Privacy Statement
The Weidmüller Group (hereinafter called “Weidmüller”; information on Weidmüller is available under Legal Notice), is happy to welcome you to our website. Data protection and data security while using our website are very important for us. So we would like to inform you at this point which of your personal data we record during your visit and for what purpose it is used.
As legislative amendments or changes to our company-internal processes necessitate adaptation of this Privacy Statement, please read through this Privacy Statement regularly.
§ 1 Scope
This Privacy Statement applies to the Weidmüller Internet offering which is accessible under the domain www.weidmueller.de as well as the various subdomains (hereinafter referred to as “our website”).
§ 2 What is personal data?
Personal data is information that can be used to find out your personal or factual circumstances (e.g. name, address, telephone number, data of birth or e-mail address). Information that could not be used to identify you (or only with a disproportionate level of effort) is not classed as personal data, e.g. data that has been anonymised.
§ 3 What personal data do we collect/process and use?
You can use a large part of our web presence without disclosing personal data. Access data are are stored without a person reference, such as the name of your Internet service provider, the page from which you are visiting us, the name of the requested files and their access date. These data are exclusively evaluated with a view to improving our offering and give no indication whatsoever of your identity. However, if you wish to take advantage of the services offered on our Internet presence, such as ordering a newsletter etc., it is necessary for you to provide further data. This is the data required for the particular processing, such as your e-mail address for ordering a newsletter. We use the data collected about you to provide the products and services we offer, to answer your questions and to operate and improve our websites and applications. We use your personal data exclusively to be able to offer you an extensive service via our website or, if you use a contact form, e.g. to register for a newsletter or webinar, to order a sample product or a white paper, to render the required service. There is no further use of your personal data. Forwarding of your personal data to third persons or use of your data for advertising purposes without your consent does not take place (except in the case below) unless we are legally required to disclose data (information to criminal prosecution authorities and courts; information to public authorities which receive data on the basis of legal stipulations,e.g. social insurance providers, tax authorities etc.) or engage third parties professionally obliged to maintain secrecy in order to assert our claims. In particular, personal data are used as follows:
a) Registration/user account
When you register with Weidmüller, we save your e-mail address so that we can send you new access data should you ever forget them. We also save your user name and password to enable you to conveniently log-in to your account, along with mandatory information (mandatory fields are labelled as such (*); all other information is optional). These data are used for the stipulated purposes in order to offer you a particular service.
b) Purchases/Ordering samples
We use the data you provide for ordering catalogues, goods or samples without your separate consent exclusively for the purpose of fulfilling and processing your order. Once the contract has been completely processed and the purchase price is fully paid, your data will be blocked against further use and will be erased on expiry of storage periods defined in tax and commercial law, unless you have expressly consented to the further use of your data. Your data is transferred to the shipping company to which we outsource the delivery of your order, if this is required in order to deliver the goods. For the processing of payments, we pass on your data to the authorised banking institution assigned to handle your payment. These companies may only use your data for order processing and not for further purposes.
c) Message board/social media platform
The user has the possibility of voluntarily posting impressions, statements, photos, videos on the message board. Every user is free to decide independently which data they would like to disclose and which not. Weidmüller reserves the right to delete a publication, without giving reasons at any time. There is no entitlement to publication.
d) Newsletter
To register for our e-mail newsletter, we require, in addition to your consent, at least an e-mail address to which the newsletter can be sent. Any other information is voluntary and is used to address you in person and to allow us to personally configure the content of the newsletter and clarify queries about your e-mail address. It is entirely up to you whether you provide us with this data. However, without this information we cannot send you our newsletter. We usually employ the double opt-in method for sending out newsletters, i.e. we will only send you the newsletter once you have confirmed your registration via a link included in a confirmation e-mail sent for this purpose. In this way we aim to ensure that only you yourself, as the owner of the specified e-mail address, can register for the newsletter. You must confirm your registration soon after receiving the confirmation e-mail, otherwise your newsletter registration will be automatically deleted from our database. If you register for the newsletter we will store and use your e-mail address for our own advertising purposes until you unsubscribe from the newsletter. To unsubscribe, you can either send us an informal e-mail to datenschutz@weidmueller.de or cancel by clicking the link at the end of the newsletter.
