Privacy Policy
This notice explains what happens to personal data when you use abscilem.com, write to us through the contact form, or book a call. It is written to be read, not to be survived.
Who is responsible
The controller of your personal data is:
Abscilem — scientific communication agency, registered in Rome, Italy.
Email: hello@abscilem.com
Our full company registration details are sent on request to that address.
We work entirely online. There is no office you visit, no paper file, and nothing about you is ever written down off a screen. Email reaches us faster than post, and everything in this notice can be settled by email.
What we collect, and why
When you use the contact form
We receive your name, email address, the organisation you enter, what you say you need help with, and your message.
- Why: to read your enquiry and answer it, and to take the steps you have asked for before any agreement is made.
- Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR — steps taken at your request before entering into a contract. Where your message is not about working with us, Art. 6(1)(f) — our legitimate interest in replying to correspondence.
- How long: 24 months from our last exchange, then deleted. If we end up working together, the record is kept for as long as Italian tax and commercial law requires.
- Consequence of not providing it: we cannot reply. Nothing else depends on it.
The form is also protected against automated abuse by a hidden field that a person never sees and by a limit on how many messages one address may send in an hour. Neither stores anything about you beyond a short-lived count.
When you use the chat window
The panel in the corner answers out of this site's own words. What you type into it is written down on our server, and ten minutes after the last message the conversation is closed and sent to our team in Telegram so we know what people are asking and where the site failed to answer. If you ask to speak to a person, your message goes across immediately instead, and their reply comes back into the same window.
The window says this before you type anything. Nothing you do on the site outside that window — reading, clicking, searching — is recorded there.
- What: the questions you type and the answers the panel gives, the page you were on, your IP address, and — if you ask for a person — the name and email address you choose to give, both optional.
- Why: to answer you; to keep a record of what was said so an answer is not contradicted a week later; and to find the questions this site should have answered and does not.
- Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR — steps taken at your request before entering into a contract — for a conversation you ask a person to join. For the record of the automated exchange, Art. 6(1)(f): our legitimate interest in knowing what the site is being asked. You can object to that at hello@abscilem.com, and the panel is not needed to use any part of this site.
- How long: 30 days from the start of the conversation, after which the whole exchange is deleted automatically by the site itself. If the conversation turns into work, the record moves to email and is kept under the contact-form period above.
- Consequence of not providing it: none. Every answer the panel gives is already written on the pages of this site, and you can write to hello@abscilem.com instead.
Telegram. Chat conversations reach us through Telegram, operated by Telegram FZ-LLC in the United Arab Emirates, which is outside the European Economic Area and not covered by an adequacy decision. This applies to the whole conversation, not only to the part after you ask for a person. So please do not put anything confidential — unpublished results, unfiled applications, personal data about a third party — into the chat window at all. Send that by email, or say it on the call.
When you visit any page
Our hosting provider records the usual server log data: your IP address, the page requested, the time, the referring page, and your browser's user-agent string.
- Why: to serve the page, and to detect and stop abuse.
- Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) — our legitimate interest in operating a site that stays up and is not attacked.
- How long: the short technical period our hosting provider keeps them for. We do not copy them, analyse them, or look at them at all except to investigate an attack on the site.
- Where: on servers in the European Union.
When you book a call
The Book a Call buttons take you to Calendly, a separate service. From that point Calendly, not us, decides how your data is handled — we then receive the booking details you gave them. Their notice is at calendly.com/privacy. Calendly is operated from the United States; transfers rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and the Standard Contractual Clauses.
The call itself is a conversation. We take notes on what you need; we do not record it.
Cookies
We set one cookie of our own, abs_consent, which records the
choice you made in the cookie banner so we do not ask again. That is the only
one: the site is a set of static pages, with no login and no session.
We do not run analytics, advertising, or social tracking. The full list is on the Cookie Policy page, including how to withdraw a choice you already made.
Who else sees your data
- Our hosting provider — stores and serves the site on our behalf, under a processing agreement. Ask us at any time and we will tell you which company it is.
- Our email provider — carries contact-form messages to our inbox.
- Telegram FZ-LLC (United Arab Emirates) — carries chat messages to us and our replies back, but only once you have asked to speak to a person. Their notice is at telegram.org/privacy.
- Calendly — only if you choose to book a call.
That is the whole list. Typefaces, images and scripts are all served from this domain: reading a page here contacts nobody but our own host.
Where any of these processes data outside the European Economic Area, it does so under the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses or an adequacy decision — with one exception, stated plainly rather than buried: the chat window delivers through Telegram, for which neither applies. That is why it is opt-in, why it is the only route on this site that leaves the Economic Area without a safeguard, and why the window itself says so before you type. Email and the contact form do not go near it.
We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you can ask us to:
- show you the data we hold about you (Art. 15);
- correct it if it is wrong (Art. 16);
- delete it (Art. 17);
- restrict what we do with it (Art. 18);
- hand it to you or to someone else in a portable format (Art. 20);
- stop processing based on legitimate interest (Art. 21).
Write to hello@abscilem.com. We answer within one month. If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to the Italian supervisory authority, the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, or to the authority where you live.
Children
This site is for researchers and organisations. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect their data.
Changes
If this notice changes, the date at the top changes with it. Material changes will be flagged on the page for thirty days.