Data protection

Introduction and overview

We have written this privacy statement (version 01.02.2022-321938052) to explain to you, in accordance with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and applicable national laws, which personal data (data for short) we as the controller - and the processors (e.g. providers) commissioned by us - process, will process in the future and what lawful options you have. The terms used are to be understood as gender-neutral.

In short: we provide you with comprehensive information about data we process about you.

Privacy statements usually sound very technical and use legal terminology. This privacy statement, on the other hand, is intended to describe the most important things to you as simply and transparently as possible. To the extent that it is conducive to transparency, technical terms are explained in a reader-friendly manner, links to further information are provided and graphics are used. In this way, we inform you in clear and simple language that we only process personal data in the course of our business activities if there is a corresponding legal basis. This is certainly not possible by providing the most concise, unclear and legalistic explanations possible, as is often standard practice on the Internet when it comes to data protection. I hope you find the following explanations interesting and informative and perhaps there is one or the other piece of information that you did not know yet.

If you still have questions, we would like to ask you to contact the responsible office mentioned below or in the imprint, to follow the existing links and to look at further information on third party sites. Our contact details can of course also be found in the imprint.

Scope

This data protection declaration applies to all personal data processed by us in the company and to all personal data processed by companies commissioned by us (order processors). By personal data, we mean information within the meaning of Art. 4 No. 1 DSGVO, such as a person's name, e-mail address and postal address. The processing of personal data ensures that we can offer and invoice our services and products, whether online or offline. The scope of this privacy policy includes:

• all online presences (websites, online stores) that we operate
• Social media appearances and e-mail communication
• mobile apps for smartphones and other devices

In short: the data protection declaration applies to all areas in which personal data is processed in a structured manner within the company via the aforementioned channels. If we enter into legal relationships with you outside of these channels, we will inform you separately if necessary.

Legal basis

In the following privacy policy, we provide you with transparent information on the legal principles and regulations, i.e. the legal basis of the General Data Protection Regulation, which enable us to process personal data.

As far as EU law is concerned, we refer to REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 27 April 2016. You can, of course, read this EU General Data Protection Regulation online on EUR-Lex, the access to EU law, at https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/DE/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32016R0679.

We only process your data if at least one of the following conditions applies:

1. Consent (Article 6(1) lit. a DSGVO): You have given us your consent to process data for a specific purpose. An example would be the storage of your entered data of a contact form.
2. Contract (Article 6(1)(b) DSGVO): In order to fulfill a contract or pre-contractual obligations with you, we process your data. For example, if we conclude a purchase contract with you, we need personal information in advance.
3. Legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c) DSGVO): If we are subject to a legal obligation, we process your data. For example, we are legally obliged to keep invoices for accounting purposes. These usually contain personal data.
4. Legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) DSGVO): In the case of legitimate interests that do not restrict your fundamental rights, we reserve the right to process personal data. For example, we need to process certain data in order to operate our website securely and economically efficiently. This processing is therefore a legitimate interest.

Further conditions such as the performance of recordings in the public interest and the exercise of official authority as well as the protection of vital interests do not generally occur with us. If such a legal basis should be relevant, it will be indicated at the appropriate place.

In addition to the EU regulation, national laws also apply:

• In Austria, this is the Federal Act on the Protection of Individuals with regard to the Processing of Personal Data (Data Protection Act), or DSG for short.
• In Germany,the Federal Data Protection Act, or BDSG for short, applies.

If other regional or national laws apply, we will inform you about them in the following sections.

Contact details of the responsible person

If you have any questions regarding data protection, you will find the contact details of the responsible person or office below:

A4ord FT7 GmbH

Torstrasse 177, 10115, Berlin, Deutschland

E-Mail: office@a4ord.com

Imprint: https://www.a4ord.com/impressum/

Storage duration

The fact that we only store personal data for as long as is absolutely necessary for the provision of our services and products applies as a general criterion at our company. This means that we delete personal data as soon as the reason for processing the data no longer exists. In some cases, we are required by law to store certain data even after the original purpose has ceased to exist, for example for accounting purposes.

Should you wish your data to be deleted or revoke your consent to data processing, the data will be deleted as soon as possible and insofar as there is no obligation to store it.

We will inform you about the specific duration of the respective data processing below, provided that we have further information on this.

