Cookies

Europa Analytics and its cookies

Europa Analytics is the corporate service, which monitors and evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of the European Labour Authority (ELA), EDPS and the European Commission websites as well as the other websites the Commission data centre hosts.

It uses an open-source analytics platform, Matomo (formerly Piwik), fully controlled by the European Commission. This platform enables the protection of end-user personal data thanks to features such as IP address de-identification. Cookies can also be used to establish anonymised statistics about the browsing experience on our sites.

Data protection information and measures in Europa Analytics

Europa Analytics is the corporate service that measures the effectiveness and efficiency of the European Union Institutions’ websites on Europa.

You are free to refuse the use of this service – either via the cookie banner that appears at the top of the first page you visit or at Europa Analytics.

Choosing not to use this service does not affect your navigation experience on Europa sites. Europa Analytics is configured to use the second level domain europa.eu (used by the websites of European institutions) and to store first-party cookies.

Cookies (from Matomo) used by Europa Analytics enable the European Commission to track the following information about visitors. We use this information to prepare aggregated statistics reports of visitors’ activity:

• IP address (masked)
• Location: country, region, city, approximate latitude and longitude (Geolocation)
• Date and time of the request (visit to the site)
• Title of the page being viewed (Page Title)
• URL of the page being viewed (Page URL)
• URL of the page that was viewed prior to the current page (Referrer URL)
• Screen resolution of user's device
• Time in local visitor's time-zone
• Files that were clicked and downloaded (Download)
• Links to an outside domain that were clicked (Outlink)
• Pages generation time (the time it takes for webpages to be generated by the webserver and then downloaded by the visitor: Page speed)
• Main language of the browser being used (Accept-Language header)
• Browser version, browser plugins (PDF, Flash, Java, …) operating system version, device identifier (User-Agent header)
• Language of the visited page
• Campaigns
• Site Search
• Events

To improve the accuracy of the produced reports, information is also stored in a first-party cookie from our website and then collected by Europa Analytics:

• Random unique Visitor ID
• Time of the first visit for the specific visitor
• Time of the previous visit for the specific visitor
• Number of visits for the specific visitor 

ELA has entrusted the European Commission to collect and retain full control of the collected through first-party cookies by storing the data in servers fully owned and controlled by the European Commission itself.

Besides some session cookies, a random ID persistent cookie is generated by Matomo, which allows Europa Analytics to identify when a user returns to the site. This cookie has an expiration date of 13 months, after which it is automatically removed from the user's device.

• First party cookies are cookies set by the website you’re visiting. Only that website can read them.  In addition, a website might potentially use an external service to analyse how people are using their site. Europa Analytics sets their own cookie to do this and does not use external parties.

• Persistent cookies are cookies saved on your computer and are not deleted automatically when you close your browser, unlike a session cookie, which is deleted when you close your browser.

Consent to collecting your browsing experience for aggregated statistics

By default, the browsing experience of our website visitors is NOT tracked by Europa Analytics. You may, though, choose to consent to contributing your browsing experience on our website for us to produce aggregated statistics.

In case you have disabled all cookies, you will be prompted the cookie banner at each visit of our website.

Restricted access to information

All analytics data communication is encrypted via HTTPS protocol. The analytical reports generated by Europa Analytics can only be accessed through the European Commission Authentication System (ECAS) by authorised Commission staff dealing with Matomo, the relevant European institution staff or by duly authorised external sub-contractors, who may be required to analyse, develop and/or regularly maintain certain sites.

Masking of IP addresses

Note: institution, city and country of origin for statistical purposes are determined from the full IP, then stored and aggregated before a mask is applied. Europa Analytics uses an IP de-identification mechanism that automatically masks a portion of each visitor's IP (Internet Protocol), effectively making it impossible to identify a particular Europa visitor via the sole IP address.

Visitor logs

Europa Analytics automatically deletes visitors' logs after 13 months. Aggregated data are stored for an indefinite period by the European Commission for analysis purposes.

Social media cookies

ELA is active on three social media platforms. Our presence in the Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn communities strengthens our online presence and visibility.

• ELA website does not set cookies when displaying links to our social media channels when you browse our website.
• You can watch ELA videos, which we upload also to our YouTube page. You can also follow links from our website to Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Similarly, by clicking on the LinkedIn button on our website, you will be redirected to the LinkedIn site, which has its own cookie and privacy policies over which we have no control.

The display of our Twitter feed on this website uses a cookie-free component (provided to us by the European Commission). Clicking on the Twitter icon on this website will re-direct you to the Twitter site, which has its own cookie and privacy policies over which we have no control.

Contact

You can enquire us about the way we use cookies via our data-protectionela [dot] europa [dot] eu (Data Protection Officer).