This notice explains what Ties holds about you, why, and what you can ask us to do about it. Ties is the community platform of the LONELY-EU consortium, funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe grant agreement No 101177225.
Who is responsible
The controller is the Annecy Behavioral Science Lab, 94 route de Filly, 74410 Saint-Jorioz, France.
Our data protection officer is reachable at ella@absl.io. Write there with anything in this notice, including requests about your own data.
What we hold, and why
Your account and profile. Your name, email address, and whatever you choose to add: the country you live in, city or region, institution, role, a short bio, languages, discipline, the populations you work with, research methods, your ORCID, links to pre-registrations, data and materials, and, if you want one, the address of your LinkedIn profile. There is also an optional field for the country you are from, which we ask because people often work in one country and come from another, and that shapes what they bring here. It is optional, it carries a “prefer not to say” option, and nothing follows from leaving it blank. We hold this to run the platform and to let members find each other. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a working professional network, Article 6(1)(f).
What you post. Discussions, replies and attachments, kept for as long as the platform runs so that conversations remain readable. We keep them for five years after the grant ends, and then delete them.
What you mark as helpful. Posts, replies and registry entries carry a Helpful mark. When you use it we store that you did, so that you can take it back and so that the same person cannot mark the same thing twice. Other members see only a number, never who is in it. There is no running total against your name anywhere, and nothing on this platform is decided by it. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a working professional network, Article 6(1)(f). Ask us and we remove every mark you have given.
Events you propose. If you add something to the events calendar we record the event and that you proposed it, so a moderator can come back to you about it. If the event is published the notice stays on the calendar, because by then it is a public announcement about somebody else’s event, but on request we remove the record that it came from you. Anything still waiting for review is deleted with the rest of your data. Legal basis: Article 6(1)(f).
The public member directory and the network map. Only if you tick the box on your profile. Nothing about you is visible to people outside Ties until you do, and unticking it removes you again. Legal basis: consent, Article 6(1)(a).
The intervention registry. Entries come from the consortium’s mapping questionnaire. Only entries whose contributor chose to be named are published. Entries from people who asked to stay anonymous are not published at all. Contributor email addresses are never published; they are kept only as a one-way hash so that a contributor can later claim their own entry. Legal basis: consent, Article 6(1)(a).
Server records. The server keeps access logs, which include IP addresses. They are kept for 14 days and then deleted.
Where it is kept
Ties runs on servers provided by Hetzner Online GmbH, a German company. The data centre is in Germany, within the European Economic Area.
Two things reach outside the EEA:
- The Item Explorer and the Evidence Explorer are hosted on shinyapps.io, run by Posit, PBC in the United States on Amazon Web Services. Posit acts as a processor for them under a data processing addendum held by the consortium. These two applications load only when you open the tab that contains them, so your browser does not contact the United States unless you ask for one of them.
- Nothing else. Typefaces, map tiles and scripts are served from our own server or from within the EEA. Ties runs no advertising and no third-party analytics.
Where AI is involved, and where it is not
Registry entries are published in the language they were written in. The English version on each entry is a machine translation, checked against the original by a second automated pass. Every translated entry says so on the page, and the original text remains the authoritative version.
The weekly digest posted in the General space is assembled by AI, and each issue says so.
No decision about you is made by automated means, and your personal data is not used to train any model.
Cookies
Ties sets cookies that are needed to keep you signed in and to remember what you have already seen. There are no advertising or analytics cookies, so there is nothing here for you to consent to or refuse.
Who else sees it
Other members see your profile and what you post. People outside Ties see only what you have consented to make public. Our host and the two application providers named above process data on our instructions. We do not sell anything to anyone.
What you can ask us to do
You can ask to see what we hold, correct it, delete it, restrict what we do with it, object to it, or receive it in a portable form. Where we rely on your consent you can withdraw it at any time, and withdrawing is as easy as giving it: untick the box on your profile, or write to us. Withdrawal does not undo what was lawful beforehand.
Requests go to ella@absl.io. We will answer within one month.
If you contributed an approach to the registry and want it corrected or taken down, write to the same address and quote the entry’s reference, the LEU number shown on the entry page.
You can also complain to the French data protection authority, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), 3 place de Fontenoy, 75007 Paris, or at cnil.fr. If you live in another EU country you may complain to your own authority instead.
Changes
This notice was last changed on 4 September 2026. If it changes in a way that affects you, we will say so in the General space.