Last updated: 2026-07-02
This website (vet-pass.eu) supports VET-PASS, a COST Action on veterinary specialisation across Europe. The Action is managed by the European Board of Veterinary Specialisation (EBVS), which acts as data controller for the information collected through this site. You can contact us at privacy@vet-pass.eu.
Participation in the Action itself is administered through e-COST, operated by the COST Association, which has its own privacy notice and is a separate controller for the data you enter there. This notice covers only the data you provide through this website.
When you complete the expression-of-interest form, we collect: your name, email address, country, institution or affiliation, professional role, career stage, the Working Group(s) you are interested in, whether you have created an e-COST account, and, if you choose to provide it, your gender and a free-text description of how you would like to contribute.
We use this information to process your request to join a Working Group, to bring you into the Action on e-COST, to contact you about your participation, and to monitor the Action's geographical spread, inclusiveness, and gender balance, which COST requires us to report.
Our lawful basis for processing most of this data is your consent, which you give by submitting the form, and our legitimate interest in running and reporting on the Action. Where you provide gender, that is a special category of data under Article 9 of the GDPR; we process it only with your explicit, optional consent, solely for equality-monitoring purposes, and it is never used to make decisions about your participation.
Career stage, country, and gender feed aggregated, anonymised statistics on participation across the Action (for example, the proportion of Young Researchers and Innovators or participants from Inclusiveness Target Countries). Reporting is at aggregate level and does not identify individuals.
Your data is accessible to the VET-PASS coordination team who process membership and inclusiveness reporting. We do not sell your data or share it with third parties for marketing. Where necessary to administer your Action membership, relevant details are entered into e-COST, at which point COST's own privacy notice applies. We may use a data processor to host this website and store form submissions; any such processor is bound by a data-processing agreement and may not use your data for its own purposes.
Form submissions are stored on EBVS-managed infrastructure hosted within the EU/EEA. Where any processor is located outside the EEA, we ensure an adequate safeguard (such as an adequacy decision or standard contractual clauses) is in place.
We keep expression-of-interest data for the duration of the Action and for a reasonable period afterwards for reporting and continuity, after which it is deleted or fully anonymised. If you ask us to remove your data sooner, we will do so unless we are required to retain it.
Under the GDPR you have the right to access your data, to correct it, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to processing, to withdraw consent at any time, and to data portability. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing carried out before you withdrew it. To exercise any of these rights, contact us at privacy@vet-pass.eu.
You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority. EBVS is established in the Netherlands, so the lead authority is the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens); you may also complain to the supervisory authority in your own country.
We may update this notice as the Action develops. The current version and its date are always shown at the top of this page.