Green Award Foundation – Privacy Statement

The Green Award Foundation understands the importance of maintaining and protecting your privacy. The Green Award Foundation processes your personal data carefully and securely in accordance with the prevailing laws and regulations. A Privacy Officer has been appointed to ensure that we process your personal data in accordance with laws and regulations.

What you need to know about how we collect and use your personal data

Personal data collected by the Green Award Foundation
For the purposes of this privacy statement, “personal data” means any information that identifies you, that could be used to identify you or that relates to you, and that you submit about you when interacting with us and/or is otherwise collected by us from third parties, when you visit the websites, by phone through contact with our employees, by writing through application forms or in another manner. During our relationship with you we may collect and process your personal data, such as your name, address, telephone number, email and other contact details, and any other information relating to you which you may provide, in the following cases:

  • visit our websites and look at our services;
  • create an account on our websites;
  • enquire about our services and/or file a complaint;
  • enter into a contract with us and/or apply for the Green Award certificate or other services like CO2 reporting;
  • participate in an event;
  • sign up for our newsletters.

 

Personal Data that you provide us with
The types of personal data we may obtain in connection with the previous cases are as follows:

  • your name, company name, address, and contact details (such as telephone, mobile and fax numbers, email address)
  • details of contact persons (such as name, address, function/title, telephone and fax numbers, e-mail address);
  • services provided;
  • names, email addresses of others within your company;
  • financial and payment data such as banking details, invoices and payment terms as well as any personal data for fulfilling and legitimate processing billing information;
  • information about the ship, such as the name and type of the ship, the MMSI/ENI-number, certificate number – and level, certification date, expiration date
  • complaints and enquiries, including history of the contact you have had with our office/employees;
  • business profile;
  • tax identification number where you request services that require such information;
  • responses provided in response to surveys.

 

We may ask you for this information to enable us to provide a service to you and we collect this information by telephone, written/digital correspondence or via the website.

Personal Data collected by automated means, such as cookies.
When you visit our websites or use our services, subject to your prior consent where applicable by law, we may collect personal data without you actively submitting such information, by automated means, using technologies such as cookies, web server logs and similar technologies as described below. For more information about which cookies our website uses, we refer you to our Cookie statement.

The types of personal data that we may collect through your visits to the websites or use of the services include, to the extent permitted under applicable law and, where required, subject to your express consent, are:

  • the date and time of visit, referring address (location from which a visitor comes to the websites);
  • type of Internet browser, OS and device details;
  • visitor’s IP address (a unique number that is assigned to any computer that connects to the Internet for identification purposes).

 

How do we use your personal data?
The Green Award Foundation shall only process your personal data for the purposes described in this Privacy statement or as otherwise permitted under applicable law. The processing of your personal data by the Green Award Foundation for the purposes described hereunder is based on your explicit consent, which will be requested separately when necessary, or on the necessity to process your personal data for the purposes of managing the contract with you, comply with legal obligations and our legitimate interests, as provided by Article 6, 1, (a), (b), (c) and (f) of the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of 27 April 2016 (“GDPR”).

Your personal information may be processed for purposes including:

  • administer our (contractual) relationship with you, including to respond to your inquiries and/or complaints;
  • to provide any services or information you have requested and information about our services, incentive providers and events;
  • to administer, operate, maintain and improve the websites and our services, such as the Green Award certification process and CO2 reporting, for example by using anonymized data for statistics and reporting;
  • for efficient customer management relationship;
  • to manage our contract with you, such as your orders, invoices and payments;
  • to administer accounting and taxes;
  • to comply with the obligations we have towards incentive providers;
  • to publish and/or distribute lists of certified vessels ;
  • to respond to requests from administrative or judicial authorities;
  • to comply with any legal obligations, applicable laws and regulations;
  • The Green Award Foundation does not use automated decision making.

Providing personal data for these purposes is necessary and refusal would make it impossible for the Green Award Foundation to manage the contract with you or to comply with its contractual and legal obligations. This can also mean that you won’t be eligible for benefits or incentives, or lose any benefits or incentives for which you were previously qualified.

