Privacy policy

Privacy policy

how we collect, use and protect your data

© Wild Wonders of Europe / Cornelia Doerr / WWF

The Successful Wildlife Crime Prosecution in Europe LIFE19 GIE/BG/000846 project (“SWiPE”, we”, “us”, and “ours”) is a consortium of partners including WWF Bulgaria (lead partner), State Attorney’s Office of the Republic of Croatia, Fauna & Flora International (in Romania), Judicial Academy Croatia, WWF Adria in Serbia, WWF Adria, WWF Spain, WWF Hungary & TRAFFIC, WWF Italy, WWF Poland, WWF Romania, WWF Slovakia, and WWF Ukraine (associated beneficiaries). We respect your right to privacy. This Privacy Notice explains who we are, how we collect, share and use personal information about you, and how you can exercise your privacy rights. 

If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, then please contact us using the contact details provided at the bottom of this Privacy Notice.

What does SWiPE do?

The SWiPE consortium comprises 13 partners in 11 countries under the funding of the EU LIFE programme and works with enforcement authorities to discourage and ultimately reduce wildlife crime by improving compliance with EU environmental law. SWiPE aims to contribute to increasing the number of successfully prosecuted offences.

For more information about the SWiPE project, please see the “About” section of our Website.

What personal information do we collect and why?

The personal information that we may collect about you broadly falls into the following categories:

  • Information that you provide voluntarily

Certain parts of our Website may ask you to provide personal information voluntarily (such as when you submit a query to us through the website). The personal information that you are asked to provide, and the reasons why you are asked to provide it, will be made clear to you at the point we ask you to provide your personal information.

  • Information that we collect automatically

When you visit our Website, we may collect certain information automatically from your device.  In some countries, including countries in the European Economic Area, this information may be considered personal information under applicable data protection laws.

Specifically, the information we collect automatically may include information like your IP address, device type, unique device identification numbers, browser-type, broad geographic location (e.g. country or city-level location) and other technical information. We may also collect information about how your device has interacted with our Website, including the pages accessed and links clicked. 

Collecting this information enables us to better understand the visitors who come to our Website, where they come from, and what content on our Website is of interest to them.  We use this information for our internal analytics purposes and to improve the quality and relevance of our Website to our visitors.

Some of this information may be collected using cookies and similar tracking technology, as explained further under the heading “Cookies and similar tracking technology” below.

  • Information that we obtain from third party sources

From time to time, we may receive personal information about you from third party sources but only where we have checked that these third parties either have your consent or are otherwise legally permitted or required to disclose your personal information to us. 

For example, we collect personal information from third parties such as reCAPTCHA (owned by Google) and we use the information we receive from reCAPTCHA to check that you are a human and not a robot. Using reCAPTCHA ensures our website is protected from spam and abuse by using an advanced risk analysis machine.

  • Information that we obtain from social media

SWiPE may also obtain your personal data through your use of social media platforms, for example Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, depending on the privacy policies of those services and your privacy settings.  To change your privacy settings with these services, please refer to their privacy policies, which will explain how to do this.

Who does SWiPE share your personal information with?

We may disclose your personal information to the following categories of recipients:

  • to our group companies, third party services providers and partners who provide data processing services to us (for example, to support the delivery of, provide functionality on, or help to enhance the security of our Website), or who otherwise process personal information for purposes that are described in this Privacy Notice or notified to you when we collect your personal information;
  • to any competent law enforcement body, regulatory, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights, or (iii) to protect your vital interests or those of any other person;
  • to any other person with your consent to the disclosure.

Legal basis for processing personal information (EEA visitors only)

If you are a visitor from the European Economic Area, our legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described above will depend on the personal information concerned and the specific context in which we collect it. 

However, we will normally collect personal information from you only (i) where the processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your rights, or (ii) where we have your consent to do so.  In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect personal information from you.

If we ask you to provide personal information to comply with a legal requirement, we will make this clear at the relevant time and advise you whether the provision of your personal information is mandatory or not (as well as of the possible consequences if you do not provide your personal information).

If we collect and use your personal information in reliance on our legitimate interests (or those of any third party), this interest will normally be to operate our platform and communicating with you as necessary to provide our services to you, for instance, when responding to your queries, improving our platform, undertaking marketing. We may have other legitimate interests and if appropriate we will make clear to you at the relevant time what those legitimate interests are.

If you have questions about or need further information concerning the legal basis on which we collect and use your personal information, please contact us at info@stopwildlifecrime.eu.

Cookies and similar tracking technology

We use cookies and similar tracking technology (collectively, “Cookies”) to collect and use personal information about you.  For further information about the types of Cookies we use, why, and how you can control Cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

How does SWiPE keep your personal information secure?

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information that we collect and process about you. The measures we use are designed to provide a level of security appropriate to the risk of processing your personal information.

Data retention

We retain personal information we collect from you where we have an ongoing legitimate business need to do so (for example, to provide you with a service you have requested or to comply with applicable legal, tax or accounting requirements). 

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymise it or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

Privacy policies of other websites

The SWiPE website contains links to other websites. Our privacy policy applies only to our website, so if you click on a link to another website, you should read their privacy policy.

What are your data protection rights?

SWiPE would like to make sure you are fully aware of all of your data protection rights. If you are a resident of the European Economic Area, you have the following data protection rights:

  • The right to access – You have the right to request SWiPE for copies of your personal data. We may charge you a small fee for this service.
  • The right to rectification – You have the right to request that SWiPE correct any information you believe is inaccurate. You also have the right to request SWiPE to complete the information you believe is incomplete.
  • The right to erasure – You have the right to request that SWiPE erase your personal data, under certain conditions.
  • The right to restrict processing – You have the right to request that SWiPE restrict the processing of your personal data, under certain conditions.
  • The right to object to processing – You have the right to object to SWiPE’s processing of your personal data, under certain conditions.
  • The right to data portability – You have the right to request that SWiPE transfers the data that we have collected to another organization, or directly to you, under certain conditions.

How can you contact the appropriate authority?

You have the right to complain to a data protection authority about our collection and use of your personal information.  For more information, please contact your local data protection authority. Contact details for data protection authorities in the European Economic Area are available here.

How often will we update this Privacy Notice?

We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time in response to changing legal, technical or business developments. When we update our Privacy Notice, we will take appropriate measures to inform you, consistent with the significance of the changes we make.  We will obtain your consent to any material Privacy Notice changes if and where this is required by applicable data protection laws.

You can see when this Privacy Notice was last updated by checking the “last updated” date displayed at the top of this site.

Where can you get further information?

If you have any questions about any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, or you would like to exercise one of your data protection rights, please contact us using the following details: please email us at info@stopwildlifecrime.eu. We respond to all requests we receive from individuals wishing to exercise their data protection rights in accordance with applicable data protection laws.


Last updated 12 July 2021