PRIVACY POLICY RTDS e.U

Last updated: 24th March 2026

 

1. SCOPE AND CONTACT

RTDS e.U. is a consulting company based in Vienna, Austria. The company focuses on developing proposals for collaborative research and development projects, as well as providing related services such as proposal preparation, organizing training workshops and events, and conducting surveys.

RTDS e.U. is the owner of the brand RTDS-Group (EU Trademark registration No. 1129542). This brand covers the following services defined according to the International Classification of Goods and Services established by the Nice Agreement 1957.

  • 35 : commercial administration of the licensing of the goods and services of others; dissemination of advertising matter; outsourcing services [business assistance]; professional business consultancy; business management consultancy; advisory services for business management; business management assistance; business information; commercial administration of the licensing of the goods and services of others; business investigations; public relations; writing of publicity texts; marketing; marketing research; marketing studies.
  • 41: Arranging and conducting of colloquiums; arranging and conducting of conferences; arranging and conducting of congresses; film production, other than advertising films; layout services, other than for advertising purposes; organization of exhibitions for cultural or educational purposes; scriptwriting services; writing of texts, other than publicity texts; arranging and conducting of seminars; arranging and conducting of symposiums; teaching / educational services / instruction services; arranging and conducting of workshops [training]; EXCLUDING Education and training services in the fields of computer hardware and computer software relating to computer simulation of power systems.
  • 45: Intellectual property consultancy; licensing of intellectual property; copyright management; legal research; mediation; monitoring intellectual property rights for legal advisory purposes; on-line social networking services; registration of domain names [legal services].

In accordance with the Strategic Alliance Agreement between RTDS. e.U. and RTDS Association, the latter, has is authorized to use the trademark. (See Strategic Alliance Agreement between RTDS e.U. and RTDS Association).

Consequently, the brand RTDS Group is made up of several different legal entities for different stakeholders. The Strategic Alliance Agreement defined the scope of the contractual obligations concerning data protection issues for the handling of personal data as required for the operation of both organization Privacy Policy – RTDS Association.

Nevertheless, this Privacy Policy is issued on behalf of RTDS e.U. When we mention “we”, “us” or “our” in this Privacy Policy, we are referring ONLY to RTDS e.U. responsible for processing your personal data (being the “data controller”) for the list of services covers under the RTDS-Group Trademark.

This Privacy Policy applies to personal data collected by RTDS e.U. on its website (www.rtds-group.com) which links to this Privacy Policy, via registration forms, surveys, competition entries, at events, or if you contact us (online, by post, telephone or social media).

Your privacy is very important to us and this Privacy Policy sets out how we will process your personal data and what rights you have in respect of your own personal data. We will securely store and process personal data which you have provided to us.

The aim of this Privacy Policy is to tell you how we will use any personal data we collect, or you provide to us. Please read it carefully before you proceed.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or your rights in respect of your personal data, please contact us at compliance@rtds-group.com

 

2. WHAT PERSONAL INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT?

You are not required to provide any personal information in order to browse our website.

However, if you choose to register on our website, subscribe to a service, book a place at an event, request further information, contact us, complete a survey, or provide content for inclusion on our website (e.g., blogs or other online forums), we will collect certain information, including personal data.

The data we collect may include:

  • your title, name, address, business telephone number(s), email address, and gender.
  • your employment details, including your current role and responsibilities, experience, seniority, salary, and education.
  • information about your organisation and the industry in which you work.
  • the areas of interest you have communicated to us, as well as preferences we may infer from your interactions with our products and services.
  • your CV.
  • your marketing communication preferences.
  • your newsletter subscription preferences.
  • your job alert preferences.
  • any data that may be obtained from social networking platforms, but only where you have granted permission; and
  • any other information that you voluntarily provide to us.

We may receive the above information directly from you or from a colleague or corporate contact who registers for a subscription or event on your behalf.
Please note that not all information we request is mandatory for us to provide the service. You are not required to provide any optional information

Device and browsing data: We may automatically collect information about the website you visited before accessing our website and the website you visit after leaving it. We also collect information about the pages you view on our website, the links you click, your IP address, the type of browser you use, and the times at which you access our website. Some of this information is aggregated and does not identify you. However, where you are logged into your account, we may use analytics tools that allow us to associate information about your use of our website with you as an identifiable user.

We may monitor how you interact with our website, including whether you open emails we send and your participation at our events (for example, when you use the bar‑coded name badge provided to you), as well as your activities during such events (such as which exhibitors you engage with). Based on these observations, we may infer certain preferences—for example, which additional brands, subscriptions, or events may be relevant to you or to users with similar profiles. This information is used strictly for our internal purposes, including service improvement, analytics, and marketing.

Cookies: We use cookies to collect information about you online. Please read our “Cookies Policy” for further information on the cookies we use and how you can enable/disable them.

Financial Information: In addition, we will keep a record of any financial transaction you make with us.

Event filming and photography: We may photograph, film, broadcast or record our events in which case we may process information such as your voice, likeness and image if you are identifiable from such photograph, film, broadcast or recording.

 

3. HOW WILL YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION BE USED AND SHARED?

In accordance with data protection legislation, we will only process your personal data where we have a lawful basis for doing so. These bases are:  (i) where it is necessary for the performance of a contract we have with you; (ii) where you have provided your consent; (iii) where it is necessary for us to comply with a legal obligation that we are subject to; or (iv) where it is in our (or a third party’s) legitimate interests and such interests are not overridden by your interests or fundamental rights and freedoms.

Specifically, we’ve set out in this Privacy Policy the purposes for which we process your personal data and the lawful basis on which we carry out such processing.

The personal information we collect allows us to (“Purpose”):

  • provide the services you have ordered or signed up for (necessary for a contract).
  • administer our websites (such as access controls) and provide customer services (legitimate interests, of us and our customers, to ensure a good quality of service and security).
  • notify you of key information in relation to your subscription or any events you are attending (necessary for a contract and legitimate interests, of our customers, to ensure they are up to date with necessary information).
  • gather information to form statistical and trend analysis including to monitor user demographic (legitimate interests, of us, so we can better understand those that use our products and services and improve our products, services, events and marketing practices).
  • monitor your use of our products and services and attendance at events, as well as your responses to targeted direct marketing emails,  in order to build up customer profiles (including through use of analytics software) (legitimate interests, of us, to help us identify content and marketing materials which will be of interest to you and other customers like you).
  • monitor interactions at events, including which exhibition stands attendees visit, for the purpose of gaining insights into our events and improving how we organise future events (legitimate interests).
  • communicate with you including responding to your enquiries (necessary for a contract, or consent).
  • contact you to seek your feedback (legitimate interests, of us, in helping us improve).
  • meet legal, regulatory and compliance requirements (necessary to comply with our legal obligations).
  • aggregate information about you with other users (legitimate interests, of us, to better understand what services our users will be interested in).
  • verify your identity and details of your payment method or credit card amount (where payments are required) (necessary to comply with our legal obligations).

Marketing Communications

Where we have informed you that we will do so (for example, during the registration process for our websites, website services, or events), we may contact you from time to time by email, SMS, telephone, or post about services that may be of interest to you

Group companies: We may share your personal information for administrative purposes with other related organization authorized to use the brand “RTDS Group”. The brand “RTDS Group” is a registered European Trademark under the number 1129542, owned by RTDS e.U.

Particularly, RTDS e.U may transfer your personal data (including name, job title and contact details) to RTDS Association (See Privacy Policy of RTDS Association) to facilitate the submission, evaluation and implementation of project proposals developed by RTDS e.U as required by the privacy statement of the corresponding funding agency and in accordance to the Data Processing Agreement between RTDS e.U and RTDS Association.

We may also share your registration information with other third parties as required to comply with contractual obligations and/or only with your consent.

