Privacy policy

For the EUROSPINE E-Poster Library at library.eurospine.org. Last updated 4 October 2026.

This page covers this library only. For everything else EUROSPINE does, the EUROSPINE privacy policy applies.

Who is responsible

EUROSPINE, the Spine Society of Europe
c/o Pfister Treuhand AG
Bankstrasse 4
8610 Uster
Switzerland
E-mail: privacy@eurospine.org

Degeler Consulting eU develops and operates the library on our behalf as a processor. The site is hosted by Hetzner Online GmbH in a data centre in Falkenstein, Germany.

When you visit

The library sets no cookies and loads nothing from other providers — fonts, images and scripts all come from this server.

Our web server records each request: the time, the address requested, the response status and the technical details your browser sends with it, such as its type, language and the page you came from. It does not record your IP address. These records are kept in the server’s system log and are deleted automatically after 30 days. We need them to run the site securely and to find errors (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Usage statistics

To learn which parts of the library are used, the page reports a few events to our own server — for example that a poster was opened, a topic filter chosen or the search used. If an address leads to a missing page, the page reports that address and whether the link came from this library, from another website (only its domain name) or from elsewhere, such as the congress app. For the search we count only the length of the text and the number of results, never the search terms. These events contain no IP address, no cookie and no identifier, so they cannot be linked to you or to each other. We keep the resulting counts to evaluate the congress (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

AI-assisted search

The library offers an optional assistant that suggests posters for what you type. If you use it, your text is sent to Mistral AI SAS, Paris, France, which processes it on our behalf to find matching posters and to write a short explanation for each. Mistral AI acts as our processor; processing takes place in the European Union, and your input is not used to train Mistral’s models.

What we keep. We store the text of your questions together with the time, the detected language and the posters that were suggested. Before storing, we automatically remove e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and personal names introduced by a title such as “Dr.” or “Prof.”. We do not store your IP address or any identifier that would link questions to you or to each other. We use these records to improve the search and delete them after 12 months (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Protection against misuse. To stop automated mass requests, the server counts requests for ten minutes, per open page and per network address. It does this with a scrambled value of your IP address and a random number that the page creates when it opens. Both exist only in working memory: the random number is not stored on your device and is new each time you load the page; the scrambled value on the server is replaced every day and never written to disk.

Please do not enter personal details or patient data into the search.

On your device

Nothing is stored on your device unless you choose “Remember my interests on this device”. Your conversation with the search assistant is then kept in your browser’s local storage, on this device only, until you choose “Start over” or clear your browser data. It is never sent to us on its own. Because you request this function yourself, no consent banner is needed for it.

The posters

The library publishes the e-posters of the EUROSPINE Annual Meeting together with the names and affiliations of their authors and the abstracts. This is based on the presenter agreement accepted when the poster was submitted (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). To have a poster removed, write to meetings@eurospine.org.

Your rights

You have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to its processing and to receive it in a portable format. Write to privacy@eurospine.org. Note that we cannot identify questions asked in the AI search, because we store them without any identifier.

You may also lodge a complaint with a data protection authority — in Switzerland the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), or the authority in the EU country where you live or work.