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Accident recording
Have you been in contact with us in connection with an accident investigation?
Would you like to find out more?
Then you will find everything you need to know about the most frequently asked questions under the following headings:
Where does the VUFO get the information about the accident?
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 analysed. To do this, we first need all accident reports of accidents involving 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.
Why have you received a cover letter?
In order to obtain and process personal data, VUFO endeavours 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 co-operation 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 will receive your postal contact details from the Saxon police by secure means. If you do not reply or do not consent to the processing of your personal data, this data will be deleted immediately.
What happens to the collected data?
We collect data from road 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 organisation 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 organisations 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 collaboration with our partners, we try to use anonymised accident data to draw on experience gained from accidents in order to make traffic safer in the future.
How do we exercise your right to data protection?
The GIDAS road 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 organisational measures to prevent unauthorised access to this data. All our employees are bound by data protection regulations and therefore maintain confidentiality. The personal data provided to us is anonymised or pseudonymised 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 anonymised, e.g. no number plates or faces are recognisable. If you have authorised us 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 unauthorised third parties (see Data transfer).
What can we pass on to you?
Have you unfortunately been involved in an accident that we have documented?
We can then 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. We are therefore unable to provide you with data from other parties unless we have their consent to do so. Please send your enquiries by e-mail to datenschutz@vufo.de .
In any case, we reserve the right to check the originality of your enquiry. We will decide on the procedure to be followed in each individual case.
As an accident research organisation, 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.
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