e) Contact form
If you decide to direct enquiries to us using our contact form, we will ask you for your given name and family name and your e-mail address. You can also enter your individual message to us in the message field. It is entirely up to you whether you provide us with this data. However, without this information we will be unable to meet your contact request.
f) Advertising and market research
If you have provided consent for advertising and market research, we will use your information beyond the purpose of handling the services you require to also offer an Internet presence geared to your interests, and occasionally provide interesting news and information about our company or our range of goods and services by post or e-mail (in the form of a newsletter) on the basis of your data, tailored to your individual interests, and use your data for the necessary evaluation and market research purposes. For this purpose, it is technically necessary for us to summarise your accumulated as well as stated data in usage profiles in order to evaluate them for the above-mentioned purposes. This only takes place internally and only for the purposes mentioned. You can revoke your consent in this regard at any time by writing to datenschutz@weidmueller.de. If you have not given your consent or you choose to revoke it, your data will not be used in accordance with the previous paragraph. You will, of course, be able to continue using other Weidmüller services.
§ 4 User profiles/Use of cookies
Apart from in the cases stated above, we do not create any personal user profiles. In connection with the retrieval of the information requested by you, data will only be saved on our servers in an anonymised form in order to render our various services or for evaluation purposes. General information is logged, e.g. regarding which content is retrieved from our offering or which sites are most frequently visited. We use cookies (small text files with configuration information). Cookies are small text files that are sent to your browser when you visit our Internet sites and which are kept on your computer for subsequent retrieval. We only use session cookies (also known as temporary cookies), i.e. those that are only saved temporarily for the duration of your visit to our Internet sites. These cookies are used, in particular, to determine the frequency of use and the number of users of our websites and to continue to identify your computer during a visit to our Internet presence when you change from one of our websites to another of our websites, and to be able to determine the end of your visit. This lets us know which area of our websites and which other websites our users have visited. This usage data does not allow any indication of the user's identity. In accordance with § 3 of this Privacy Statement, none of the anonymised usage data collected is merged with your personal data and all data is immediately deleted at the end of the statistical evaluation. The cookies are deleted at the end of the session as soon as you close your browser. Most browsers are pre-configured to automatically accept cookies. However, you can deactivate the saving of cookies or configure your browser to notify you before cookies are saved. Users who do not accept cookies may not be able to access certain areas of our websites.
§ 5 Integration of social plug-ins
Our websites also contain plug-ins from the social networks “Facebook” (Facebook Inc., 1601 S. California Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA) and “Twitter” (Twitter, Inc. 1355 Market St, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA). These are operated by the respective providers. The plug-ins used in our online presence are identified by the respective button of the service. When you visit a page of one of our websites that contains such a plug-in, your browser establishes a connection to the servers of the respective service to enable the content of the plug-in to be transmitted to your browser and integrated into the displayed page. Information about the visit to our Website is thus transferred to Facebook. If, while visiting our website, you also have a parallel browser session open in which you are logged into your account with the respective service, the service can assign the visit to our website to your account. Plug-ins allow users to share or post links to relevant websites in social networks like Twitter or Facebook or to recommend the contents there. Any active interaction you may make with these plug-ins, e.g. by clicking the respective button or adding a comment, will result in the information being transferred directly to the respective service, where it will be stored. If you want to prevent such a transfer of data from taking place, you must log off from your user account with the respective service before visiting our website. Details about the extent and purpose of data collection by the respective service and the processing and use of your data is available directly from the data protection notice on the service website (www.facebook.com/about/privacy/ , http://twitter.com/privacy ). There, you will also find further information on your data protection rights and setting options for the protection of your privacy.
