The PAT Workbench (Pictures And Text) is a tool of the University of Groningen (UG), built and run by team Data Science at the Center for Information Technology (CIT). It is used to annotate PDF documents — marking up text, pictures and the relations between them — for teaching and research.
The UG intends to handle your personal data carefully, and under privacy law is responsible for doing so. This statement sets out which of your data the workbench processes, why, for how long, and what rights you have. It supplements the general UG privacy statement. Where the two conflict, this one applies to the PAT Workbench.
For questions and requests about your personal data, you can turn to:
The UG processes your personal data in the workbench in order to:
The legal basis is the performance of the UG's public task in education, research and the services that go with them. Before you can use the workbench we ask you to confirm this statement; all we record is that you did so, when, and which version of this text you saw.
When you sign in, the workbench receives from the central UG account service:
While you use it, the workbench also records:
The workbench neither stores nor processes your password. Signing in uses the central UG account, which is managed by the UG's Identity and Access Management (IAM) department.
The workbench itself — the application, the database and the documents you upload — runs on equipment the UG owns and manages, at the Center for Information Technology.
One step is not carried out within the UG. To make the text of an uploaded PDF selectable and annotatable, each page is rendered to an image and sent to the Google Cloud Vision service for optical character recognition. The recognised words and their positions come back and are stored in the workbench. Google acts as a processor for the UG in this step, and the page images concerned leave UG equipment. The outgoing email this service sends — the confirmation of a deletion request, for instance — likewise passes through Google's mail servers.
PLEASE NOTE: because of that step, do not upload documents containing personal or confidential data unless it has been established for your project that this is permitted. Think of case files, medical or financial records, unpublished research data, or documents identifying people who have not agreed to it. If you are unsure whether your material may be uploaded, ask team Data Science first.
Within the UG your personal data is processed only by the people for whom that is necessary: the managers of the projects you take part in, who can see which annotations are yours, and team Data Science and the Center for Information Technology, who run and support the service. They consult content only where that is needed to investigate a fault or a report of misuse.
Apart from the recognition and mail services named above, the UG engages no external party to run the workbench. Your data is not sold and not shared with third parties, except where the UG is legally obliged to do so.
Your personal data is kept until you ask for it to be removed. Exports you generate are deleted automatically a week after you create them; you can always make a new one.
You can make a deletion request here. It is entirely automatic: nobody is notified of your request and it does not need manual approval. You receive an email containing a short code, valid for one hour. Entering that code on the same page removes your first name, last name, username and email address from the workbench and closes your account. We send a code rather than a link because a link in an email can be opened by mail scanners before you have read the message, and this cannot be undone.
The annotations you made are not removed. Once your name, username and email address are gone they no longer identify you, and they are part of the research or teaching material of the projects you contributed to. Bear in mind that closing your account cannot be undone, and that you will no longer be able to use the service.
Please also bear in mind that annotations may be needed for assessment. If you ask for removal before your work has been marked, you may not be able to complete your course successfully.
This concerns only what the workbench knows about you. Your UG account carries on existing — that is managed by the UG and is separate from this service.
The workbench is reachable only over a secure connection and only after signing in with your UG account. You can reach only the projects you have been given access to. The servers and the database sit in managed UG environments.
Under privacy law you have various rights: to access the personal data processed about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to restrict the processing, to object to the processing, and in certain cases to a copy of your data in a usable format. To exercise your rights, contact the UG at privacy@rug.nl.
Your request is assessed and handled within a month of receipt. Handling it involves establishing that the request was made by an authorised person and that it is legitimate, which is why you may be asked to identify yourself. Assessing and handling your request naturally involves processing your personal data.
Besides the UG you can also turn to the Data Protection Officer (fg@rug.nl). You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority; in the Netherlands that is the Dutch Data Protection Authority.
The UG may change this privacy statement. Reasons may include: changes in law and regulation, changes in the UG's overarching privacy policy, or changes in the technology used or in the way the workbench works. In the event of a material change you will be informed in good time and asked to confirm the new statement.
Last updated: 2026-09-09.
