Privacy Policy

ABOUT US

The ‘Saving Our Blue’ Campaign aims to educate and encourage the public to stop littering, reduce waste generation, and opt for alternative products to single-use items. The awareness that is being promoted by the Ministry for the Environment, Energy and Enterprise (hereinafter, MEEE) through the Saving Our Blue Campaign also comes at an opportune time, with the ban on the sale of single-use plastics locally coming into force in January 2022.

PRIVACY POLICY

MEEE shall ensure that any processing of personal data is in accordance with the GDPR, the Data Protection Act (Chapter 586 of the Laws of Malta), and any subsidiary legislation.

MEEE (hereinafter, ‘we’ or ‘us’) is committed to protecting our visitors’ and/or user’s privacy and we will not collect any personal information about you as a visitor unless you provide it voluntarily. By giving your consent to provide your personal information to us, you are agreeing that the personal information you are providing shall be collected, processed and stored in accordance with the principles outlined below.

Definition of “Personal Data” is data that identifies an individual, including but not limited to:

  • Name
  • Email address
  • Postal address
  • Contact number
  • Date of birth
  • Identification number

This policy sets out the basis for which any of your personal data is collected and processed.

1.     PURPOSE OF COLLECTING PERSONAL INFORMATION

Personal data may be collected, processed and stored by us for the purpose of;

  • planning and execution of events and activities organised by us;
  • internal management, research and statistics, systems administration, the development and improvement of our services;
  • preventing, detecting and/or prosecuting any criminal activity which we are bound to report/act upon whilst fulfilling our statutory obligations;

2.     DISCLOSURE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION TO THIRD PARTIES

All personal information collected by us is processed in a secure environment and in confidence. We will only disclose any personal information to our employees, other government entities/departments or third parties that need access to your data to provide you with a service.

With your consent only – We will share personal data with companies, organisations or individuals outside our remit.

We reserve the right to store and forward any records, data and recordings to the relevant authorities when requested to do so by a lawful order of the Police, Court, Tribunal or Regulatory Body.

3.     DATA RETENTION

We will not retain your personal data for longer than it is required for us to provide such services and implementation of regulations under our direct responsibility or for any legal or statutory requirement.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

4.     ACCESS TO YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

As a data subject, you have right of access to the personal information we hold about you. By law you have a right;-

  • to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
  • be informed about how we process your data;
  • to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected;
  • to ask us to suspend the processing of personal data about you for example if you want to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.

If you have any queries in relation to personal information on you, if any, held by us please contact our Data Protection Officer.

Requests in relation to personal information can also be made in writing and addressed to our Data Protection Officer. Your ID number, name and surname and address have to be submitted with the request. In case of identification difficulties, you may be required to show your Identity Card.  

  1. Our Data Protection Officer (DPO) may be contacted at:   

Name:                  Mr. Glen Chircop

Address:             MEEE Head Office, 6, Qormi Road, St Venera

Telephone:         (00356) 23316257

Email:                   dataprotection.meee@gov.mt

  • All personal data shall be processed according to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679 as well as any other applicable law or guidelines published from time to time.
  • We shall not transfer any personal data to any third party other than in the cases specified in this form unless with the Applicant’s consent or in cases where we are required to disclose such data by law.
  • Your rights as data subjects under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679 shall apply. You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information and Data Protection Commissioner;

Address:
Information and Data Protection Commissioner (IDPC)
Level 2, Airways House
High Street
Sliema SLM 1549
Malta

Tel:               (00356) 2328 7100

Email:          idpc.info@idpc.org.mt

  1. You may not withhold data for the purposes of such application.
  2. You warrant that all data provided by you is accurate.
  3. You acknowledge that data in such application shall be retained by us.
  4. Upon request, we shall:

i) remove you and your personal information, from our database, thereby cancelling your application; or

ii) correct personal information that you state is erroneous.

Updates to this Data Protection Notice

We reserve the right to update this data protection notice at any time. The updated data protection notice will be published on our website. In case of any questions about this notice please contact us on the details provided above for the DPO.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Cookies

A cookie is a small piece of data that a website asks your browser to store as text strings on your computer’s hard-disk. All cookies are set with expiry dates which determine how long they reside on your browser.  Generally, cookies can be removed automatically after the lapse of the expiry date or else can be deleted manually by the user.

This website makes use of the following two different types of cookies:

Session cookies: these are temporary cookies which are used to give you access to the content of this website.  These types of cookies expire and are deleted as soon as you close the browser.

Limited third party cookies: these cookies are set by entities other than the administrator of this website and may be temporary or persistent. The use of third party cookies on this website are restricted and only allowed for the purpose of social sharing (allows you to share our articles through the various social media networks) and when we embed content on the pages of this website from other third party websites.

If your browser is NOT configured, by default, to block all or certain cookies, you may manually configure your browser to either reject all cookies or control which cookies are set on your device through this website. You may find all the necessary information on how to make the necessary configuration settings by visiting the following site: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/​

Disabling the cookies of this website will not affect your browsing experience.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded Content from other Websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

JURISDICTION AND APPLICABLE LAW

The Maltese courts will have exclusive jurisdiction over any claim arising from, or related to our privacy  policy, and/or a visit to the website. 

Any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with this privacy policy or its subject matter or formation (including non-contractual disputes or claims) shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the Laws of Malta.

VARIATIONS

We may revise this privacy policy at any time by amending this page. You are expected to check this page from time to time to take notice of any changes we made, as they are binding on you.

ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT

All effort has been made to ensure that this website confirms to the accessibility requirements and recommendations of the W3C WAI accessibility recommendations to ensure that the website caters for individuals with specific disabilities.