Cookie Notice

The European Space Agency (herein the "Agency" or "ESA") is an intergovernmental organisation established by its Convention opened for signature in Paris on 30 May 1975 having its headquarters located at 24 rue du Général Bertrand, CS 30798, 75345 Paris Cedex 07, France.

Protection of Personal Data is of great importance for ESA, therefore this Cookie Notice aims to ensure lawfulness and transparency by explaining the cookies and similar technologies that we use on the eoPortal website, what they do, what your choices regarding their use are and how you can contact us.

The eoPortal provides technical articles on many Earth observation satellite missions from around the world, in addition to a number of articles focusing on airborne sensors. The aim for the website is to provide an extensive directory of such articles on a single website.

Cookies are small bits of data that a website may send to the browser on your device, for instance mobile device or computer, upon your visit to the website. Cookies may allow a website to recognise an individual's device and store some information about the user.

What are the different types of cookies?

A cookie can be classified by its lifespan and the domain to which it belongs. By lifespan, a cookie is either a:

session cookie which is erased when the user closes the browser or
persistent cookie which remains on the user's computer/device for a pre-defined period of time

As for the domain to which it belongs, there are either:

first-party cookies which are set by the web server of the visited page and share the same domain
third-party cookies stored by a different domain to the visited page's domain. This can happen when the webpage references a file, such as JavaScript, located outside its domain.

Which cookies do we use?

Strictly Necessary or Essential Cookies: these cookies are strictly necessary for the website to provide the services that you requested and/or for the sole purpose of the transmission of the services and/or the website. Without these cookies you would not be able to access the services or the website and therefore this category cannot be disabled.

Analytics Cookies: ESA uses cookies generated by an open source web analytics platform called Matomo to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the eoPortal. The cookies help ESA to know which pages are visited most often and to ensure that the eoPortal website responds effectively to users' needs.

If you do not wish to receive a cookie, or if you wish your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie, you may use the option on your web browser to disable cookies or you can opt out using the 'Opt-out' option below. However, please note that if you disable all cookies you may not be able to take advantage of all the features available on this website.

Anonymised information generated by these cookies will be collected and processed on behalf of ESA by Symbios Space Limited (Symbios UK) and Eversis Sp. Z.o. o. (Eversis), and subsequently transmitted to ESA in the form of statistics reports.

ESA, Symbios UK, and Eversis do not use information generated by these cookies either for promotion or marketing purposes, and they will not share the information with any third party.

The cookies placed on your device by the eoPortal website are generated by an open source web analytics platform called Matomo. The cookies are used to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the eoPortal. They are first party persistent cookies which help ESA to know which pages are visited most often and to ensure that the eoPortal website responds effectively to users' needs. The cookies also enable ESA to monitor repeat visits. Using a random unique visitor ID, the software is able to distinguish between the first visit and subsequent visits made by the user, to improve the accuracy of the statistics.

About the analytics tool used by ESA

Matomo is an open source web analytics platform which complies with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of 27 April 2016. This means that Matomo ensures end-user data protection, thanks to features such as source data anonymisation and opt-out mechanisms for users.

Cookies generated by Matomo enable ESA to track information about visitors in an anonymised form. Examples of such information are:

the user's anonymised internet protocol (IP) address. Matomo uses an IP anonymisation mechanism which automatically masks a portion of each user's IP, effectively making it impossible to identify a particular visitor from the remaining information.
location: country, region (geolocation)
date and time of the visit to the site
title of the page being viewed

The cookies are first party persistent cookies which also enable ESA to monitor repeat visits. Using a random unique visitor ID, the software is able to distinguish between the first visit and subsequent visits made by the user, to improve the accuracy of the reports.

How to control cookies

You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site and some services and functionalities may not work.

Your current status is displayed at the bottom of the page.

If your status if Opted In but you do not wish to receive cookies from the eoPortal website, or if you wish your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie, you may use the option on your web browser to disable cookies or you can opt out using the 'Reject all cookies' option above. However, please note that if you disable all cookies you may not be able to take advantage of all of the features available on this website. Moreover, if you opt out, it will not be possible for ESA to take your use of the website into account when it improves the user experience of the eoPortal website.

If you change your mind about opting out, you can choose to opt back in and be tracked again by Matomo (opt-in).

Deleting old visitors logs

Matomo automatically deletes visitors' logs after 12 months. The aggregated data reports are stored for an indefinite period by ESA for analysis purposes.

Users logged in to Facebook/Twitter may experience some additional tracking when interacting with the social sharing buttons on our pages as clarified within the Terms and Conditions of their agreement with Facebook/Twitter, though no such information is collected/relayed/made available to ESA at any point.

Contact

In case of any question, you can contact ESA DPO, as first point of contact, by sending an email to: dpo@esa.int

You can also submit a request here.