Data sources and your rights

Effective 3 August 2026. Version 1.0.

1. Who is responsible

EURVISTA is a research project at University College Dublin, funded by the All-Ireland Research Council's Translational Research Programme.

If EURVISTA is transferred to a spin-out company, this page will be updated to name the new controller before any transfer takes effect.

2. Where the data comes from

EURVISTA holds no data collected from you directly. Everything is gathered from official registers and open data services published by the EU institutions, listed below. Each record we display carries a link back to its source so you can check it.

We do not scrape private correspondence, leaked material, or any source that is not published by the institution responsible for it. We do not buy data from data brokers, and we do not combine EURVISTA data with commercial marketing databases.

3. Whose personal data is included, and why

Members of the European Parliament and other office-holders

We hold voting records, speeches, questions, amendments, committee roles, declared meetings and declarations of interests. These are acts performed publicly, in a public office, and published by the institutions precisely so that they can be scrutinised.

We also publish an influence band for sitting MEPs: an ordinal grouping derived from recorded activity such as rapporteurships, committee roles and amendment outcomes. It is a band, never a numeric score or a ranking, and every band is shown with the evidence and the formula version that produced it. It is a description of a recorded legislative record, not an assessment of a person.

Interest representatives and registered organisations

We hold the organisation-level entries published in the EU Transparency Register, and the meetings those organisations have declared with the institutions.

Individuals who are not office-holders

Some official records name individuals who do not hold public office, for example people accredited for Parliament access, or people listed as attending a declared meeting. We recognise that the balance of interests is different for these individuals than for office-holders. We are currently reviewing every place such names appear and reducing them to the minimum the record requires. If you are named in this way and would prefer not to be, please contact us: we will remove the name rather than argue the point.

4. Our lawful basis

We process this data on the basis of our legitimate interests under Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR. The interest is enabling scrutiny of EU legislative decision-making by researchers, civil society and the public. We have assessed the balance between that interest and the rights of the people concerned, taking into account that the data relates to public activity, comes from official accountability records, and is presented with a link to its source.

Some of this data reveals political opinions, which is special category data under Article 9. Where an MEP has cast a recorded vote, given a speech, tabled an amendment or filed a declaration, they have manifestly made that position public themselves, and we rely on Article 9(2)(e). We do not apply that reasoning to opinions we would have to infer rather than read from the record.

A Data Protection Impact Assessment for this processing is in preparation with the UCD Data Protection Officer. This page will be updated when it is complete.

5. Why you may not have heard from us

Article 14 of the GDPR normally requires us to contact people whose data we obtain from other sources. EURVISTA holds records relating to a very large number of individuals, and contacting each one would involve disproportionate effort. Article 14(5)(b) allows us to publish this information instead, and that is what this page is for.

The EURVISTA platform itself is not publicly available. It is a closed beta, accessible only to a small number of invited people. This page, the privacy notice, the terms of access and the rest of the public site sit outside that login and can be read by anyone, which is what Article 14(5)(b) asks of us. You can reach us directly using the contacts in section 7, and we will answer whether or not you have access to the platform.

6. How long we keep it

The public record is historical by nature, so we retain it for as long as the project or its successor operates. Where a source institution corrects, withdraws or unpublishes a record, we reflect that change on our next refresh of the relevant source. Where a record was published in error by the institution, tell us and we will remove our copy without waiting for the refresh cycle.

7. Your rights

You have the right to ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you (Article 15), to have inaccurate data corrected (Article 16), to have data erased (Article 17), to restrict our processing (Article 18), and to object to our processing at any time (Article 21), because we rely on legitimate interests.

In practice, the most useful thing to know is this. If a record about you on EURVISTA is wrong, it is usually wrong at source as well, and we will both correct our copy and tell you which institution to approach so the original is fixed. If a record is correct but you object to us holding it, we will consider your objection on its facts; we will not simply assert that a public record settles the matter.

To make a request, email contact@eurvista.com. Tell us who you are and, if you can, link to the page where you appear. We will acknowledge within 5 working days and respond substantively within one month. There is no fee.

If you are unhappy with our response you can complain to the UCD Data Protection Officer (gdpr@ucd.ie) or to the Data Protection Commission, 21 Fitzwilliam Square South, Dublin 2, D02 RD28, www.dataprotection.ie. You may also complain to the supervisory authority where you live or work.

8. What we do not do

• We do not sell personal data.
• We do not use this data for advertising, marketing or political campaigning, and we do not use it to contact the people it describes.
• We make no automated decision that produces legal or similarly significant effects on any individual.
• We do not predict how any named person will vote or act. The platform reports what is on the record and historical base rates, not forecasts.
• We do not paraphrase third-party texts such as amendments, speeches or consultation submissions. They are reproduced verbatim and attributed, or not at all.

9. Changes

We will revise this page as the project develops, and always before a change of controller. The effective date at the top records the current version, and earlier versions are available on request.

See also the privacy notice (for people who use the platform) and the terms of access.