Legal notice and notes

Legal notice

Courtesy translation. The legal texts on this page are translated from German for information only; the German version is legally binding.

Information pursuant to Art. XII.6 of the Belgian Code of Economic Law (Wetboek van economisch recht / Code de droit économique)

OpenRCV
Dustin Hoffmann
Brussels, Belgium

E-mail: info@openrcv.eu
Web: openrcv.eu

Responsible publisher (verantwoordelijke uitgever / éditeur responsable):
Dustin Hoffmann, Brussels.

Notes

OpenRCV analyses only official, freely accessible data of EU institutions and bodies: above all those of the European Parliament and, on the procedure pages, the votes in the Council of the EU. No data from third-party sources are used; Wikimedia Commons serves at most as a source for official portrait photos not yet copied (see below). Data sources used:

• European Parliament Open Data Portal (data.europarl.europa.eu, API v2): voting results (vote-results), individual roll-call votes and vote corrections (decisions), and the master data of the MEPs (meps).
• EP document register (/documents): official title, committee responsible, rapporteur, procedure and date of each document.
• EuroVoc (publications.europa.eu): the multilingual thesaurus of the EU, used for the subject matter of the documents.
• doceo (europarl.europa.eu/doceo): links to the full texts of the reports.
• Council of the European Union (consilium.europa.eu, search for voting results): votes in the Council on legislative acts with the position of each member state, on the procedure pages. In addition, the population figures of the member states for the qualified majority from Annex III of the Council’s Rules of Procedure, republished every year in the Official Journal of the EU.
• Portrait photos: the official photos of the European Parliament (© European Union, Source: EP) as reduced copies of the originals from the Parliament’s website. If there is no copy yet (for example for a new MEP), the same official portrait from Wikimedia Commons (matched via Wikidata) or the photo loaded directly from the Parliament’s website.

Licence and attribution. The data of the European Parliament are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). © European Parliament, Open Data Portal (data.europarl.europa.eu). The data have been processed, combined and analysed for presentation on OpenRCV. OpenRCV is an independent project and is not affiliated with the European Parliament; the Parliament does not endorse the presentation and accepts no liability for it. The voting results of the Council are reused with acknowledgement of the source, as permitted by Council Decision (EU) 2017/1842 on its open data policy: © European Union, Council of the European Union (consilium.europa.eu). OpenRCV is not affiliated with the Council either; the Council accepts no liability for any consequence of the reuse.

Download data. The analysed dataset is openly available for download: all roll-call final votes and, as a separate dataset, all split and amendment votes, each with the individual votes and vote corrections, as CSV and JSON, freely reusable under CC BY 4.0: Download data.

Only roll-call votes record how individual MEPs voted. “Did not vote” means absent or did not take part. The figures shown on the cards refer to the main vote on the file concerned. All information is provided without guarantee.

Aggregated analyses. For a small number of files there is no roll-call final vote: the final vote was taken by show of hands, and only individual amendments were voted by roll call. On the vote pages, such cases are explicitly marked as “no roll-call final vote” and shown without a misleading result figure. In the summary analyses (statistics, topics, MEP profiles and the data download), however, they are included with the result of the vote recorded by roll call, which may be that of an amendment rather than the final vote. This concerns only very few files and may lead to minor inaccuracies there. We have deliberately decided against adjusting these cases retrospectively, so that the underlying official data are reproduced unchanged and in a verifiable way.

Privacy

OpenRCV is an independent, advertising-free service without user accounts. We collect no data for analytics or advertising purposes and create no usage profiles. This section explains which data arise when you use the website, who receives them and which personal data we publish.

1. Controller

The controller within the meaning of the GDPR is Dustin Hoffmann, Brussels, Belgium (see Legal notice).
E-mail: info@openrcv.eu

2. Hosting and server logs

The website runs on our own dedicated server provided by Hetzner Online GmbH, Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen, Germany, in a data centre in Helsinki (Finland), and thus within the European Union. Hetzner provides the hardware, power supply and network connection; we operate the web servers ourselves. A data processing agreement pursuant to Art. 28 GDPR is in place with Hetzner. All connections are encrypted (HTTPS).