Rights under the General Data Protection Regulation

According to Article 13 of the GDPR, you have the following rights to ensure fair and transparent processing of data:

• According to Article 15 of the GDPR, you have the right to know whether we are processing data about you. If this is the case, you have the right to receive a copy of the data and the following information:
• the purpose for which we carry out the processing;
• the categories, i.e. the types of data that are processed;
• who receives this data and, if the data is transferred to third countries, how security can be guaranteed;
• how long the data will be stored;
• the existence of the right to rectification, erasure or restriction of processing and the right to object to processing;
• that you can complain to a supervisory authority (links to these authorities can be found below);
• the origin of the data if we have not collected it from you;
• whether profiling is carried out, i.e. whether data is automatically evaluated in order to arrive at a personal profile of you.
• You have a right to rectify data according to Article 16 of the GDPR, which means that we must correct data if you find errors.
• According to Article 17 of the GDPR, you have the right to erase ("right to be forgotten"), which specifically means that you may request the deletion of your data.
• According to Article 18 of the GDPR, you have the right to restrict processing, which means that we may only store the data but not use it any further.
• According to Article 19 of the GDPR, you have the right to data portability, which means that we will provide you with your data in a common format upon request.
• According to Article 21 of the GDPR, you have a right to object, which, once enforced, entails a change in processing.
• If the processing of your data is based on Article 6(1)(e) (public interest, exercise of official authority) or Article 6(1)(f) (legitimate interest), you may object to the processing. We will then check as soon as possible whether we can legally comply with this objection.
• If data is used to conduct direct marketing, you may object to this type of data processing at any time. We may not use your data for direct marketing thereafter.
• If data is used to perform profiling, you can object to this type of data processing at any time. We may not use your data for profiling thereafter.
• According to Article 22 of the GDPR, you may have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing (for example, profiling).

In short: you have rights - do not hesitate to contact the responsible party listed above with us!

If you believe that the processing of your data violates data protection law or that your data protection rights have been violated in any other way, you can complain to the supervisory authority. For Austria, this is the data protection authority, whose website can be found at https://www.dsb.gv.at/ In Germany, there is a data protection officer for each federal state. For more information, you can contact the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI). The following local data protection authority is responsible for our company:

Berlin data protection authority

State Commissioner for Data Protection: Maja Smoltczyk

Address: Friedrichstraße 219, 10969 Berlin

Telephone no.: 030/138 89-0

E-mail address: mailbox@datenschutz-berlin.de

Website: https://www.datenschutz-berlin.de/

Data processing security

To protect personal data, we have implemented both technical and organizational measures. Where possible, we encrypt or pseudonymize personal data. In this way, we make it as difficult as possible for third parties to infer personal information from our data.

Article 25 of the GDPR refers to "data protection through technical design and data protection-friendly default settings" and thus means that both software (e.g., forms) and hardware (e.g., access to the server room) should always be designed with security in mind and that appropriate measures should be taken. If necessary, we will go into more detail on specific measures below.

TLS encryption with https

TLS, encryption and https sound very technical and they are. We use HTTPS (the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure stands for "secure hypertext transfer protocol") to transfer data over the Internet in a tap-proof way.

This means that the complete transmission of all data from your browser to our web server is secured - no one can "listen in".

We have thus introduced an additional layer of security and comply with Data Protection by Design ( Article 25(1) DSGVO). By using TLS (Transport Layer Security), an encryption protocol for secure data transmission on the Internet, we can ensure the protection of confidential data.

You can recognize the use of this data transmission protection by the small lock symbol 🔒 links in the upper left corner of the browser, to the left of the Internet address (e.g. examplepage.de) and the use of the scheme https (instead of http) as part of our Internet address.

If you want to know more about encryption, we recommend doing a Google search for "Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure wiki" to get good links to more information.

Communication

When you contact us and communicate by phone, e-mail or online form, personal data may be processed.

The data will be processed for the handling and processing of your question and the related business transaction. The data will be stored for the same period or as long as required by law.

Persons concerned

All those who seek contact with us via the communication channels provided by us are affected by the aforementioned processes.

Phone

When you call us, the call data is stored pseudonymously on the respective terminal device and with the telecommunications provider used. In addition, data such as name and telephone number may subsequently be sent by e-mail and stored for the purpose of responding to inquiries. The data is deleted as soon as the business case has been terminated and legal requirements permit.

