What you need to know about Aarhus University's processing of your personal data

Here you will find information about why and how Aarhus University process your personal data.

1. Who is the data controller?

Aarhus University (AU) is data controllers for the processing of your personal data. Our information:

Aarhus University                             
Nordre Ringgade 1                                 
8000 Aarhus C                                                      

CVR-no.: 31119103        

Aarhus University has a Data Protection Officer. You can contact our Data Protection Officer at dpo@au.dk.

If you have any questions about the research project, including participation and processing of personal data, please contact Martin Bækgaard, Professor and Principal Investigator, Mads Pieter van Luttervelt, and Mathias Rask Østergaard-Nielsen Assistant Professors, Department of Political Science, poliadmi@ps.au.dk

2. What is personal data?

Personal data is any information that directly or indirectly can be attributed to you. This can, for example be your name, your age, but it can also be a lot of information that, when linked to other information, tells something about you, for example your address combined with information from a public register.

3. Why do we process personal data about you?

As a university in Denmark, AU is obligated to conduct research. To conduct research, we often need to process information about people. In order to conduct research, we often need to process personal data. In this research project, we process personal data to examine how civil servants respond to different fictitious political proposal about reforms of democratic institutions.

4. What information do we process about you?

We will process the following categories of personal data about you: general personal data, special categories of personal data, and confidential data.

For example, information such as age, gender, nationality, political opinions, employment status. 

We collect the information from your response to our questionnaire and from the information you provided to Prolific regarding your employment sector. 

5. What is the legal basis for processing your personal data?

The processing of personal data requires that there is a legal basis for the processing in the data protection rules or other legislation. We process your personal data on the basis of section 10(1) of the Danish Data Protection Act and Article 6(1)(e) of the General Data Protection Regulation. 

6. How long do we process your personal data?

As soon as we complete the data collection, we will fully anonymize the data and therefore you will not be identifiable in our dataset. At present, it is not possible to say for how long Aarhus University will process your data exactly, as this depends on the purpose of the research project and the rules on storage according to responsible research practice. However, according to policy at Aarhus University, we will keep the data for a minimum of five years after the research goals has been achieved. This is to be able to provide data for replication purposes etc. 

When assessing how long it is necessary to process your personal data, we take into account, among other things: achieving the research purpose, disseminating the research results and being able to account for the accuracy of the research findings for a period after the research has been completed (e.g. according to the rules on responsible research practice or according to law).

7. Who do we share your information with?

We must provide you with information about who we share your personal data with. In this research project, we will not share data containing your personal information. It may be necessary (for instance by request of scientific journals to replicate analyses) to share your data in a form where you are non-identifiable at a later time. In this case, we will only share them with recipients who have a legitimate research purpose. 

8. What are your rights?

According to the General Data Protection Regulation, you have a number of rights when we process your personal data. Your rights are limited when the processing is carried out for research purposes. Therefore, you can read below what rights you have in connection with the processing of your personal data in research.

Rights in research

• You have the right to have your data erased if the erasure of your data does not make it impossible or seriously impede the achievement of the research purpose.
• In the event that we erase your personal data, we are obliged to notify any recipients of your personal data of the deletion, unless this proves impossible or is disproportionately difficult.

However, be aware that after data collection is finished we will anonymize the dataset and therefore it will no longer be possible to identify you in the dataset and therefore also not possible to erase your data.

You can assert your rights by contacting Martin Bækgaard, Professor and Principal Investigator, Mads Pieter van Luttervelt, and Mathias Rask Østergaard-Nielsen Assistant Professors, Department of Political Science, poliadmi@ps.au.dk. 

9. How can you complain?

The processing of your personal data and your trust are important to us. Therefore, we hope that you will contact us if you have any questions or are unhappy with the way we process your information.

If you nevertheless wish to complain about our processing of your personal data, you can contact the supervisory authority in Denmark:

Danish Data Protection Agency (Datatilsynet)

Carl Jacobsens Vej 35

DK-2500 Valby