Claim confidentiality

When can information be considered confidential

All confidential information submitted to the Commission in response to this Request for Information will, without exception, be treated in confidence.

As per the Commission Notice on the rules for access to the Commission file, you can claim confidentiality for information that can be considered as "business secrets" or "other confidential information".

Business secrets: Information about an undertaking's business activity that could result in a serious harm to the same undertaking. Examples: technical and/or financial information relating to an undertaking's know-how, methods of assessing costs, production secrets and processes, supply sources, quantities produced and sold, market shares, customer and distributor lists, marketing plans, cost and price structure and sales strategy.

Other confidential information: Information, disclosure of which would significantly har a person or undertaking. Depending on the specific circumstances of each case, this may apply to information provided by third parties about undertakings which are able to place very considerable economic or commercial pressure on their competitors or on their trading partners, customers or suppliers.

All other information will not be considered confidential. Information relating to an undertaking but which is already known outside the undertaking (in case of a group, outside the group), or outside the association to which it has been communicated by that undertaking, will not normally be considered confidential. Information that has lost its commercial importance, for instance due to the passage of time, can no longer be regarded as confidential. As a general rule, the Commission presumes that information pertaining to the parties' turnover, sales, market-share data and similar information which is more than 5 years old is no longer confidential.

How to claim confidentiality in text answers

Confidentiality in text answers consists of two elements: (a) the highlighted information that warrants protection, and (b) an assigned confidentiality claim which contains the substantiation and non-confidential summary.

After typing your text, select the information for which you would like to claim confidentiality and click on the CLAIM CONFIDENTIALITY button.

In the dialogue box that will appear, provide a substantiation (why is this information confidential) and a non-confidential summary (a representative non-confidential version of the information you are about to redact). Then click ASSIGN CLAIM.

For convenience, you can reuse a previously created claim by selecting it from the dropdown.

After finishing this process, protected text is visibly highlighted in your answer and confidentiality claims appear in the footer of each question. To see the details of your claim, click on the claim number. To reassign the highlight to another claim, click on the chain button.

You can create multiple confidentiality claims which can also overlap. To delete a confidentiality claim, click on the highlight to select it, and then on the on the REMOVE HIGHLIGHT button.

How to claim confidentiality in non-text answers

Non-text answers cannot be redacted, so there are no highlights. You can only create one confidentiality claim for non-text answers.

To claim confidentiality, for instance, for a multiple choice answer, click on the CLAIM CONFIDENTIALITY button in the footer of the question.

The same dialogue box will appear as for text answers, so that you can create a confidentiality claim or reuse an existing one. After you successfully created a confidentiality claim, it will be visible in the footer of the question. To delete a confidentiality claim, click on the trash icon next to it.