• Publication of directory on Europa

• Compliance with Regulation (EC) No  45/2001 on protection of personal data

• Entries in private directories

1) Publication of directory on Europa

The Directorate-General for Personnel and Administration and the Secretariat-General have decided, as part of the move to develop a service culture and in order to make the Commission's operations more transparent, to publish on Europa a new departmental directory that will facilitate the general public's access to Commission staff by phone, e-mail and post and through the Internet.

For this purpose the following information on officials and other staff will constitute their public details:

• surname, first name, how addressed (Mr, Ms, etc.)
• administrative assignment (Directorate-General, Directorate, Unit)
• job description²
• assignment location (including postal address)
• phone number (and possibly fax number)
• e-mail address

Making the above information available must not involve any infringement of Regulation (EC) No 45/2001 (see section 2).

For security reasons the actual office address (building, floor, office number) is not to be treated as a public detail. But to facilitate distribution of incoming mail staff are asked to give their office address voluntarily to identified correspondents.

Exceptions and restrictions:

Staff members' details will be omitted if their Directorate-General can show that the nature of their job warrants this in order to protect them.

Staff in the following categories will appear in the directory:

• officials (permanent and temporary)
• auxiliary staff
• contract staff
• detached national experts

Temporary staff, trainees and intramural experts will not be included.

Apart from the departments authorised to hold and process personal data, no-one is allowed to provide outside persons and organisations with paper or electronic lists containing even the public details of officials.

In particular Regulation (EC) No 45/2001 imposes on the Institutions an obligation to take all necessary measures to prevent directories from being used for direct marketing purposes.

Preventing unsolicited e-mails ('spam'), and also unsolicited approaches by other means of communication, is a constant concern. There are access control and filter installations on the central servers and these will continue to be developed. Legal action will also be taken under the provisions of Directive 2002/58/EC (Directive on privacy and electronic communications).

It will be possible to use the directory on Europa only in interactive mode to ask questions of very restricted scope that will allow only response lists of limited length to be obtained. In the first version of the directory e-mail addresses will be omitted and to stop them being reconstructed³ only the initial of the first name will be shown. Other ways of protecting e-mail addresses are being looked at for later use.

3) Entries in private directories

When officials are asked by outside bodies (publishers of commercial directories and Who's Who-type guides) to notify their personal data, particularly their office and e-mail addresses, they should bear in mind the security risk, the possibility that the data will soon be obsolete and the fact that they may be exposing themselves to directly targeted promotional activity.

footnotes

1Regulation (EC) No 45/2001 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2000 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data by the Community institutions and on the free movement of such data.

²Summary of the job description in Sysper 2. This will allow updating of the Directory along with updating of Sysper 2.

3Except in the case of managerial staff whose addresses are already published in the IDEA database.