Our web servers keep no access logs: your page views are not recorded. Your IP address is processed only in order to deliver pages, data, downloads and RSS feeds to your browser or feed reader. Only if a transfer is interrupted (for example because you leave a page before it has fully loaded) or another technical error occurs does the upstream server write an error message to its system log. This message contains:

• IP address
• date and time
• the page or file requested
• the information sent by your browser: browser type and operating system, language setting and previously visited page (referrer)

These messages serve solely to detect faults and to ward off attacks. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; the legitimate interest lies in secure and fault-free operation. They are not combined with other data sources. The system log is deleted automatically after 14 days. Encrypted backups of the server, which may contain such messages, are likewise stored with Hetzner in the European Union and are deleted after three months at the latest.

3. No cookies, no audience measurement, settings in your browser

We use no cookies and no analytics or tracking services, no advertising and no social media plug-ins. A cookie banner is therefore not required.

Your browser itself remembers a few settings so that a feature you have chosen still applies the next time you open a page. This information remains on your device and is not transmitted to us:

• rcv-theme (local storage): your choice of “Light” or “Dark”, only if you use the switch.
• rcv-sp (local storage): the format and layout you last chose in the graphic generator.
• rcv-begriffe (local storage): the value “aus” (off), only if you turn off the “Explain terms” switch so that technical terms are no longer marked. If you turn it back on, the entry is deleted.
• rcv-positionen (local storage): your position list under “Statistics, Own positions” (name, publisher, votes, positions and counting rule), only if you turn on “Remember in this browser”. Turning it off deletes the entry. Without remembering, the list is only in the part of the address after #, which your browser does not send to the server when the page is opened.
• rcv-fragen (session storage): the history of the “Ask” feature in this tab, so that it is kept when you move to another page. It is removed when you close the tab or choose “New conversation”.

This storage is strictly necessary for the feature you have chosen (Article 5(3) of Directive 2002/58/EC); no consent is required for it. You can delete this information at any time in your browser settings (clear website data).

4. The “Ask” feature

With “Ask” you can enquire about votes and MEPs in your own words. The answers are written by an AI language model (Claude by Anthropic) on the basis of OpenRCV’s voting data. They are generated automatically and may contain errors; the linked votes are authoritative. Use of the feature is voluntary; all other parts of the website work without it.

What is transmitted. When you submit a question, your browser sends the question and the previous history of this conversation to our server. Our server adds relevant public data from our voting database and forwards both to Anthropic’s application programming interface (API), which generates the answer. Our server does not pass on your IP address or information about your browser; Anthropic sees only our server. Please do not include in your questions any information about yourself or other people that is not needed to answer them.

On our side. The service handling the questions keeps no access log and stores neither questions nor answers. It logs only technical metrics without any personal reference (size of the request, duration, cost, error codes). To prevent misuse, it limits the number of questions per connection. For this purpose it derives a check value from your IP address (for IPv6, from the network range of your connection) using a key that is generated anew each time the service restarts; the address cannot be derived back from this value. The check value is held only in working memory, never on a storage medium, and serves only to count the requests and costs of the current day.

At Anthropic. Anthropic processes the transmitted content on our behalf pursuant to Art. 28 GDPR, on the basis of Anthropic’s terms for the API and its data processing agreement. The contracting party for customers in the European Economic Area is Anthropic Ireland, Limited, Dublin (Ireland); processing also takes place at Anthropic, PBC in the United States. This transfer to a third country is covered by the standard contractual clauses of the European Commission (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR). Anthropic does not use content from the API to train its models and deletes inputs and outputs after 30 days, unless longer retention is necessary to enforce Anthropic’s usage policy or is required by law. Further information is available in the Anthropic Privacy Center.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; our legitimate interest is to answer your question at your request and to protect the service against misuse.

