortium members who handle enquiries; it is not stored in our database. The legal basis is your consent (GDPR Art. 6(1)(a)) and our legitimate interest in responding to correspondence (Art. 6(1)(f)).

1.2 Membership data

When you become a member of the consortium (by accepting an invitation), we store:

Name (first name and last name)
Email address(es)
Institution / location
Biography, ORCID identifier, homepage URL (optional, provided by you)
Forgejo account login (derived from your email address at onboarding)
Membership dates (joined, alumnus date if applicable)

This data is processed on the basis of the membership contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) and is necessary to manage your participation in the consortium.

1.3 Scientific activity

We record your authorship of posts, talks, claimed publications, and collaboration project content (updates and comments) that you create on this platform. These records support the consortium’s collaborative work and are retained for as long as you are an active or alumni member (Art. 6(1)(b)).

1.4 Authentication & sessions

When you log in via our OAuth2 provider, we store a session cookie (PHPSESSID) and issue a short-lived JSON Web Token (JWT) valid for 24 hours. These are strictly necessary for authentication and expire automatically (Art. 6(1)(f) — security and operational necessity).

1.5 Email log

Every outgoing email sent by the platform (invitations, activity digests) is recorded in an internal log containing the recipient address, subject, timestamp, and any delivery error. This log is used for administrative auditing (Art. 6(1)(f)).

1.6 Audience measurement

We count page views so we can tell which of our pages are read. This is done entirely on our own server, and it is deliberately built so that it cannot identify you.

For each page view we record the date and time, the path (never the query string), the host of the referring site (never the full referring address), a two-letter country code, your browser and operating system families, whether the request looked like a crawler, and the HTTP status.

What we do not do is the important part:

No cookie, no local storage, no script. Nothing is written to or read from your device, and no JavaScript runs to measure you. This is why there is no cookie banner on this site.
No third party. No request is made to any external service. The country lookup reads a database file stored on our own server, so your address never leaves it.
Your address is never stored. It is truncated to a network prefix (/24 for IPv4, /48 for IPv6) before it is used at all, and even that prefix is only ever kept inside a one-way hash.
No raw browser identification string is stored either.

To count returning readers within a single day we compute a hash of the truncated network prefix, your browser identification string, a secret known only to this server, and the date. Because the date is part of it, the hash is rebuilt from scratch at midnight UTC and two days’ values for the same reader have no computable relationship. The consequence is stated plainly: we can count visitor-days, and we cannot compute weekly or monthly unique visitors at all. We do not measure session length, bounce rate, scroll depth, or funnels, and we do not track you across other sites — none of that is possible without an identifier we have deliberately refused to keep.

Requests carrying DNT: 1 or Sec-GPC: 1 are not recorded at all. Our legal basis is legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)); the processing is limited to aggregate first-party statistics, uses a truncated address, is matched against no other dataset, and has a limited retention, which is the basis on which CNIL exempts audience measurement from consent.

2. Cookies

Cookie	Purpose	Consent required?
`PHPSESSID`	PHP session — authentication	No (strictly necessary)

That is the complete list. This site sets no analytics cookie, stores nothing else on your device, and runs no measurement script — which is why you are not asked to consent to any. Two optional display preferences (colour mode and reading width) are kept in your browser’s own local storage if you use those controls; they never leave your device and are never read by the server.

We do not sell or share your personal data with third parties for marketing purposes.

Forgejo instance (git.aquila-consortium.org): a Forgejo account is created for each new member as part of the onboarding process. The account login (derived from your email address) and your email address are transmitted to this service.

4. Your rights

Under the GDPR, you have the following rights regarding your personal data:

Right of access (Art. 15): obtain a copy of all data we hold about you.
Right to rectification (Art. 16): correct inaccurate or incomplete data — you can do this at any time via your profile page in the members’ area.
Right to erasure (Art. 17): request deletion or anonymisation of your personal data.
Right to object (Art. 21): object to any processing based on our legitimate interest. For audience measurement specifically, sending a DNT: 1 or Sec-GPC: 1 header — a setting in most browsers — stops the recording before it happens, on every request, with no account and no cookie needed.

On access and erasure of audience-measurement data (Art. 11). The visit records described in §1.6 contain no identifier we can link to you: the address is truncated before use and never stored, the daily hash is one-way and is rebuilt every midnight, and no browser identification string is kept. We are therefore genuinely unable to find “your” rows in order to show or delete them, and Art. 11 does not require us to acquire additional data in order to become able to. We say so plainly rather than offering a process we could not honour. This applies only to §1.6; every other category above is fully covered by the rights listed here.

To exercise the rights of access or erasure, or for any other privacy enquiry, please use our contact form.

We will respond within 30 days as required by the GDPR.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority — in France: the CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés), 3 Place de Fontenoy, 75007 Paris.

5. Data retention

Data	Retention
Session token (JWT)	24 hours
Contact form	Never stored (email only)
Member profile & activity	Until an erasure request is fulfilled
Email log	Administrative retention (no fixed schedule)
Visit records (§1.6)	90 days, then irreversibly reduced to per-day counts

The visitor identifier in §1.6 is gone sooner than that in any case — it is rebuilt from scratch every midnight UTC, so it never links two days together. At 90 days the raw rows are deleted outright and only totals per day survive: how many views, how many visitor-days, from which countries, to which pages. Those totals carry no identifier of any kind, so the deletion is an erasure rather than a compaction, and it cannot be undone or reconstructed.

If the 90-day figure above is ever changed in this site’s configuration, this statement is changed with it — otherwise it stops being true.

Last updated: August 2026