Privacy policy

Last Revised: 01-12-2023

Privacy policy Opinia panel

Last change: 01.12.2023

The privacy policy determines how Valicon d.o.o, Kopitarjeva ulica 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Republic of Slovenia, registration number: 5997135000 acquires, stores and uses your personal data. The effective date of the privacy policy is 01.12.2023. This privacy policy applies to your participation in the Opinia web panel (hereinafter: “Panel”).

Please read our privacy policy carefully. We recommend that you appropriately save or print a copy of this privacy policy and any future versions that apply for your record of the consent you have given us.

About us

The data controller of your personal data is Valicon d.o.o., Kopitarjeva ulica 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Republic of Slovenia, registration number: 5997135000 (hereinafter: “Valicon”). In certain cases, your personal data from the Opinia panel may be processed by affiliated companies of the Valicon group of companies (hereinafter: “Valicon Group Affiliates” or “Affiliates” or “Affiliate”) who act as data processors.

The Valicon Group Affiliates which may process your personal data are listed as follows:

Valicon d.o.o., Draškovićeva ulica 54, 10000 Zagreb, Republic of Croatia, OIB: 48343448386;
Valicon d.o.o., Trampina 2, 71000 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, PIB: 103864144
Valicon d.o.o. Kosova, Dukagjini Rezidence, Floor 13, Entrance B, No. 38 business number: 812088400

The processing of your personal data by Valicon Group Affiliates is done on the basis of appropriate intra group contracts concluded between Valicon and its Affiliates. Such contracts include appropriate provisions to ensure the protection of your personal data. When your personal data is transferred to Affiliates outside of the EU/EEA, such transfers are secured in accordance with the transfer mechanisms prescribed in the General Data Protection Regulation (e.g., Standard Contractual Clauses adopted by the European Commission).

In certain situations, when a Valicon Group Affiliate conducts a special research project it may process your personal data as a joint data controller with Valicon. In such case Valicon Group Affiliate and Valicon shall jointly determine the purposes and means of the processing of personal data. The respective Affiliate shall notify you when it acts as a data controller in every case. To determine their mutual rights and responsibilities and regarding the execution of data subject’s rights, Valicon and Valicon Group Affiliate shall execute a data processing agreement utilizing Standard Contractual Clauses published in Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2021/914. The Party responsible for the collection of data from data subjects directly shall be responsible for obtaining data processing consent and shall inform data subjects regarding their rights. Each party will implement and maintain all appropriate technical, administrative, and organizational measures required to: (i) ensure a level of confidentiality and security appropriate to the risks represented by the processing and the nature of personal data; and (ii) prevent unauthorized or unlawful processing of personal data, accidental loss, disclosure or destruction of, or damage to, personal data, all in accordance with the data processing agreement.

In case you have any questions, please contact us via e-mail at: [email protected]

How we acquire, use and otherwise process your personal data

We can obtain your personal data through our website www.opinia.club or when you express your interest in joining the Panel via a forwarded web link.

What types of personal data we collect or acquire from you

We may process the following categories of your personal data:

Basic personal data
Socio-demographic data
Survey data
Sensitive data
Aggregated characteristics of your Internet browser

How we use your personal data (purpose of processing)

We may use your personal data for one or more of the following purposes:

In connection with your participation in the Panel and execution of online surveys for our clients or for use in our own research.
In direct communication with you about changes to the conditions of participation in the Panel and informing the community about activities.
Protection of our business and our business interests, including the purpose of checking past experiences, preventing fraud. This is necessary to protect our legal obligations and to prevent criminal activities, such as fraud, to prevent the misuse of the Opinia panel and to ensure the protection of our business. We will only carry out such checks if the law allows us to do so.
Communication with our business advisors and legal representatives. This is necessary for our legal obligations, in obtaining legal or professional business advice, and we will only provide your personal data, if necessary, to the minimum extent necessary and anonymized wherever possible.
Sharing personal data with third parties (hereinafter: our subcontractors) who are connected with us in regard with our provision of services, such as our business partners, Affiliates, associates, suppliers, independent contractors, providers of various information and communication technology services. For example, we may pass on personal data to subcontractors for data processing services or to send you information that you have requested or conduct interviews for market research projects. Such data will be transferred or made available only to the extent required by the specific purpose. These data will not be used for other purposes, especially not for their own purposes or for the needs of third parties. When we share your personal information, we will do so consistently on a need-to-know basis, subject to appropriate confidentiality restrictions, on an anonymized basis to the extent possible, and only to the extent strictly necessary for any of these purposes.
Enforcing our legal rights and complying with laws, regulations and other legal requirements. This is necessary for our legal obligation to protect our business and to enforce our contractual and other legal rights. To ensure physical, network and information security and integrity. This is necessary due to our legal obligation to ensure a secure and uncompromised IT system and networks, including backup and archiving, preventing misuse of software, viruses, bugs or other malicious code, preventing unauthorized access to our systems and any form of attack or damage to our IT systems and networks. We may need to use and process your personal data in order to comply with legal obligations that we must comply with. For example, we may ask you to submit your certain personal data to the court upon receipt of a court order. We may also need your personal information to comply with applicable legal obligations, such as tax laws and other regulations that bind us.
In connection with disclosure requirements and in the case of any sale or purchase transaction in case our shareholders opt to sell Valicon to a third party. This is necessary for our legitimate interests in selling and/or ensuring and promoting the success of our business.
For statistical and research purposes. We will either pseudominize or anonymize the data and use it for the legitimate interests of processing personal data for research purposes.
In connection with any legal or potential legal dispute or proceeding. This is necessary for our legal obligation to promote and ensure the success of our business, resolve disputes and make such disclosures as are required by law or which we believe are reasonable to comply with the law.

When we process your personal data on the basis of your consent, you can revoke the given consent at any time by sending us an e-mail at [email protected]. The request fulfilment date is one month from the day we received your request.

Processing of personal data of children

We will not collect or process information about children under the age of 16, unless we receive parental consent in accordance with applicable laws. If we find that we have accidentally collected information about a child, we will immediately delete it.

Processing of sensitive data

In some cases, and for the purposes specified in the statement of consent for your participation in the panel in which you participate as a panelist, we may process special categories of personal data about you ("sensitive data"). We may also process your sensitive data if you have previously given your voluntary, express and specific consent in a specific context for a specific purpose.

Personal data storage and processing period

Valicon stores your personal data on its own servers. We store your personal data until your revocation. We will usually delete your personal data that we have received from you, if it is no longer relevant to achieve the purpose for which it was collected. In the event of a data deletion request, the data will be deleted within a certain legal period (one month).

For more information about where and how long your personal data is stored and more information about your right to delete and transfer personal data, please contact us at [email protected].

How we protect your personal data

We have taken appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your personal data and protect it against unauthorized or illegal use or processing and against accidental loss or destruction or damage to your personal data, including:

The principle of minimum amount of data and processing on a pseudonymised basis, wherever possible;
Training our staff on the importance of confidentiality and maintaining the privacy and security of your data;
Commitment to take appropriate disciplinary measures to enforce employee privacy responsibilities;
Continuous and comprehensive modernization and testing of our security technology;
Careful and responsible selection of our subcontractors;
Using secure servers to store your personal data;
Appointing an authorized person for personal data protection;
By requesting proof of identity from each individual who requests access to personal data.

Network connections and other Internet technology

You Tube

Our website uses plugins from YouTube, operated by Google. The site is operated by YouTube LLC, 901 Cherry Ave., San Bruno, CA 94066, USA. If you visit our website, which has a YouTube plugin, a connection is established with the YouTube servers. YouTube is thereby informed about your visit to our website.

If you are signed into a YouTube account, YouTube allows you to link your search data directly to your personal profile. You can prevent this by logging out of your YouTube account.

YouTube helps us to make our website attractive. This is a legitimate interest in accordance with Article 6 (1) (f) of the General Data Protection Regulation (hereinafter: GDPR).

Additional information on the management of user data can be found in YouTube's data protection statement https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/our-commitments/protecting-user-data/

How we use cookies and similar technology

A cookie is a small amount of data that a website places on your computer and receives again, every time you access another document on the same website. Cookies are used primarily to identify each user or to distinguish them from the multitude of other users who use the same website at the same time. It is therefore a computerized method of identity recognition.

Some cookies are deleted when you close the browser. These cookies are called session or temporary cookies, as they only last as long as a single session lasts and are no longer stored after the session ends. Cookies of this type usually only have identification codes, which can only be recognized by the website that installed the cookies.

Other cookies have a certain life span or duration and are used to determine that you have already logged in to a certain website, or to store information about certain settings, such as language selection.

Each website can only access the cookies which that website has stored, but it cannot access the data of other websites.