5. Summaries of documents

In the view of a vote, a summary of the document can be expanded below “Procedure details”. It is created once per document: an AI language model (Claude by Anthropic) summarises the official text of the European Parliament, our server stores the result and then shows it to everyone in the same form. The summary may contain errors; the official text is authoritative. Its use is voluntary.

What is transmitted. When you expand it, your browser sends only the reference number of the document to our server. If there is no summary yet, our server retrieves the official text from the European Parliament and forwards it to Anthropic’s application programming interface (API). Our server does not pass on your IP address, information about your browser or any other information about you, either to Parliament or to Anthropic. Processing at Anthropic is subject to what is stated in section 4.

On our side. As with “Ask”, the service keeps no access log. It limits the number of newly generated summaries per connection using the same check value derived from your IP address, which is held only in working memory (section 4). Only the summaries themselves are stored, with no link to the person who requested them. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; our legitimate interest is to show you an understandable summary at your request and to protect the service against misuse.

6. Fonts

The website uses the system fonts installed on your device. Only the images of the graphic generator use the typeface Instrument Sans; it is stored on our server and loaded from there. There is no connection to Google Fonts or other providers.

7. Portrait photos

The portrait photos of the MEPs are the official photos of the European Parliament (© European Union, Source: EP). We serve copies of them from our own server: in the overview, on the profile pages, in the enlarged view and in the graphics. Only if no copy is available yet (for example for MEPs who have newly joined Parliament) does your browser load the photo directly from the European Parliament’s server (www.europarl.europa.eu). In that case Parliament receives your IP address; its processing is governed by Regulation (EU) 2018/1725. The legal basis for this embedding is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; the legitimate interest lies in a complete presentation.

8. Graphics, sharing and copying

The graphic generator draws the images entirely in your browser; nothing is transmitted to us in the process. If you pass on an image or a link via “Share”, your device’s share menu opens, and the content goes directly to the app or service you select there. Its privacy policy then applies to any further processing; we are not informed of it. “Copy” uses your device’s clipboard.

9. Links to other services

The website links to other services, in particular to pages and documents of the European Parliament. Your browser connects to the respective provider only when you follow a link; that provider’s privacy policy then applies.

10. Contact by e-mail

If you write to us, we process your message and your contact details in order to deal with your enquiry (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) and delete them once they are no longer needed for that purpose. The mailboxes are hosted by ALL-INKL.COM – Neue Medien Münnich, Hauptstraße 68, 02742 Friedersdorf, Germany.

11. Publication of data on MEPs

OpenRCV presents the roll-call voting behaviour of Members of the European Parliament, including former Members for the duration of their mandate. To do so, we process personal data: name, portrait photo, political group, national party, member state, term of office, positions held in Parliament, political groups, committees and delegations, voting behaviour including corrections put on record, and speeches in plenary. The sole basis is the data officially published and freely accessible from the European Parliament (Open Data Portal, CC BY 4.0) and its official portrait photos. The processing is carried out in the overriding public interest in the transparency of parliamentary activity and for information purposes (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, where applicable in conjunction with Art. 85 GDPR). In this respect, MEPs act in their public role related to their mandate. For answers from the “Ask” feature and for the summaries of documents, this public information is also sent to Anthropic (sections 4 and 5). The figures shown reflect the official records of Parliament; reports of possible discrepancies are welcome at the e-mail address given above.

12. Your rights

Subject to the statutory requirements, you have the right of access (Art. 15), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction of processing (Art. 18) and data portability (Art. 20), as well as a right to object to processing based on legitimate interests (Art. 21 GDPR). A message to the e-mail address given above is sufficient to exercise these rights.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. The competent authority is the Belgian Data Protection Authority (Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit / Autorité de protection des données), Drukpersstraat 35 / Rue de la Presse 35, 1000 Brussels, contact@apd-gba.be, gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit.be.

13. No automated decision-making

No automated decision-making or profiling within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR takes place; the “Ask” feature does not make any decisions about you either. Your data are passed on to third parties only as described above (hosting, the “Ask” feature, portrait photos in exceptional cases).

Version: October 2026.