Privacy Policy

The data controller for this site is:

• Digital Image SRL, publisher of RomaniaFrumoasa.org
• Registered office: str. Tudor Vladimirescu nr. 170, ap. 44, Târgu Mureș, Mureș County, Romania
• VAT number: RO22409155
• Trade Register number: J26/1633/2007
• Contact address for personal data matters: adicoco@romaniafrumoasa.org

For requests concerning your GDPR rights (access, rectification, erasure, portability, withdrawal of consent), we respond within a maximum of 30 days.

2.1 Newsletter subscription

When you subscribe to the newsletter, we collect your email address and (optionally) your name. We use them to send you new articles and occasional announcements about the project. We do not sell them or give them to anyone for their own marketing. The one exception: if you have accepted marketing cookies, at the moment you subscribe your email address also reaches Meta, as a code (hash), so that we can measure our campaigns and show them to interested people — see 2.4.

The subscription itself and the actual email delivery are handled by Buttondown, a newsletter service provider based in the United States, under the standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission. You can unsubscribe at any time with one click in any email you receive, or by writing to our contact address.

2.2 Editorial sign-in

Only authors and editors explicitly invited can access the editorial area. For this access we use Google OAuth — we receive from Google the email address, the name and a profile picture. We use this data exclusively to identify the account and we do not share it.

2.3 Automatic logging (web server logs)

Our hosting provider (Vercel) automatically keeps, for limited periods, technical logs containing the IP address, the time of the request and the browser user-agent. We use this data only for security purposes (abuse detection, debugging) and we do not correlate it with reader identities.

2.4 Audience measurement and the Meta Pixel

We count visits with Vercel Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. We see only aggregate figures — how many visits a page gets, from which country, on what kind of device and how often the social media icons are clicked — and cannot recognise any individual reader.

Only if you consent to the “Marketing” category in the cookie banner do we also load the Meta Pixel, a piece of code provided by Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd. (Merrion Road, Dublin 4, Ireland). Without consent, or if you reject it, the Pixel does not load at all and your browser sends no request to Meta. While it is active, the Pixel sends Meta:

• the address of the page you visit and of the page you came from;
• on article pages, the article’s title, section and address;
• if you subscribe to the newsletter: the sign-up event and your email address, turned in your own browser into a code (a SHA-256 hash) from which the address cannot be read directly, plus a mask of it in which letters and digits become asterisks (for instance, ****@*******.***). Both go out with the sign-up and with the pages you open afterwards during the same visit;
• your IP address, browser and device type, and the time of the visit;
• the identifier in the _fbp cookie and, if you arrived from a Meta ad, the click identifier (the _fbc cookie).

The email code is not anonymous: Meta compares it with the email addresses of Facebook and Instagram accounts and, if it finds yours, links the sign-up and the visits in the same session to it. We send Meta no other data you give us. If you are signed in to Facebook or Instagram in the same browser, Meta may link the visit to your account even without your email address. We never learn who you are: we see only aggregate reports, and audiences whose members we cannot see.

Purpose: measuring the campaigns that promote our articles and the newsletter — how many people reach the site from an ad, what they read and how many subscribe — and targeting them as precisely as possible. Based on this data, Meta shows our ads to people more likely to be interested in them. We may also create audiences in Meta — for instance, readers of a section or people who subscribed to the newsletter — to show them our ads, or so that Meta can look for people with similar interests. We only see how many people these audiences contain, never who they are.

For collecting data through the Pixel and transmitting it to Meta, we are joint controllers with Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd. (Art. 26 GDPR), under Meta’s Controller Addendum. What Meta does with the data afterwards, as an independent controller, is described in Meta’s privacy policy. Meta may transfer the data to Meta Platforms, Inc. in the United States under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

How to withdraw consent: open Cookie settings(the link is also at the bottom of every page) and untick “Marketing”, or press “Reject”. The Pixel stops at once and no longer loads on later visits, and the _fbp and _fbc cookies are deleted from your browser, together with what the Pixel left in its local storage. Withdrawal does not affect data already sent; for that data you can write to us or contact Meta directly.

2.5 Publishing to social networks

The editorial area includes tools that publish our own articles and photographs to the accounts we own on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn and TikTok. Only our team uses them; readers never interact with them.

When an editor connects our Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts, Meta asks them to approve the connection and issues a temporary access token. We use that token once, during the connection, to list the Pages the editor manages and the Instagram business accounts linked to them, and we do not keep it. For each Page and account we then store:

• its identifier, name and username;
• the access token Meta issues for that Page, encrypted (AES-256-GCM);
• which of our editors connected it.

