Privacy Policy

This website is published by the Société Tunisienne de Biologie Clinique (STBC), the Tunisian Society of Clinical Biology: a non-profit scientific association founded in 1981 and governed by decree-law no. 2011-88 of 24 September 2011 relating to associations.

For the personal data described in this policy, the STBC is the data controller: it decides what is collected and for what purpose. That processing falls under Loi organique n° 2004-63 du 27 juillet 2004 on the protection of personal data.

You can reach us at the following contacts:

This policy covers this website only, including the Jeunes STBC section. It describes what happens when you browse the pages, read the news and the congress programmes, and when you use the contact form.

As soon as a link takes you off this site, the rules of the destination apply instead of ours. We suggest you read them before you provide anything there.

This policy does not cover:

There are two places on this website where you give us personal data: the contact form and the newsletter subscription form. The contact form also carries a consent box and an invisible field used to catch automated submissions; neither travels with your message.

Beyond that form, this website has no account, no login, no database, and no payment is taken here: no card details are ever entered on it. The site never asks for your date of birth, a professional identifier, or any health information.

The newsletter form on the home page asks for one thing: your email address. Sending it also passes on the language you are reading in, so the confirmation email arrives in that language, and an invisible anti-spam field. Your address is not added to any list at that point: it is only added once you click the link in the confirmation email we send to it. Ending a subscription works from a link at the foot of any email we send, which opens a page where you confirm it. That page carries one optional field: a free-text box for telling us why. Anything you write in it is sent to the society and kept with the record of your unsubscribe, so please leave it blank rather than put anything personal in it — the unsubscribe works either way, and skipping it changes nothing. The Newsletter panel on the contact page and the Subscribe button in the footer are something else entirely — links to the members' application, with no field to fill in.

Two other things deserve naming: your browser keeps a language and a display preference (see the section on cookies), and words typed into the search box on the Activities and Events page travel with the request that fetches the event list.

The five items that leave your browser when you send the contact form are:

What you send through the contact form serves one purpose: reading your message and answering it. Depending on the subject, your request may be passed on inside the society to the board member or the committee responsible for it.

What you send through the contact form is never used for marketing: we do not add it to any mailing list. The newsletter list is a separate one that you put yourself on — an address reaches it only by being entered in the newsletter form and then confirmed from the email that follows — and it carries nothing but the society's own announcements: congresses, study days, training and calls for papers. Every one of those emails ends with a link that stops them. Whichever form you used, we build no profile of you, we take no automated decision about you, and nothing is sold, rented or exchanged.

This site runs no audience measurement, no advertising and no browsing analysis. Its pages contain no statistics script, no tag manager, no advertising pixel and no social-network tracker. We are therefore unable to tell you which pages you personally read: that information is not collected.

The language and display preferences kept by your browser are used for one thing only: showing the site in the language and the appearance you chose.

In Tunisia, the processing of personal data is governed by Loi organique n° 2004-63 du 27 juillet 2004, under the supervision of the Instance Nationale de Protection des Données à Caractère Personnel (INPDP).

Our basis for handling enquiries received through the form is your consent. The box provided for it is not ticked in advance: you have to tick it yourself, and the form cannot be sent until you do. By ticking it, you agree that the STBC processes the details you entered in order to reply to you.

The newsletter rests on your consent as well, and adds a second step to it: the box beneath the address is not ticked in advance either, and the address joins the list only once you follow the link in the confirmation email. That second step exists because the form is open to anyone — without it, one person could put another person's address on the society's list. You can withdraw either consent at any time: for an enquiry, by writing to contact@stbc.org.tn; for the newsletter, through the link at the foot of any email we send you, which needs no message to anyone. Withdrawal does not undo a reply already sent, but it ends any further use of your details.

The language and display preferences are kept because you asked the site to remember a choice. The site works without them, and you can remove them from your browser whenever you wish.

When you press Send message, it is your browser that posts the five fields directly to the STBC enquiry service. Subscribing to the newsletter works the same way: your browser posts the address straight to that same service. Neither is stored on this website along the way — the site's own server never sees them. That service runs at its own address, separate from this website, on the domain used for the society's applications.

The home page and the Activities and Events pages are built by our server, which asks that same service for the list of events and for each event's details. Those calls are anonymous: they carry no cookie, no identifier and nothing about you, except that the words and dates you type into the events search are passed on as search criteria.

Beyond that, your data may become known to:

Two pages embed a map supplied by Google: the contact page, where the map sits at the foot of the page and loads only once you scroll down to it, and the JNBC congress page, where it loads only if you open the Posters tab. When one of them loads, your browser connects to www.google.com, which receives your IP address, information about your browser and the page you came from. Google may also set cookies of its own there. That processing is governed by Google's own privacy policy.

