Personal Data Protection

The MANDOLA research does not collect voluntarily personal data relating to Internet users. Data processed during the MANDOLA research are the following:

• Some text and URLs coming from the web and Twitter, which have been collected by and stored securely at UCY, for the solely purpose of training a technical module called “hate classifier”. All detectable potentially personal data (namely user-names and Twitter mentions) have been removed from these texts, which have been accessed by human social analysts, pursuing the solely purpose of classifying as “potentially legal” or “potentially illegal”, based on the MANDOLA work presented in the MANDOLA Deliverable D2.1 - Definition of illegal hatred and implications. These social analysts have signed agreements of confidentiality and of data non-misuse. Some of the afore-mentioned texts and URLs have also been collected by UAM and sent to UCY. Collected sources were users’ comments on online newspapers’ articles. Sources that have been scanned have authorised UAM to do it for the purpose of the MANDOLA research, on UAM’s request.
• A few data coming from public parts of Twitter and of Internet more generally, which have been dynamically analysed in real-time from Google streams by UCY. These data are namely and exhaustively the qualification of the content (which is itself not kept at all, neither its metadata) on a legal point of view (hate speech or non-hate speech), the type of hate speech, and the geolocation (timestamp of the tweets where the user has enabled the location service), reducing the decimals of the coordinates to 3 in order to minimise the possibility of any identification of a particular individual. These elements are stored in a secured database and visualised in the dashboard under development.

Despite the very low probability that personal data are processed within the framework of these operations, both UCY and UAM committed to respect their national data protection legislation in relation to these processing, and to notify respectively the Cypriot and the Spanish data protection authorities. Both the Cypriot and the Spanish data protection authorities acknowledged these notifications.

It is unlikely that the information processed and stored during the MANDOLA activities might enable to identify a natural person. However, in case of query or request for exercise of your right of access, communication and erasure, please contact UCY and namely the Laboratory for Internet Computing: