Data Protection Policy / Information about processing “cookies”

“Personal data” means information about your personal or factual circumstances, particularly your name, date of birth, e-mail address, telephone number, and postal address. Beiersdorf collects, processes, and uses (hereinafter: “uses”) the personal data that you provide to the extent necessary to establish, implement, or terminate a contractual or quasi-contractual relationship with you. For example, such a relationship is established if you register for a newsletter or participate in surveys, contests, competitions, product tests, or lotteries or if you wish to receive product samples or contact us to receive information about us or our products. In such cases, we use your personal data to process your requests. You are free to decide whether to give us your data for the aforementioned purposes. To the extent permitted by the nature of your request, you can contact us anonymously or under a pseudonym.

In processing your request, Beiersdorf may have to disclose your personal data to other affiliated companies in the Beiersdorf Group or to outside service providers in European or non-European countries. For example, such service providers may have been hired to ship product samples to you, distribute advertising materials, or conduct lotteries. Beiersdorf demands that its outside service providers only use your personal data in conformity with our standards, this Data Protection Policy, and the statutory requirements for contract data processing.

In other respects, we do not disclose your personal data to third parties or sell or rent data without your permission. However, we reserve the right to disclose information about you if we are required to do so by law or if such disclosure is demanded of us by lawfully acting government agencies or law enforcement bodies.

The so-called social plug-ins (“plug-ins”) of social networks may be used on our websites, particularly Facebook’s “Like” plug-in. The provider’s website, i.e. facebook.com, is operated by Facebook Inc., 1601 S. California Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA. However, Facebook Ireland Limited, Hanover Reach, 5-7 Hanover Quay, Dublin 2, Ireland, is responsible for the German website facebook.de. The plug-ins are generally labeled with the Facebook logo.

In addition to Facebook’s plug-ins, we also use those of  “Google+” (provider: Google Inc., Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA) and “Twitter” (provider: Twitter, Inc., 1355 Market St, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94103). The following explanations regarding Facebook also apply to these two providers with the appropriate changes. You can find additional information about the use of data by “Google+” and “Twitter” at http://www.google.de/intl/de/policies/privacy/ and http://twitter.com/privacy. If you visit one of our websites with a plug-in, your Internet browser will create a link to the Facebook servers, and the fact that you visited our website will be forwarded to Facebook, even if you are not logged on to Facebook and regardless of whether you actually activate the plug-in, i.e. click on it.

If you are logged on to your user Facebook account during your visit to our website, Facebook can  assign the accessing our website to your user account. If you click on the “Like” button, this will be transmitted to Facebook and stored there so you can share the “Like” information with your Facebook friends. The same applies if you use the “Public,” “Share,” or “Share with Friends” functions available on some of our websites. We cannot influence the nature and scope of the data transmitted to Facebook. Moreover, we do not know precisely what data of yours is transmitted to Facebook and for what purposes Facebook uses this data. In any event, your IP address and – according to Facebook – information about the web page visited, the date, and the time of the visit and other browser-related information are transmitted. You can find additional information about Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=186325668085084

If you do not want Facebook to assign the visit to our website to your Facebook user account, you must log off of your Facebook user account before calling up our website. You can find additional information about the collection, storage, and use of your personal data by Facebook and the settings available to you to protect your personal date in Facebook’s privacy notices at http://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/.

To the extent you consent to the use of your personal data for “advertising and market research purposes,” your personal data will be used for such purposes. We only do this if you expressly consent to such use, e.g. by placing a check mark in the appropriate box during a promotion and then confirming.

We can then send you individualized advertisements about our products and services or suggest that you participate in promotions, such as lotteries or product tests. We contact you over the channels of communication you have indicated in connection with your consent to our contact, e.g. by e-mail, if you provide your e-mail address, or by telephone or SMS if you provide us with your landline number or mobile phone number. Finally, we also use your data to analyze and improve the effectiveness of our websites and our advertising and market research.

Without charge, you can at any time revoke the use of your personal data in the future, place a partial or complete block on your personal information, delete your personal information, demand information about the personal data we have stored, or demand that the data be corrected. You need not comply with any particular formalities. For example, simply write to Beiersdorf AG, Customer Center, Hopfenbruchweg 6, 19059 Schwerin or contact us by e-mail at nivea@beiersdorf.com.

We use so-called “cookies” on our websites. Cookies are small text files that are placed on the hard drive of your computer by your browser. The cookies we use do not store any personal data, so that personal identification is impossible.

a) Cookies improve the functionality of our websites

One reason we use cookies is to better understand how our websites are being used so as to improve their attractiveness, content, and functionality. For example, cookies help us to determine whether sub-pages of our website are being visited, and, if so, which ones and what content is of interest to users. Specifically, we record the number of accesses to a page, the number of sub-pages viewed, the amount of time spent on our websites, the sequence of pages visited, which search terms led you to us, the country, region and, if necessary, city from which the access was made, what Internet browser with what language setting you use, and the percentage of mobile terminals that access our websites. The IP address of your computer, which is transmitted for technical reasons, is automatically anonymized and does not permit any conclusions to be drawn as to your identity.

As a participant in the “Nivea for me” program, you are able to log on to our website with your registration data. In this case, we also use cookies to identify you as a registered customer if you revisit our website within 14 days and enable you to remain logged in.

b) Cookies for use-based online advertising

We reserve the right to use information that we have obtained from cookies and an anonymized analysis of your pattern of website use in order to display specific advertising for certain of our products on our websites. We believe that you, as a user, profit from this, because we run advertising or content that we believe matches your interests – based on your surfing behavior –  and you see less randomly displayed advertising and less content that is of little interest to you.

As a company, we have voluntarily submitted ourselves to self-regulation by the German Data Protection Council for Online Advertising (DDOW). You can find the self-regulation code to which we subscribe and additional information at the link: www.meine-cookies.org/ddow.html.

c) How to prevent “cookies” from being stored on your hard drive or delete them

You can set your Internet browser to prevent the storage of cookies on your hard drive, and you will be asked each time whether you agree to the placement of a cookie. You can delete cookies that have been placed on your hard drive at any time. The specifics of how this is done can be found in the operating instructions for your browser. You will find an explanation in word and picture for the Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome Internet browsers at this link: http://www.meine-cookies.org/cookies_verwalten/index.html

d) Google Analytics

This website uses Google Analytics, a web analysis service of Google Inc. (“Google”). Google Analytics uses a specific form of “cookie,” i.e. text file, which is stored on your computer and enables an analysis of your use of the website. The information about your use of this website generated by the cookie is generally transmitted to a Google server in the USA and stored there. We would like to point out that Google Analytics has been expanded on this website to include the code “gat._anonymizeIp();” to ensure the anonymized recording of IP addresses (so-called IP masking). Due to the IP anonymization on this website, your IP address is shortened by Google within the territory of the EU and the Treaty States of the European Economic Community. Only in exceptional cases is the full IP address transmitted to a Google server in the USA and shortened there.

Google uses this information on our behalf to analyze your use of this website in order to compile reports on website activities and provide additional services related to website use and Internet use to the website operator. The IP address transmitted to Google Analytics by your browser is not consolidated with other data by Google. You can prevent the storage of cookies by making the proper setting using your browser software, see Section 5 c), above. In addition, you can prevent Google from recording the data related to your use of the website generated by the cookie (including your IP address) and from processing this data by downloading and installing the browser plug-in available at the link http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. You can find further information about terms of use and data protection at http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/ or http://www.google.com/analytics/privacyoverview.html.

We also use Google Analytics to analyze data from AdWords and any cookies from “DoubleClick” for statistical purposes. If you do not want this to be done, you can deactivate it with the Ad Preferences Manager (http://www.google.com/settings/ads/onweb).

We have taken technical and organizational measures to protect your data from loss, alternation, or third-party access.

We may change or update portions of this Data Protection Policy without informing you of this in advance. Please review the Data Protection Policy before using our offerings to be up to date on the latest changes or updates.