The society does not control where Google handles those connections, and that place may be outside Tunisia.

If you would rather avoid the connection, do not scroll to the map at the foot of the contact page and do not open the Posters tab; you can also block frames from www.google.com in your browser settings. The rest of the site works without them: the postal address is written out in full on the contact page.

This website keeps nothing: it has no database and no account system, so nothing you type is recorded here. Your message exists on this site only while the form stays open in your browser.

Once sent, an enquiry is kept by the society for as long as it takes to deal with it and to keep track of the exchange it belongs to. We set no single fixed period here: a question about a congress closes in days, while a partnership discussion can run over a season. What we do commit to is deleting your enquiry as soon as you ask.

In your browser: the language cookie is a session cookie, deleted when you close the browser. The display preference never leaves it at all, and stays until you clear the data for this site.

A newsletter subscription is kept for as long as you leave it in place. Unsubscribing stops the sending at once: follow the link at the foot of any of our emails and confirm on the page it opens. The society does keep a note that the address asked not to be contacted, and keeps it indefinitely: it is the only way to be certain a later mailing does not reach it again, and that note is used for nothing else. An address that was entered but never confirmed is never written to, and can be removed on request.

Technical server logs are limited in size and overwrite themselves as they fill, and no feature of this site records your personal data in them. A relay server in front of the site keeps its own connection records, as any web server does, including the page addresses requested — which is why the search box should not carry personal details.

The site is served over HTTPS and asks browsers to use HTTPS for every later visit as well (HSTS). The enquiry service your message goes to is reached over HTTPS too, so the message travels encrypted — but it is a different address from this site, which this site's HSTS setting does not cover.

The pages carry a content security policy restricting where scripts, styles, images, frames and network connections may come from: this site, the society's own services, and the Google map frame. Beyond those, only images and fonts embedded in the pages themselves are allowed. The usual protective headers are sent alongside it: the site refuses to be framed by another site, prevents file types from being reinterpreted, limits the referrer it passes on to other sites, the two map frames included, and switches off camera, microphone and geolocation. The server software signature is not published.

We also reduce risk by collecting little: the contact form sends five fields, the newsletter form sends an address and the language you are reading in, and neither submission carries a cookie or an identifier. Both carry an invisible field that only automated programs fill in, which lets us drop unwanted submissions without imposing a test on you. The contact form's copy of that field stays in your browser; the newsletter's is sent, and the service throws the submission away on seeing it — deliberately, so that an automated sender is told nothing it could learn from.

Loi organique n° 2004-63 du 27 juillet 2004 gives you rights over the data concerning you. To exercise any of them, write to contact@stbc.org.tn, or to the postal address given in the first section, saying what you are asking for. Since we hold nothing beyond the messages you have sent us and, if you subscribed, your newsletter address, it helps to repeat the email address or telephone number you used, so that we can find them. We may ask for something confirming that you are the person concerned, and never for more than is necessary.

If you believe your rights have not been respected, you may bring the matter to the Instance Nationale de Protection des Données à Caractère Personnel (INPDP), the supervisory authority in Tunisia. You are also welcome to write to us first: we would rather settle the question directly.

The rights you can exercise are these:

This site sets one cookie, and only when needed. It is called NEXT_LOCALE and it remembers the language you read in, English or French. It is written when you switch language, or when the language served differs from the one your browser asks for. It carries no expiry date, so it is a session cookie: your browser deletes it when you close it. It is limited to this site (SameSite=Lax) and readable by this site's own scripts.

One further preference is kept in your browser's local storage, under the key selected-theme, holding one of three words: light, dark or system. It is sent to no server, and is read before the page is painted so the site does not flash the wrong colours. Local storage does not expire: the key stays until you clear the data for this site.

There is no audience-measurement cookie, no advertising cookie and no tracking cookie here, because nothing on the site would set one. This site places no third-party cookie of its own. Google may place its own inside the maps described above, under its policy.

This policy will change as the site changes. If a feature starts collecting something new, or a service starts receiving something, it will be described here when it goes live.

The date of the last revision is shown at the top of this page. When a change affects what is collected, why it is collected, or who receives it, we update the revision date shown on these policies and rewrite the section concerned rather than adding a note at the end of the document.

This website has no mailing list, so we cannot warn you individually when the text changes. If the subject matters to you, look at the date on this page from time to time.

For any question about this policy, about your data, or about the site itself, you can reach the STBC directly.

You may also use the contact form and choose Other as the subject: it arrives in the same place. Bear in mind, though, that the form sends your name, your email address and your telephone number; if your request is precisely to have those deleted, an email is simpler.

We answer in French or in English, depending on the language of your message. Requests about your rights are handled by the same people who answer the rest of our correspondence: there is no separate address and no special form to fill in. Our contacts are: