Privacy Policy

Privacy policy of the European Society for Applied Mathematics.

Your privacy matters to us. The European Society for Applied Mathematics (“ESAM”, “we”, “us”) is committed to handling responsibly any personal information collected through our websites and services. This policy explains what we collect, why we collect it, how we use it, and the choices you have.

Guiding Principles

When collecting, storing and processing your personal data, we follow these principles:

• We identify the purpose of collection before or at the time personal information is collected.
• We use personal information only for the purposes we have specified, or for compatible purposes, unless we obtain your consent or are required by law to do otherwise.
• We retain personal information only for as long as necessary to fulfil those purposes.
• We collect personal information by lawful and fair means and, where appropriate, with your knowledge or consent.
• We keep personal data relevant, accurate, complete and up to date to the extent necessary for its purpose.
• We protect personal information with reasonable security safeguards against loss, theft, unauthorised access, disclosure, copying, use or modification.
• We make information about our data-handling policies and practices readily available to you.

What Information We Collect and How We Use It

Membership Data

To manage memberships and provide services to our members, ESAM collects, stores and uses personal information including your name, postal address, email address, institutional affiliation, and payment data for processing membership fees.

Contest and Event Registration

When you register for a contest (such as EuroMCM), a conference, or another event we organise, we collect the information needed to administer your participation. This may include your name, email address, institution, country, team composition, and academic level. We use this information to run the event, communicate with participants and advisors, judge submissions, and issue certificates and awards. Contest results and award designations may be published as part of the official record of the competition.

Newsletter

If you sign up for our newsletter, we use your email address to send you updates about our activities and services. You can opt out at any time, for example by using the unsubscribe link included in every email.

Automatically Collected Information

Some information is collected automatically when you visit the ESAM website and interact with its features.

Log Data

When you visit our site, we automatically receive log data about your interactions with it, such as browser type, operating system, referring web page, approximate location, IP address, device information, search terms, and cookie information. We anonymise personal identifiers such as IP addresses at the earliest technically possible stage and use them only to derive an approximate location. The full IP address is never written to disk.

We use log data to improve the site, protect your data, detect problems or irregularities, conduct analytics, and operate the service reliably. Log data is kept for a maximum of 24 months.

Cookies and Local Storage

We use cookies and local storage to improve your experience on the ESAM website. These browser technologies allow us to store small pieces of data in your browser in order to:

• keep essential site functions working, such as secure login and session management,
• better understand how visitors interact with the website,
• monitor aggregated usage patterns.

Cookies store personal data only in pseudonymous form. Non-essential cookies are set only with your consent, which you can give or withdraw at any time via the “Cookies” link in the website footer. You can also block or delete cookies through your browser settings.

Who We Share Information With

Service Providers

Third-party companies provide us with services including hosting, storage, backup, maintenance, virtual infrastructure, email delivery, payment processing, and analytics. Some of these providers may need to access or use personal information to perform services on our behalf. This always happens under our instruction and in compliance with policies and procedures designed to protect your data.

Links to Third-Party Sites

The ESAM website may contain links to other websites whose privacy policies differ from ours. If you use those websites, the data you share with them is governed by their privacy policies, not this one.

Enforcement Requests and Applicable Laws

In exceptional situations we may share your information with a third party if we need to:

• comply with applicable law, regulation, or legal process,
• protect the security or integrity of our services,
• protect our users or the public from harmful or illegal activities (for example, to prevent spam and abuse).

International Transfer of Information

We collect information globally and primarily store it within the European Union. Whenever personal information is transferred across borders, we take measures to protect it, relying on appropriate safeguards under the GDPR such as adequacy decisions of the European Commission (including the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, where applicable) or standard contractual clauses.

Our web analytics provider processes website usage data in anonymised and aggregated form and does not collect personally identifiable information.

Your Rights

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you have the right to access, rectify, or erase your personal data, to restrict or object to its processing, and to data portability. Where processing is based on consent, you may withdraw that consent at any time without affecting the lawfulness of processing carried out before the withdrawal. To exercise these rights, contact us at contact@esam.science. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy may change from time to time. You will be informed of changes when accessing our website, and the most current version is always available at https://esam.science/privacy. If the way your data is collected, stored, processed or shared changes substantially, we will treat previously given consent as withdrawn and ask you to renew it.

Contact

European Society for Applied Mathematics
contact@esam.science

Effective: March 14th, 2026.