The NATO Centre of Excellence (HCOE) takes seriously its responsibilities to protect your privacy.
In this Privacy Policy we describe how we collect, store, and use your personal information.
Data we collect about you
Whenever you access our website, only the IP address is automatically collected:
This is used for statistics purposes, and for improving our services.
We do not collect any other personal information, unless you consent to provide it, when you request to:
– create an account on our website,
– communicate/get in contact with us,
– register to, or participate in an activity organized by the HCOE,
– accommodate in and use the services of the HCOE Lodge,
– have commercial relations with the HCOE,
– get access in the HCOE.
In any of the cases above, you understand and acknowledge that we will collect and use personal information as described in this Privacy Policy.
The collected personal information may include: rank, name, Home Unit/Organisation, job title, email address, phone number, nationality, passport or ID number, serial number, guest preferences; information about vehicles you may bring onto the HCOE compound.
We may ask for details on persons accompanying you, including their rank, name, passport or ID number and reason of their visit to the HCOE.
Information regarding English language proficiency and level of expertise / special training might also be collected in some cases.
We collect those data in order to process your request in any of the cases mentioned above. Failure to provide this information will result in our inability to process your request.
We use your personal information to provide and personalize the services you request and expect from the HCOE, to offer you the expected level of hospitality, and for security purposes.
Sensitive personal information
We do not collect sensitive information, except for the case when these are voluntarily offered by you, so we can better satisfy your special needs.
We may use health related data provided by you to serve you better and meet your particular needs (answer special meal requests, or special/medical assistance).
Surveys
Completion of surveys during events organized by the HCOE is voluntary. We process the information obtained from surveys on the basis of your consent and in furtherance of our interests, including quality assurance, services improvements, and analytics.
Photos
We may take group photos during events organized by the HCOE that might be stored on the HCOE secured systems, distributed in hard or soft copies to participants, or posted on the News section of the HCOE Internet website.
Whenever a group photo is taken, participants are informed in advance about its scope. Participation in the group photo is voluntary and it implies that participants have consented to the scope.
Please note that once photos distributed or posted on the HCOE website, participants are not able to withdraw the consent anymore, or request destruction/deletion of the distributed hard or soft copies.
How long we keep your data
We retain your personal information for the time necessary to accomplish the purpose for which such information was collected, and for any period thereafter as legally required or permitted by applicable law. We will actively review the information we hold and when it is no longer needed, we will either delete it securely or, in some cases, anonymize it.
We will destroy your personal information as early as practicable and in a way that the information may not be restored or reconstructed.
If printed on paper, the personal information will be destroyed in a secure manner, such as by cross-shredding or incinerating the paper documents or otherwise and, if saved in electronic form, the personal information will be destroyed by technical means to ensure the information may not be restored or reconstructed at a later time.
Changing your personal information
The personal information that you provided to us may be reviewed and updated at any time.
You can request that we inform you about the personal information we maintain about you and also to update, correct, delete, and/or stop processing your personal information.
Such requests can be submitted via email. To protect your confidentiality, we can only respond to such requests to the email address that you have registered or otherwise provided to us.
We will perform all the updates and alterations needed within the due term and according to the applicable laws and regulations.
Sharing your personal information with third parties
We do not share your personal information with third parties, unless they are involved in activities organized by the HCOE and, in this case, only when they need your personal information for performing their duties. These third parties may include travel agencies, hotels, local companies, NATO military organizations.
In this case, we share only the personal information that they need to know for performing their duties.
We seek to require our service providers with whom we share personal information to exercise efforts to maintain the confidentiality of personal information about you, but please note that we are not responsible for the collection, use, maintenance, sharing, or disclosure of data and information by those third parties.
Protecting Personal Information
HCOE takes measures to protect personal information from unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration or destruction, and keep personal information accurate and up-to-date as appropriate. HCOE uses a dedicated internal team of information security professionals that are responsible for managing the HCOE networks security. In the event of a security incident, HCOE will act as required by applicable laws or regulations.
We use technical measures such as encryption and password protection to protect your personal information and the systems they are held in. We also use other measures such as limiting the number of people who have access to our databases, on the “need to know” basis.
We keep these security measures under review and refer to industry security standards to keep up to date with current best practice.
For online registrations, we use technological measures to protect the personal information that you transmit to us via our site. However, transmitting data over the Internet can not be guaranteed to be entirely secure.
Therefore, NATO personnel can use the HCOE NATO classified network e-mail address to submit their personal information to us instead of the Internet.
For your own privacy protection, please do not send confidential personal information to us via email.
We will not contact you by mobile/text messaging or email to ask for your confidential personal information. If you receive this type of request, you should not respond to it. We also ask that you please notify us about it.
Receiving news from HCOE
If you have given us your contact information, we may want to inform you about our products and services or invite you to events via the contact means that you provided.
If you prefer not to be contacted for the reasons above, please opt-out by sending us a message via email.

Our site may contain links to other websites. Please note that we are not responsible for the collection, use, maintenance, sharing, or disclosure of data and information by those websites. If you provide information on and use those sites, the privacy policy and terms of service on those sites are applicable. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of websites that you visit before submitting personal information.
Updating Privacy Policy
We may modify this Privacy Policy from time to time. You can tell when this Policy was last updated by looking at the date at the top of the document. Any changes to our Privacy Policy will become effective upon posting of the revised document on the site. Use of the site, any of our products and services, and/or providing consent to the updated Privacy Policy following such changes constitutes your acceptance of the revised document then in effect.
Contact information
If you have concerns about our data practices or the exercise of your rights, you may either contact HCOE, or the supervisory authority in Romania.
We will answer your request as soon as possible, within 30 days. There is no charge for such requests.
we can only respond to such requests to the email address that you have registered or otherwise provided to us.
HCOE contact information:
Headquarters: No.24 A, Armatei Române Street 410087, Oradea, Bihor County, ROMANIA
Internet Email address: registry@natohcoe.org
Website: www.natohcoe.org
Phone: +40 259 434 932
Fax: +40 259 434 932

Supervisory Authority in Romania
Autoritatea Nationala de Supraveghere a Prelucrarii Datelor cu Caracter Personal
28-30 G-ral Gheorghe Magheru Bld.
District 1, post code 010336
Bucharest, Romania
email: presa@dataprotection.ro
anspdcp@dataprotection.ro
phone: +40.318.059.211
Fax +40.318.059.602