Protecting your privacy is important to the Malta Environment & Planning Authority (MEPA) and we strive to keep your personal information protected. We have notified the Commissioner for Data Protection in accordance with Article 29 of the Data Protection Act (Chapter 440 of the Laws of Malta).

Please take a moment to read the following policy to learn how we handle your personal information, as your use of our services will indicate your acceptance of its content.

Purpose for the collection of personal information

We collect and use your personal information to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements, historical and statistical purposes, for security and control, to provide you with our services and to make more of such services available to you in the future. From time to time, we may also use your personal information to contact you by mail, email, telephone or mobile phone to introduce you to our products or any events, activities, projects, plans, developments or undertakings being promoted or supported by MEPA.

By supplying us with your information you confirm that you do not consider use of your information in accordance with this Privacy Policy to be a breach of your rights under the Data Protection Act (Chapter 440 of the Laws of Malta).

We encourage you to contact us at any time and remind you of your right to opt out from receiving any promotional or marketing materials from us at any time.

Disclosure of personal information to third parties.

As a policy MEPA will not disclose any personal information to anyone other than those employees or third parties that need access to your data to provide you with a service. Such third parties would be the payment gateway provider and our Internet Service Provider.

We may be required by law or legal process to disclose your personal information to authorities such as the VAT department, Inland Revenue Department, and other similar authorities.

Protection of your personal information

MEPA safeguards the security of the data you send us with physical, electronic and managerial procedures. Please note that we cannot guarantee that any data transmission over the Internet is completely secure. Accordingly, we encourage you to take every precaution to protect your personal data when you are on the Internet.

Access to your personal information

You always have a right of access to the information we have about you. To review and update your personal contact information, contact our Customer Service Centre using the contact details available on the site. Additionally, you have the right to have any inaccurate information corrected and where applicable, erased. Kindly submit a written request to review information we hold about you.

Cookies

A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer's hard drive. Cookies are developed to standards, tightly restricted, and under no circumstance do we have direct access to your PC, hard drive or any other of your devices. We may send you more than one cookie depending on the services you are interested in. This is done automatically and you will normally not notice that this is happening. You can choose whether to accept the cookies that we send to you by changing the settings of your browser. However, if you choose not to accept these cookies, your experience at our site may be inferior and some features will not work as intended.

Normally, we may use cookies to:

1. Link a User to the account information we store on our servers.
2. Estimate the number of people using our different services. Each browser accessing www.mepa.org is given a unique cookie which is then used to determine the extent of repeat usage, usage by a registered user versus by an unregistered user, and to help target information and advertisements based on user interests and behaviour.
3. Measure certain traffic patterns, which areas of MEPA's services are visited and detect visiting patterns. This information is used to understand how our site is used.

Commitment to privacy

To make sure your personal information remains confidential; we communicate privacy guidelines to every employee of MEPA.

MEPA's website contains a number of links to other sites. MEPA does not share your personal information with those websites. MEPA is also not responsible for their privacy practices, therefore, we encourage you to learn about the privacy policies of any such organisations before you submit any information to them.

If we are going to use your personal information differently from that stated at the time of collection, we will inform you.
MEPA's Privacy Policy is subject to change at any time. It is in your interest to review the privacy policy regularly for any changes.