Whilst we do make every effort to provide accurate material you are advised that:
You USE OR RELY UPON THESE MATERIALS AT YOUR OWN RISK.
No assurance or warranty is given as to the accuracy or completeness of any of the information provided.
You are advised to verify any information that is provided here against original documents.
Links to Third Party Sites:
TransLex contains links to third party Web sites ("Linked Sites"). The Linked Sites are not under control of the CENTRAL and the CENTRAL is not responsible for the contents of any Linked Sites. TransLex is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement by CENTRAL of the site or any association with its operators.
Materials provided by TransLex:
TransLex does not claim ownership of the materials posted, uploaded, imputted or submitted herein.
Liability disclaimer:
We do not make any representations about the suitability, reliability, availability and accuracy of the information contained in TransLex. All such information are provided without warranty of any kind. We hereby disclaim all warranties and conditions with regard to this information. In no event shall CENTRAL be liable for any damages, if direct of indirect, arising out of or in any way connected with use or performance of TransLex.
Privacy Statement
Definitions
Personal data means information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. This may include, in particular, IP addresses, names or other personal details contained in search queries.
Prompts are questions and other texts that you enter into the AI-assisted research function of Trans-Lex.org. They may contain personal data if, for example, you name individuals or describe specific circumstances.
AI inference refers to the processing of an input by an already deployed AI model to generate a response.
I. Controller
The controller responsible for processing personal data in connection with the operation of this website is:
University of Cologne
A public-law corporation
Represented by the Rector
Albertus-Magnus-Platz
50923 Cologne
Telephone: 0221 / 470-0
Email: online-redaktion@uni-koeln.de
Website: https://www.uni-koeln.de
Operating institution: Center for Transnational Law (CENTRAL).
II. Data Protection Officer
You can contact the University of Cologne’s Data Protection Officer at:
Data Protection Officer of the University of Cologne
Albertus-Magnus-Platz
50923 Cologne
Telephone: 0221 / 470-3872
Email: dsb@verw.uni-koeln.de
III. Purposes, Scope, Retention Periods and Legal Bases for the Processing of Personal Data
1. Website Provision and Web Server Logs
The University of Cologne automatically collects and stores information transmitted to us by your browser in the web server’s log files. This includes:
The temporary storage of your IP address by the system is necessary to deliver the website to your computer. For this purpose, your computer’s IP address must remain stored for the duration of the session.
We also use this data to ensure the security of our information technology systems and to optimise our website. The data is not analysed for marketing purposes in this context.
This data is stored for no longer than 7 Days and then permanently deleted.
The legal basis for the temporary storage of the data and log files is Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, as the University of Cologne has a legitimate interest in detecting and resolving technical issues and optimising its website.
2. Prompts and AI-Assisted Research
When you use the AI-assisted research function, we process your input, the research materials used to address your request and the generated response. We also process the technical information required to associate and handle your request. Any personal data contained in this information is processed as part of handling the request.
The purpose is to address your question and provide a relevant response. AI inference is performed using the Mittwald service described in section (III.3).
Processing to generate a response takes place with your prior consent under Article 6(1)(a) GDPR. This consent includes the transmission of data to Mittwald necessary for this purpose. Use of the function is voluntary. Without this consent, no AI request will be processed. The other research services remain available.
Please limit the prompts to the information necessary for your question. Wherever possible, anonymise personal details before entering them. In particular, do not enter health data, confidential information or personal data about other individuals for which there is no sufficient legal basis for processing.
3. AI Inference by Mittwald
For AI inference, we use “mittwald AI Hosting”, provided by Mittwald CM Service GmbH & Co. KG, Königsberger Straße 4–6, 32339 Espelkamp, Germany. Mittwald processes the data transmitted for this purpose on our behalf under an agreement pursuant to Article 28 GDPR.
Our application transmits the content required to generate a response to Mittwald in encrypted form. Processing takes place within Mittwald’s infrastructure in Germany. Inputs are not used to train AI models. The content is discarded immediately after processing. Mittwald does not permanently store inputs or responses.
The legal basis for our processing to generate responses, including the transmission of data to Mittwald, is your consent under Article 6(1)(a) GDPR.
