Here you will find the most important questions and answers on the subject if you would like to find out more.
The VUFO works according to a specific sampling plan, which makes it possible to make representative statements about the accident situation in Germany based on the accidents investigated. To do this, we first need all accident reports of accidents with injured persons in our survey area during our shift times. We receive these accident reports directly and securely from the Saxon police immediately after the accident.
In order to obtain and process personal data, VUFO attempts to contact all persons involved in an accident. If we do not meet you at the scene of the accident or if we are still missing essential information, we will send you a letter. In this letter, we ask for your cooperation in the accident research project and for your consent to the collection and further processing of your personal data.
In order to be able to contact you, we receive your postal contact details from the Saxon police in a secure way. If you do not reply to us or do not consent to the processing of personal data, this data will be deleted immediately.
We collect data on traffic accidents in order to increase the safety of vehicles and road traffic in general. To this end, we work together with various clients and partners. As a matter of principle, we do not provide raw data, but always processed data for studies or projects. This means that no conclusions can be drawn about the person involved (see right to data protection).
Our clients and partners include suppliers and manufacturers from the automotive industry, the Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) as a federal research institution in the field of road engineering.
The traffic accident data collected is used by partners from the automotive industry, BASt and other partners such as universities and other research institutions as well as associations and testing organizations from the vehicle and traffic sector for road safety work, e.g. in the design or scaling of new or existing vehicle safety systems, in the investigation of safety-relevant traffic topics, in the drafting of legislation or in studies on road safety for future mobility.
In cooperation with our partners, we try to use the experience gained from accidents on the basis of anonymized accident data in order to make traffic safer in the future.
The GIDAS traffic accident research project has complied with all the necessary data protection requirements since it was founded in 1999. When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force, we reviewed our requirements and further specified the data protection requirements. We are constantly updating this development process in your interest. Of course, you can exercise all rights arising from the General Data Protection Regulation (e.g. right to clarification and information, objection, deletion, …).
We protect your personal data by taking all technical and organizational measures to prevent unauthorized access to this data. All our employees are bound by data protection regulations and therefore maintain confidentiality. The personal data provided to us is anonymized or pseudonymized during case processing. This means that the accident database does not contain any names, addresses or other personal data. All of the image material we record is extensively anonymized, e.g. no license plates or faces are recognizable. If you have given us permission to make further contact, we will store your address data securely at our location for possible future contact.
We do not pass on any personal data to unauthorized third parties (see Data transfer).
We can provide you with the information collected from you or your vehicle (usually the recorded image material). Please understand that, as an uninvolved research company, we must protect the rights of third parties. Therefore, we cannot provide you with data from other parties unless we have their consent to do so.
Please send your inquiries by e-mail to datenschutz@vufo.de .
In any case, we reserve the right to check the originality of your request. We will decide on the procedure to be followed in each individual case.
As an accident research company, we are not involved in police or public prosecutor’s investigations to determine the question of guilt. Therefore, we do not prepare accident or damage reports. As we work on scientific issues and are not familiar with the circumstances in court, we will not comment on questions of guilt or the conditions under which the accident occurred.