Who we may share your personal data with?
Our data is stored on servers in the European Economic Area (EEA). Our policy is not to give, sell or otherwise distribute personal data we collect, to third parties outside of The Green Award Foundation, except where required with your express consent or where this is necessary and in accordance with applicable law. In line with this, we may share personal data with the incentive providers of the Green Award Foundation for the purpose of benefiting from the incentives. A list of the incentive providers can be found on our website or can be provided upon request provided there is a legitimate reason. For the CO2 administration we share anonymized information with ports through a platform of an IT-service provider. We have a processing agreement with this party. As controller, we remain responsible for your data.
In any case, we will only transfer personal data to recipients that provide an adequate level of data protection or as permitted by applicable data protection laws.

Please note that when you order services from the Green Award Foundation, we may make enquiries about you for credit reference purposes. These enquiries include searching your records held by a credit reference agency. At all times where your information is disclosed to us we will protect it in accordance with this privacy statement and keep it secure.

How is your personal data protected?
The Green Award Foundation has appropriate policies and technical and organizational measures in place to safeguard and protect your personal data against unlawful or unauthorized access, accidental loss or destruction, damage, unlawful or unauthorized use and disclosure. For example, we have implemented a policy where only certain personnel has access to the personal data (on a ‘need to know basis’), applied security measures such as firewalls, anti-virus scanning, two factor authentication (2FA) and daily backups to prevent loss of data.

How long do we keep your personal data for?
We have a retention policy for personal data that we adhere to, in line with legal and statutory requirement, which is 7 years for financially related data. With regards to all personal data related to the Green Award certificate or provision of incentives, these will be stored during the validity/lifetime of the Green Award Certificate. For further details please contact the Privacy Officer at Green Award using the email address gdpr-GA@greenaward.org. We also may retain your information for the period of time needed for Green Award to comply with our legal obligations and enforce our agreements.

How to withdraw your consent?
If you no longer wish to receive our newsletters or any other information you get from the Green Award Foundation, please inform us by email or using the UNSUBSCRIBE option available in the communication you receive from us.

What are your data protection rights?
In accordance with applicable data protection law, you have several rights:

  • Right of access to the personal data that the Green Award foundation processes of you and to request a written copy of the personal information undergoing processing by The Green Award Foundation;
  • have any inaccurate information about you rectified;
  • have personal data we hold about you deleted, blocked or removed;
  • withdraw your consent where relevant, without affecting the lawfulness of processing based on your consent before its withdrawal;
  • restrict the processing we make in relation to your personal data;
  • receive your personal data, which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format in order to transmit them to another data controller (‘right to data portability’);
  • object to the use of your details for marketing activities and other promotional activities; and
  • lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in particular in the Member State of your habitual residence, place of work or place of the alleged infringement if you consider that the processing of your personal data infringes applicable data protection law. In the Netherlands, this supervisory authority is the Dutch DPA.

In case you wish to exercise any such rights, please send a written and signed request to the Green Award Foundation using the email address gdpr-GA@greenaward.org. Please note that a request can’t always be granted. For example, we cannot delete your personal data if we have a legal obligation to retain this data for a certain period of time. Should this be the case, we will inform you of this.

Other websites?
This privacy statement only applies to how the Green Award Foundation deals with your personal data. It does not apply to any other company or to any other company´s websites, even if you have accessed them through our website. If you disclose your personal data to other companies or information obtained by third party websites accessed via our website is governed by the terms applicable to your relationship with that third party. The Green Award Foundation accepts no responsibility or liability in respect of third party websites.

How can we update this privacy statement?
The Green Award Foundation reserves the right to amend this statement. We advise you to check on a regular basis whether this statement has been changed. The last change was in January 2025.

How to contact us?
If you have any questions about this privacy statement, or if you wish to exercise your rights under applicable data protection laws, please feel free to contact us through our website or write to us at: gdpr-GA@greenaward.org.