LinkedIn and TikTok work the same way: we store the account identifier and the encrypted token the platform issues. Our X account is linked through credentials configured on the server, with no editor data involved. The tokens serve one purpose only — publishing the posts an editor explicitly confirms. We do not read, collect or analyse data about the people who follow, like or comment on our posts.

2.6 Deleting data received from social networks

You can have this data deleted at any time, in any of these ways:

1. From the editorial area — in Social › Conturi (Accounts), disconnect the account. The stored record, encrypted token included, is deleted immediately.
2. From Facebook or Instagram — remove the RomaniaFrumoasa app from the Business integrations section of your Facebook settings, or from Apps and websites in Instagram. The tokens stop working at once; to have the stored records deleted as well, use option 1 or 3.
3. By email — write to adicoco@romaniafrumoasa.org. We delete the records within 30 days and confirm by reply.

Cookies are small files a website saves in your browser. We group ours into three categories, which you choose from the banner shown on your first visit:

• Necessary — always on. The site cannot work without them, so they need no consent (Art. 4(5) of Romanian Law 506/2004).
• Statistics — we use no statistics cookies today; we measure readership without cookies (see 2.4).
• Marketing — the Meta Pixel, only with your consent (see 2.4).

Nothing is pre-ticked. Your choice is kept for 12 months, and you can change it at any time from Cookie settings, a link also found at the bottom of every page.

Besides cookies, we use your browser’s session storage to count one read per article in each tab. It does not identify you and is cleared when you close the tab. You can also delete cookies at any time from your browser settings.

• Newsletter: explicit consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR).
• Editorial sign-in: performance of a contractual or collaboration relationship (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).
• Server logs, security: the legitimate interest of the controller (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
• Essential cookies: legitimate interest or technical necessity for the site to function.
• Meta Pixel and marketing cookies, including the email code sent when you subscribe: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR and Art. 4(5) of Romanian Law 506/2004), which you can withdraw at any time.
• Cookieless audience measurement (Vercel Web Analytics): the legitimate interest of the controller in knowing how the site is read (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
• Publishing to social networks: the legitimate interest of the controller in distributing its own editorial content (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

We work with the following service providers who, depending on the service, process personal data strictly on our behalf:

• Vercel Inc. (website hosting and cookieless audience measurement) — United States, under EU standard contractual clauses.
• Neon Inc. (database) — EU (Frankfurt).
• Cloudflare Inc. (image storage, CDN) — EU (chosen storage jurisdiction).
• Buttondown (newsletter) — United States, under EU standard contractual clauses.
• Google Inc. (OAuth authentication for the editorial area) — United States.

Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram), X Corp., LinkedIn and TikTok receive from us only the posts we publish on our own accounts, and handle them as independent controllers under their own privacy policies. Apart from the Meta Pixel, described in 2.4 and used only with your consent, we send them no reader data.

We do not sell your data to third parties. We do not use the data for automated profiling with legal effect.

• Newsletter email: until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it.
• Editorial account: for the duration of the collaboration; once it ends, we delete the account data within 30 days.
• Server logs: up to 30 days (according to the hosting provider’s policy).
• Social network connections: until an editor disconnects the account, which deletes them immediately.
• Meta Pixel cookies: 90 days in your browser, or until you withdraw consent. Meta keeps the data it receives under its own policy.
• Your cookie choice: 12 months; then we ask again.

As a data subject, you have the following rights:

• Right of access — to find out what data we hold about you.
• Right to rectification — to have us correct inaccurate data.
• Right to erasure(the “right to be forgotten”) — to have us delete your data when it is no longer necessary.
• Right to restriction of processing.
• Right to data portability — to receive your data in an easily transferable format.
• Right to object to processing based on legitimate interest.
• Right to withdraw consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing already carried out.
• Right to lodge a complaint with the National Supervisory Authority for Personal Data Processing — dataprotection.ro.

To exercise any of these rights, write to us at adicoco@romaniafrumoasa.org. We respond within a maximum of 30 days.

We apply reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal data — HTTPS across the entire site, authentication with a trusted provider (Google), restricted access to the database, encryption of the access tokens for social networks, regular backups. In the event of a security incident affecting personal data, we notify the supervisory authority and the affected persons in accordance with the GDPR.

We will update this page whenever our technology or practices change. The date of the last update appears at the top of the document. Major changes will also be announced through the newsletter.

For any question concerning privacy or your personal data, you can write to us at adicoco@romaniafrumoasa.org.