Other ways in which we use and share your personal information

Events (including among other conferences, awards and round tables): Where you are attending an event organised by us, we may share your name, job title and company with the other attendees of the event (including making this information available via the event app, on social media sites and in our event guide). Generally we will ask for your consent to share this information, but for some of our events, such as our awards and round table events (and any other events which we inform you of) we rely on legitimate interests to share this information because it is a fundamental part of such events (for example, for table plans and networking purposes).  Where you are attending a virtual event, we may use a third-party technology service provider to help facilitate this, meaning the information you provide to us may also be shared with them (for the purpose of administering the event).

If you enter one of our awards and are short-listed, your name and organisation details will be included in the award lists and materials used and distributed in relation to the award (legitimate interests, of us and other entrants and attendees of the awards, to allow other entrants and those attending the awards to see who is in the running).

We will share your registration information with the sponsors of our events who may contact you for marketing purposes (legitimate interests, of us, to attract the most appropriate sponsors for the event and of our sponsors, to facilitate business-to-business communication between them and our registrants before, during and after our events). We or our sponsors may contact you ahead of our events to enquire whether you’d like to set up a meeting with our sponsors at the relevant event.

We may make available your job title and company to potential attendees of the following year’s event, as part of marketing and promotion of such event (legitimate interests, of us, to attract the most appropriate delegates for the event).

Where you register to attend certain seminars or presentations at our events hosted by a third party, we may share your registration information with such third party (legitimate interests, of our hosts, so they know who has attended their events and so they can contact attendees about their goods and services).

Where you indicate that you want us to share your details with exhibitors at events (for example, by scanning your event badge at an exhibitor’s stand) we share your information with those exhibitors who may contact you about their goods and services (consent).

Event filming and photography: We process your personal data comprised in the film, photograph, broadcast or recording of the event so that we have a record of our events for our own internal purposes such as training (legitimate interests, of us, to train our staff and help us better understand how best to run future events), to create marketing content for our promotion of future events (legitimate interests, of us, to encourage future sponsorship, attendance and awards entries), to supplement editorial content on an event (legitimate interests, of us, to provide fuller and more engaging content). We may also share this with future sponsors (legitimate interests, of us, to show potential sponsors what the event is like and to encourage sponsorship) and existing sponsors and clients (legitimate interests, of us and our sponsors and clients, to share potential marketing material with our sponsors and clients so that they can promote their involvement in the event).

Sponsored webinars and whitepapers: Where you sign up for a sponsored webinar or to access sponsored content such as whitepapers, we share your sign-up details with that sponsor who may contact you (legitimate interests, of us, to enable us to offer our users premium business content free of charge, and of our sponsors, to facilitate business-to-business relationships). We use third party technology service providers to help facilitate this.  If you do not wish for your details to be shared with a sponsor, we usually offer an alternative means of accessing this content.

Your employer: Where your personal information has been provided to us to meet the request of your employer as part of a wider corporate subscription (i.e. your employer enters in a contract with RTDS e.U. where you are a listed contact employee). We may share information about your use of the service with your employer (legitimate interests, of your employer, so they can understand how their staff are contributing to the purpose of the contracted services).

Service providers: We may employ the services of third-party service providers, including (but not limited to) technology platforms, file storing, to help us in certain areas such as website hosting, maintenance, the operation of events and customer relationship management, including tracking our marketing efforts. In some cases, the third party may receive your personal data (legitimate interests, of us, for service efficiency and to benefit from third party expertise). However, always, we will control and be responsible for the use of your personal data and we will endeavor to ensure that our service providers are bound by contractual obligations to only process your personal data in accordance with our instructions.

Aggregate information: As mentioned above, we may use aggregated information so we can administer and improve our website, analyse trends and gather broad demographic information and detect suspicious or fraudulent transactions. We may pass this information to third parties. In most cases this information will be anonymised, meaning that you will not be able to identify from it.

Surveys: If you complete a survey, unless we inform you otherwise, your answers will be aggregated and anonymized for research and analysis purposes. However, if you choose to provide any information in your response to a survey which identifies you (e.g. name, job title), we may be able to identify with you from this. If you choose to submit your email address to enter any prize associated with the survey, this will be used to administer the prize only and will not be linked to your survey responses (necessary for a contract). We may share your responses in an aggregated and anonymised form with third parties carrying out research relating to the topics covered in the survey or, if the survey relates to your use of one of our subscription products, and this forms part of a corporate subscription taken out by your employer for you and other employees, we may share information provided in your survey responses about your use of the subscription with your employer (legitimate interests, for research purposes). If you have included information about yourself in your survey responses (e.g. name, job title), third parties or your employer (as appropriate) may be able to identify you from this.

Other:

We process personal data about individuals who feature in our publications, content and services, including information we have researched from publicly available sources (legitimate interests and for journalistic purposes).

We also use publicly available sources to research prospective customers to send them marketing information about products and services relevant to them (legitimate interests, to grow our business).

If you are submitting personal data on behalf of another or are submitting personal data which may be used publicly on our products, you should only do so where you have the consent of the individual and it will be your responsibility to ensure that the individual is made aware of this Privacy Policy and our processing of their personal data.

Administration of justice: We may occasionally be required by law, court order or governmental authority, public R&D funding agencies to disclose certain types of personal data (necessary to comply with a legal obligation, or for legitimate interests in connection with a legal claim against us).  Examples of the type of situation where this would occur would be:

  • in the administration of justice; or
  • where we must defend ourselves legally.

Opting out

If at any point you would like to opt-out of receiving any communications from us, or would like to change the channels that we use to contact you, please email us, stating your preferences, at compliance@rtds-group.com

4. TRANSFER OF YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION OUTSIDE THE EEA

We may transfer some of your personal information to non-EEA contributes such as the New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa, as some of the project partners of RTDS Group are in these jurisdictions. In addition, we and service providers processing personal data on our behalf, transfer personal data to servers outside the EEA including in the United States of America for storage purposes. However, when we transfer your personal information in this way we will endeavor to ensure that adequate safeguard measures are in place so that your personal data is treated in a way that is consistent with and which respects the EU laws on data protection, including via standard contractual clauses and Privacy Shield. If you require further information about our safeguard measures in place you can request it from compliance@rtds-group.com.

 

5. LINKS

Our site may contain links to other websites over which we have no control. We are not responsible for privacy policies or practices of other websites to which you choose to link from this site. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of those other websites so you can understand how they collect, use and share your personal information.

 

6. SECURITY

We have implemented reasonable technical and organisational measures designed to secure your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorised access, use, alteration or disclosure. However, the Internet is an open system, and we cannot guarantee that unauthorised third parties will never be able to defeat those measures or use your personal information for improper purposes.

 

7. YOUR RIGHTS

Under certain circumstances, and in accordance with applicable law, you have the following rights in relation to your personal data:

  • the right to access the personal data we hold about you.
  • the right to receive your personal data in a structured, commonly used, and machine‑readable format.
  • the right to object to the processing of your personal data where we rely on legitimate interests (our own or those of a third party), if you believe that your circumstances give rise to grounds for objection and we do not have compelling legitimate interests to continue the processing.
  • the right to object to decisions made solely by automated means that significantly affect you.
  • where we rely on your consent, the right to withdraw that consent at any time. You may do so using the methods described in this Privacy Policy or any method we specify when obtaining your consent.
  • the right, in certain circumstances, to have your personal data rectified, blocked, erased, or destroyed; and
  • the right to lodge a complaint with your data protection supervisory authority.

These rights can be exercised by contacting us at compliance@rtds-group.com. To protect you, we reserve the right to verify your identity before processing any such request.

If you are unsure about your rights, you can contact the Austrian data protection supervisory authority. However, we would kindly ask you to contact us before doing so. If you contact us in relation to your rights, we will do our best to accommodate your request or objection as soon as possible. Please note, however, that not all rights are absolute.

 

8. UPDATING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

You may review, correct, update or change your personal information at any time by contacting us at compliance@rtds-group.com.

 

9. RETENTION

We will retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law. Accordingly, your personal data may be retained for up to twenty years following the end of the services we provide to you or your last contact with us. This retention period may be extended if an applicable statutory or regulatory obligation requires us to retain the information for a longer period.

 

10. HOW TO CONTACT US

As a reminder, if you have any questions about this statement or your personal information, please contact us at compliance@rtds-group.com