E-Mail

If you communicate with us by e-mail, data may be stored on the respective end device (computer, laptop, smartphone,...) and data is stored on the e-mail server. The data is deleted as soon as the business case has been terminated and legal requirements allow it.

Online forms

If you communicate with us using an online form, data is stored on our web server and, if necessary, forwarded to an e-mail address of ours. The data is deleted as soon as the business case has been terminated and legal requirements permit.

Legal basis

The processing of the data is based on the following legal bases:

• Art. 6 para. 1 lit. a DSGVO (consent): You give us your consent to store your data and to further use it for purposes related to the business case;
• Art. 6 para. 1 lit. b DSGVO (contract): There is a need for the performance of a contract with you or a processor such as the telephone provider or we need to process the data for pre-contractual activities, such as the preparation of an offer;
• Art. 6 para. 1 lit. f DSGVO (Legitimate Interests): We want to operate customer inquiries and business communication in a professional framework. For this purpose, certain technical facilities such as e-mail programs, exchange servers and mobile network operators are necessary in order to be able to operate the communication efficiently.

Cookies

What are cookies?

Our website uses HTTP cookies to store user-specific data.

Below we explain what cookies are and why they are used so that you can better understand the following privacy policy.

Whenever you browse the Internet, you use a browser. Popular browsers include Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge. Most websites store small text files in your browser. These files are called cookies.

One thing cannot be denied: Cookies are really useful little helpers. Almost all websites use cookies. More precisely, they are HTTP cookies, as there are other cookies for other applications. HTTP cookies are small files that are stored on your computer by our website. These cookie files are automatically placed in the cookie folder, effectively the "brain" of your browser. A cookie consists of a name and a value. When defining a cookie, one or more attributes must also be specified.

Cookies store certain user data about you, such as language or personal page settings. When you return to our site, your browser transmits the "user-related" information back to our site. Thanks to cookies, our site knows who you are and offers you the setting you are used to. In some browsers, each cookie has its own file, in others, such as Firefox, all cookies are stored in a single file.

The following graphic shows a possible interaction between a web browser such as Chrome and the web server. Here, the web browser requests a website and receives a cookie back from the server, which the browser uses again as soon as another page is requested.

There are both first-party cookies and third-party cookies. First-party cookies are created directly by our site, third-party cookies are created by partner websites (e.g. Google Analytics). Each cookie must be evaluated individually, as each cookie stores different data. Also, the expiration time of a cookie varies from a few minutes to a few years. Cookies are not software programs and do not contain viruses, Trojans or other "pests". Cookies also cannot access information on your PC.

For example, cookie data can look like this:

Name: _ga

Value: GA1.2.1326744211.152321938052-9

Intended use: differentiation of website visitors

Expiration date: after 2 years

A browser should be able to support these minimum sizes:

• At least 4096 bytes per cookie
• At least 50 cookies per domain
• At least 3000 cookies in total

What are the types of cookies?

The question of which cookies we use in particular depends on the services used and is clarified in the following sections of the privacy policy. At this point, we would like to briefly discuss the different types of HTTP cookies.

We can distinguish 4 types of cookies:

Essential cookies

These cookies are necessary to ensure basic functions of the website. For example, these cookies are needed when a user adds a product to the shopping cart, then continues surfing on other pages and later goes to the checkout. Through these cookies, the shopping cart is not deleted even if the user closes his browser window.

Purpose cookies

These cookies collect information about user behavior and whether the user receives any error messages. In addition, these cookies are also used to measure the loading time and the behavior of the website with different browsers.

Targeting cookies

These cookies provide a better user experience. For example, entered locations, font sizes or form data are stored.

Advertising cookies

These cookies are also called targeting cookies. They are used to deliver customized advertising to the user. This can be very convenient, but also very annoying.

Usually, when you visit a website for the first time, you are asked which of these cookie types you want to allow. And, of course, this decision is also stored in a cookie.

If you want to know more about cookies and are not afraid of technical documentation, we recommend https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6265the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments called "HTTP State Management Mechanism".

Purpose of processing via cookies

The purpose ultimately depends on the cookie in question. You can find more details below or from the manufacturer of the software that sets the cookie.

What data is processed?

Cookies are small helpers for many different tasks. Unfortunately, it is not possible to generalize what data is stored in cookies, but we will inform you about the processed or stored data in the following privacy policy.