You can reject some or all the cookies that we use by changing your browser settings, however this may reduce your ability to use our web pages or some or all of their features. For more information about cookies, including how to change your browser settings, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

The online survey system (surveys.valicon.net) uses cookies for proper and secure operation and to improve the user experience. The lifetime of individual cookies is limited to the duration of the survey or session, and to the estimated time of completing the survey (as a rule, 5 minutes).

The cookies for each survey are named WSS__HEADERS__AI__XXX and WSS__SESSION__ID __XXX, where XXX represents the identification of the survey to which the cookies refer.

Google reCAPTCHA

In order to ensure sufficient data security when entering data on our website, in certain cases we use the Google reCAPTCHA service provided by Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA (hereinafter: reCAPTCHA).

This is mainly used to distinguish whether the entry on our website (e.g. via the contact form) is made by a natural person or if there has been abuse with an automated i.e. automatic entry. The service includes the sending of IP addresses and all other data that Google needs for the reCAPTCHA service (e.g. information about which pages you viewed and the time you viewed them and what you clicked on).

The analysis performed by reCAPTCHA happens entirely in the background.

You can read more about reCAPTCHA and Google's privacy policy on the following websites: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/v3beta.html and https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en.

The reCAPTCHA service is used on the basis of Article 6(1)(f) GDPR. As a website operator, we have a legitimate interest in our online offer being protected from malicious automated input and unsolicited e-mail (SPAM).

International transfers of personal data

If we transfer your personal data outside the EEA, we will do so after carefully reviewing the appropriate legal bases and safeguards, such as:

data protection policies known as "Binding Corporate Rules" or "BCRs";
Standard Contractual Clauses adopted by the European Commission or accepted by the national supervisory authority and confirmed by the European Commission in accordance with the relevant law;
a code or codes of conduct drawn up by an association or other body approved by the national supervisory authority;
approved certification mechanisms;
or when approved by the national supervisory authority, contractual clauses between the data controller or data processor and the data controller, data processor or recipient of personal data in a third country or international organization.

On July 10, 2023, the European Commission adopted a new adequacy decision based on which personal data can be freely transferred from the European Union to companies in the US that participate in the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. The adequacy decision is based on Article 45 of the General Data Protection Regulation and represents a mechanism that ensures secure and lawful data transfer to third countries. Companies in the US that want to participate in the Data Privacy Framework must undergo a self-certification process and enroll on the list of companies that have joined the Data Privacy Framework. Valicon will use the adequacy decision for the transfer of personal data to service providers who successfully self-certify and join the Data Privacy Framework. Valicon will use valid Standard Contractual Clauses based on the General Data Protection Regulation for the transfer of personal data to service providers who do not join the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and in the transitional period, until our service providers self-certify in accordance with the new adequacy decision.

Rights of the individual to whom the personal data is related

We would like to remind you of the following rights in relation to your personal data, which you can exercise by sending an e-mail to [email protected].

request access to your personal data and information about our use and processing of your personal data;
request correction or deletion of your personal data;
request that we restrict the use of your personal data;
request your personal data that you have provided to us and that we will provide to you in a structured and machine-readable format (e.g. Excel spreadsheet) and the right to transfer this personal data to another data controller;
object to the processing of your personal data for certain purposes (for further information see the section "Your right to object to the processing of your personal data for certain purposes"); and
withdraw consent to the use of your personal data, where we rely on your consent. If you withdraw your consent, this will not affect the lawfulness of our use and processing of your personal data based on your consent before the date you withdrew your consent. You also have the right to file a complaint with the national supervisory authority, which is National Agency for the Protection of Personal Data.
For further information about your rights in relation to your personal data, including certain limitations that apply to some of these rights, please see Articles 12 to 23 GDPR, located at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj

Your right to object to the processing of your personal data for certain purposes:

You have the following rights in relation to your personal data, which you can exercise in the same way as it is set out in the previous section (your rights in relation to your personal data):

object to the use or processing of your personal data where we use or process it to carry out a task in the public interest, if we process your personal data for our legitimate interests, including "profiling" (e.g. predicting your behavior based on your personal data) based on any of these purposes; and
object to the processing of your personal data for direct marketing purposes (including any automated evaluation we make about you or any of your characteristics as a person, if related to such direct marketing).

Modification of our privacy policy

We may change our privacy policy from time to time, including the possible addition of newly founded Valicon Group Affiliates that may process your personal data. We will inform you about this in due course. If you continue to access the Opinia internet panel on or after that date, you agree to be bound by the new version of our privacy policy.

If we intend to use your personal data for new purposes, we will inform you of that intention and any other important information before we use your personal data for those purposes.