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This policy covers www.parousiagroup.com and the regional sites operated on the same codebase: westafrica, eastafrica, europe, americas, middleeast and apac.parousiagroup.com. It describes everything this site stores on, or reads from, your device — cookies and any equivalent technique, since Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive applies to the storage and the access, not to the name given to them.

It does not cover the sites of the group’s six solutions — NetVox Intelligence, Global Technology Africa, Afrika Plaza, PAGEXPRESS, PAGPay and INTIC — which publish their own. What personal data the group processes, on what legal basis and for how long, is set out in the privacy policy; this document deals only with what is written to your device.

Its value is one of eleven language codes — en, fr, pt, es, ar, he, zh, hi, am, sw, ln. It is not an identifier: it does not distinguish you from anyone else reading the site in the same language, it is never combined with any other data, and no script on the site reads it. It is written by the server, on a request to an address that carries no language prefix — typically your first arrival on the site. Browsing addresses that already carry a prefix, such as /fr/about or /ar/contact, writes nothing.

Article 5(3) of Directive 2002/58/EC, as amended by Directive 2009/136/EC, makes consent the rule for storing information on, or gaining access to information already stored in, a user’s terminal equipment. The same provision states two exceptions, and the second is the one that applies here: storage that is strictly necessary in order to provide an information society service explicitly requested by the user.

Serving a page in a readable language is not an accessory of the service, it is the service. The Article 29 Working Party classified cookies of this kind as user interface customisation cookies and treated them as exempt (Opinion 04/2012, WP 194, section 3.6); the CNIL exempts, on the same reasoning, trackers used for interface personalisation such as the choice of language, where that personalisation is an intrinsic and expected part of the service (délibération n° 2020-091). The EDPB’s Guidelines 2/2023 confirm that the test bears on the storage and the access themselves, which is why this policy describes both.

The exemption relieves the group of asking for consent; it does not relieve it of informing you. That duty is met here, and by the privacy policy, which carries the legal basis and the retention period for the associated processing under Article 13 of the GDPR. The twelve-month lifetime is stated in the table rather than left to be discovered, and it is not extended silently: a change of duration is a change to this document.

The following is stated as an inventory rather than as a promise, because it can be checked from outside: open the developer tools of your browser and look at the storage and the network requests of any page of this site.

This is enforced rather than merely intended. The site is served with a content security policy that allows scripts, styles, images, fonts and network connections from its own origin only, and framing is denied outright. A third-party tracker added by mistake would be blocked by your browser before it ran.

Every browser lets you view, delete and block cookies, site by site, from its privacy or content settings. You can delete NEXT_LOCALE at any time, or refuse cookies from this site altogether, without asking the group and without telling it.

Nothing breaks if you do. Without the cookie, the language of a page requested without a prefix is negotiated from the Accept-Language header your browser already sends, and the negotiation simply runs again on the next visit. And you can avoid the negotiation entirely by using an address that carries the language, such as /fr/contact — no cookie is written on those.

This document carries a version number, a review date and an effective date, and all three are displayed. Adding a cookie, changing the purpose of the one described here or lengthening its duration raises the version number and is published before it takes effect, never after. Where the addition is not exempt under Article 5(3), it will not be set until consent has been obtained, and refusing will be as easy as accepting.

Questions about this document go to contact@parousiagroup.com, or by post to Parousia Group, 157, avenue du Livre, Kinshasa – Gombe, Democratic Republic of the Congo. If you consider that this site stores something it has not declared here, say what you observed and how — a screenshot of your browser’s storage panel is enough, and the group would rather be told than not.

You may also complain to a supervisory authority without going through the group first. The authority competent for each jurisdiction is listed in the privacy policy; in the European Union, the rule in Article 5(3) is enforced by the authority designated by the Member State concerned, and in the United Kingdom by the Information Commissioner’s Office under Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.