§ 6 econda site monitor
Solutions and technologies from econda GmbH are used for demand-oriented configuration and to optimise this website by entering and saving anonymised data from which usage profiles are produced through the use of pseudonyms. Cookies may be used for this purpose to enable an Internet browser to be recognised. User profiles are not merged with personal data pertaining to the bearer of the pseudonym unless agreed to expressly by the visitor. IP addresses, in particular, are made unreadable immediately upon entry, so that correlation of user profiles to IP addresses is not possible.
Visitors to this website may object to this data collection and future storage at any time. The objection only applies to the device and the web browser on which it was set; please repeat the process on all devices, if necessary. If you delete the opt-out cookie, the subsequent requests are once again stored by us as standard.
§ 7 Use of YouTube videos
We use embedded YouTube videos in the extended data protection mode. YouTube is a service from Google Inc., Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA. YouTube makes this extended data protection mode available and thus ensures that YouTube saves no cookies with personal data on your computer. The IP address is transferred when calling up the website and embedding the video. This address cannot be correlated, provided you have not logged into YouTube or another Google service prior to calling up the site or you are not permanently logged in. As soon as you start playing an embedded video by clicking Start, the extended data protection mode means that YouTube only saves cookies on your computer that contain no personally identifiable data. These cookies can be prevented with the relevant browser settings and extensions (source: YouTube “Activate the extended data protection mode for embedded videos”).
Further information on embedding YouTube videos can be found at YouTube information page
§ 8 Security measures to protect the data we save
We pledge to protect your privacy and to treat your personal data confidentially. To prevent loss or misuse of the data we store, we take comprehensive technical and organisational safety precautions, which are regularly reviewed and updated in keeping with the latest technological advances. However, you should be aware that the Internet is structured in such a way that data protection rules or the above security measures may not be observed by other persons or organisations outside our sphere of influence. In particular, it is possible for unencrypted data to be read by third parties - if disclosed in an e-mail, for example. We have no technical influence over this. It is the responsibility of the user to protect from misuse any data made available either by way of encryption or by other methods.
§ 9 Hyperlinks to external websites
Our website includes hyperlinks to websites operated by other providers. Clicking on these hyperlinks takes you from our website directly to the website of the other providers. This can be identified through the change in the URL, etc. We do not accept any responsibility for the confidential handling of your data on these third-party websites since we cannot influence these companies to comply with the data privacy provisions. You should find out directly on these websites how these companies handle your personal data.
§ 10 Revocation/objection
We would like to point out that you may revoke the consent you have given at any time, with future effect, and may also object at any time to the processing and use of your personal data. Please contact datenschutz@weidmueller.de.
§ 11 Information about your personal data stored by us / storage period / deletion
We will only store your personal data for as long as is permitted by law. The deletion of the personal data stored is carried out if you revoke your consent to storage, if knowledge of the data is no longer necessary for the fulfilment of the purpose for which it was saved, especially if the user account is deleted, or if storage is inadmissible on other legal grounds. We would be happy to notify you, on request, about which of your personal data we have stored. If, despite all our efforts to keep correct and current data, incorrect data should be stored, we will correct it promptly at your request. You have the possibility to verify, change or delete at any time the data you have made available to us by sending an e-mail to datenschutz@weidmueller.de. If you have permanently deleted your user account, the data saved under the user account are fully deleted automatically. A request for deletion is not necessary. Should you wish to have the saved data deleted, deletion will be carried out on your request without delay. If deletion is not possible for legal reasons, the data will be blocked from further processing. Please note, however, that once your data has been deleted we can no longer offer the services described here. If the user permanently deletes their user account, the data record saved under the user's account is fully deleted automatically.
§ 12 External data protection officer
If you have any questions or suggestions on the subject of data protection at our company or on this data protection information, please contact our external data protection officer directly.
Dr. Karsten Kinast, LL.M, attorney.