Privacy notice

Information pursuant to Art. 13 GDPR. The German version is the authoritative one; this translation is provided so that the information is genuinely accessible to you.

1. Controller

Controller within the meaning of Art. 4(7) GDPR

Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, represented by its President Professor Dr Anja Steinbeck
Universitätsstraße 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany
Operating institute: Molecular Proteomics Laboratory (BMFZ) — further details in the legal notice.

Contact for this service

Prof. Dr. Kai Stühler, kai.stuehler@uni-duesseldorf.de, phone +49 211 81-13036

Data protection officer of the university

Universitätsstraße 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany
Phone +49 211 81-13060
Contact form and further routes: HHU data protection office (in German)

2. Principle

This service is built so that as little personal data as possible arises. There are no user accounts, no registration, no cookies, no analytics or tracking and no content loaded from third parties such as fonts or scripts. No data is transferred to countries outside the EU.

Because nothing is stored on or read from your device, no consent under § 25 of the German TDDDG (a cookie banner) is required.

3. Processing of the sequence data you submit

When you submit a FASTA file it is processed to compute the prediction you requested. In detail:

• The uploaded file is deleted as soon as the compute process has read it — that is, before the actual prediction begins. It is also deleted if the prediction subsequently fails.
• While a submission is still waiting in the queue, the file remains on disk until processing starts. If a submission is never processed, for instance after a server restart, an automatic cleanup removes it after at most 6 hours.
• The result table contains no sequences. It holds only the identifiers you supplied in the FASTA headers, together with the computed values and the prediction.
• The result table and the identifiers are deleted automatically and completely 24 hours after completion.
• Independently of this you can delete a submission yourself at any time. The status page of your job offers a "Delete job and data" button: a waiting submission is removed from the queue, a finished result is erased immediately rather than after the 24 hours.

No personal data in submissions

This service is not intended to process personal data. When using it you warrant that you will not enter any personal data — in particular no genetic data within the meaning of Art. 4(13) GDPR — neither in the sequences themselves nor in the identifiers in the FASTA headers. See the Terms of use.

The job id is your access key

Every submission receives a random identifier. Anyone who knows it can retrieve the corresponding result; there is no further authentication. No listing exists through which identifiers could be discovered. Please treat the identifier as confidential and pass it only to people who may see the result.

4. Server and security logs

• Access log: submissions are counted so that load and usage of the service can be assessed. The IP address is stored truncated (for IPv4 the last byte is removed, for IPv6 the lower half of the address). Requests to result pages are not logged.
• Error and security log: technical errors and rate-limit hits produce an entry containing the full IP address. These entries are deleted automatically after seven days. Where there is a concrete reason in an individual case, such as an attack on the service, the relevant entries are retained for as long as is necessary to investigate.
• Rate limiting: to prevent overload and abuse, the number of requests per sending address is limited. The address needed for this is held only transiently in memory and is not stored persistently.

Legal basis

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(e) GDPR in conjunction with § 3(1) DSG NRW. The processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest, namely providing this scientific service and ensuring its secure and functional operation.

5. Hosting

The service runs on infrastructure owned by Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and provided by its Centre for Information and Media Technology (ZIM). ZIM is a unit of the university and therefore part of the controller; no processing under Art. 28 GDPR takes place in this respect. No data is transferred to third parties or to countries outside the EU.

6. Your rights

You have the following rights against the controller:

• Access to the data processed about you (Art. 15 GDPR)
• Rectification of inaccurate data (Art. 16 GDPR)
• Erasure (Art. 17 GDPR)
• Restriction of processing (Art. 18 GDPR)
• Data portability (Art. 20 GDPR)

You can exercise the right to erasure under Art. 17 GDPR for a submission directly: the "Delete job and data" button on the status page removes the job and everything belonging to it immediately. If the prediction is already running, it is discarded and no result is stored.

Since no information about you is stored with a submission, a submission cannot be attributed to you without the job id. Please quote the identifier when enquiring about a specific result.

7. Right to lodge a complaint

Without prejudice to any other remedy, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in particular with the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information of North Rhine-Westphalia.

8. Changes

This notice is updated when the processing changes. The version published on this page is the applicable one.