4. Protection Against Automated Requests Using ALTCHA
We use a self-hosted version of the open-source software ALTCHA to protect our AI-assisted research function against automated abuse and excessive requests.
ALTCHA requires your browser to solve a computational challenge. Our server verifies the result before accepting the protected request. This increases the computational effort required to submit automated requests.
The ALTCHA scripts and verification functions are hosted on our own infrastructure. No connection to ALTCHA’s developer or an external CAPTCHA service is established for this verification, and no visitor data is transmitted to them. Our ALTCHA implementation does not use cookies, browser fingerprinting or advertising tracking.
We process the challenge data, the submitted solution and the verification result. Our server also processes the connection data necessary to exchange this information, including your IP address. Web server logging is described in section III.1.
Any verification records retained to prevent the reuse of completed challenges are deleted after one day. They are used solely to protect the service against abuse.
To the extent that personal data is processed, the legal basis is Article 6(1)(e) GDPR in conjunction with Section 3(1) DSG NRW and Section 8b(1) and (4) HG NRW. The processing serves the security and availability of the University’s information technology systems.
Successful verification is required to submit an AI-assisted research request. The other research services remain available without this verification.
5. Sessions, Cookies and Browser Storage
We use a session cookie containing a randomly generated identifier to associate your browser with session data stored on our server. For Ask AI, this data includes a security token that protects against forged requests, whether you have accepted the privacy agreement, and the expiry time of successful human verification. These values are stored on our server, not in the cookie itself. Human verification remains valid for up to one hour.
If you submit a question from the search bar on another page, its text is temporarily stored in your browser tab’s session storage. It is removed when the Ask AI page retrieves it.
The cookie’s lifetime and the retention of server-side session data are governed separately. Browser session restoration may preserve session cookies after the browser is closed.
Storing and accessing the session cookie and the temporary input in your browser is based on Section 25(2), point 2 TDDDG, as these operations are strictly necessary to provide the functions you expressly request. No separate consent is required for these strictly necessary operations.
The legal basis for processing personal data for protection against forged or abusive requests is Article 6(1)(f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest is to provide the requested website functions securely and maintain the integrity and availability of our systems.
6. Traditional Search and Search Suggestions
When you use the traditional search function, we process your search terms to identify and display matching content. Search terms may contain personal data.
The search service discards your query immediately after completing the search. Any query information recorded in web server logs is subject to the separate retention period described in section III.1.
IV. Your Rights
Subject to the applicable statutory provisions, every person whose personal data is processed has the right to request, free of charge, access to or confirmation of the personal data we hold about them.
You also have the right to obtain the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning you without undue delay, the erasure of your data or the restriction of its processing, or to object to its processing. (However, collecting data to provide the website and storing data in log files is strictly necessary for the operation of the website. Consequently, there is no right to object in this respect.)
You may withdraw your consent to the processing of personal data at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing based on that consent before its withdrawal.
You have the right to receive the personal data you have provided in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and to transmit that data to another controller.
We are happy to answer any questions about the processing of your personal data. If you would like to know what data we store about you or your pseudonym, have questions about the processing of personal data when using University of Cologne websites that this privacy policy has not answered, or would like further information on a particular point, please contact us at any time, including by email at webmaster@uni-koeln.de. However, we cannot guarantee complete data security when communicating by email, so we recommend sending confidential information by post.
Without prejudice to any other administrative or judicial remedy, you may also lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority in an EU Member State if you have doubts about the lawfulness of the processing of your personal data. The supervisory authority responsible for the University of Cologne is:
State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information
North Rhine-Westphalia
Postfach 20 04 44
40102 Düsseldorf
Telephone: 0211/38424-0
Fax: 0211/38424-10
Email: poststelle@ldi.nrw.de
V. Contacting us
You can contact us at feedback@trans-lex.org
- Search queries -
This site stores any used search query in an anonymized way in order to enhance the search function. This Data is exclusively used for internal purposes and is not given to any third party. We only want to monitor search queries that do not match our database and search queries entered several times. This helps us to improve this website.
See for more information regarding privacy: https://www.portal.uni-koeln.de/datenschutz1.html