Data protection

The statutory duty of the Research Council of Finland is to promote scientific research by funding it and by participating in international cooperation. We also have other expert duties. As a government authority, we must promote the openness of our functions and give advice on and provide information about our services.

To comply with these statutory obligations, we may process personal data of some groups of people, including applicants, stakeholders and Research Council staff.

We process personal data in accordance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (EU 2016/679) and the Finnish Data Protection Act (1050/2018). We are also committed to following good governance and data processing practices.

If data processing is relevant to our statutory obligations, personal data may generally be processed without explicit consent. Additionally, we may process personal data based on consent, in which case we will ask for the explicit consent of the data subject. The data subject has the right to withdraw their consent at any time.

Moreover, data protection legislation secures the following rights of data subjects:

The right to know if their personal data is processed by the Research Council of Finland and to gain access to the data if need be.
The right to demand rectification of faulty or insufficient data.
The right to expect that the Research Council of Finland restrict processing the personal data of the data subject in a situation where the correctness of the data is denied, or the data is processed unlawfully.
The right to resist processing personal data based on the data subject’s personal special conditions, if the basis for data processing is to carry out a task for public interest.
The right to appeal to a supervisory authority if the data subject considers the processing of personal data unlawful. In Finland, the national supervisory authority is the Data Protection Ombudsman: tietosuoja(at)om.fi, tel. +358 295 666 700.

Please send all requests based on the data subject’s rights and observations of possible breaches of data protection legislation to our Registrar’s Office by email, kirjaamo(at)aka.fi. If you have questions about data protection, you can also contact the Data Protection Officer: tietosuoja(at)aka.fi, tel. +358 295 335 000 (switchboard).

For more detailed descriptions of different tasks and systems concerning processing personal data, please see our privacy policies below. The privacy policies describe the purpose and legal basis of personal data processing, the data we process, the source of the data, the parties to whom we disclose data, whether the data are processed outside the EEA and how the data is stored. They also include more detailed description of the data subject’s rights.

We may outsource processing tasks to third-party service providers as provided for in and in compliance with data protection legislation.

We will announce any changes in data protection on our website.

Privacy notices

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