Privacy Statement

Christoph Merian Verlag is an institution of the Christoph Merian Stiftung (Christoph Merian Foundation; CMS). We of CMS respect your privacy. The protection of your privacy is an important concern of ours, both when processing personal data and when securing any personal information. This privacy statement explains which of your data we process, the uses to which we put this information, and how you can object to processing and use of your data. We collect, process and store personal data in strict accordance with statutory provisions or with your express consent, for example within the context of a registration. The definition of personal data is any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person.

This privacy statement is based on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union (EU). Though the GDPR is an EU-regulation we take it as our standard.

Personal data we collect and process
We collect personal data solely within the framework of our relations to you. The collected data particularly includes your contact details, such as name, phone number, address or email address, and other information particularly in connection with your use of our website or your registration for our e-newsletter. By contrast, not classified as personal data is any information that cannot be related to your identity, e.g. statistical information on the user numbers of our online services.

We collect your personal data when you: visit our website, enter into direct communication with us, register for our e-newsletter or for our events, take part in a survey, share personal data with us for any other reasons, or order products of the Christoph Merian Verlag. In all of these cases, we process personal data solely for the intended, specific, and to the user discernible purpose. A prior consent can be revoked at any time with regard to future uses but will not affect data already processed.

Do we transfer personal data?
In the course of our business activities, we pass on data to third parties where permitted and necessary, e.g. when we use external service providers to provide our services. For the further processing of orders, we pass on your contact details (delivery address and e-mail) to our distributors in Switzerland or Germany. The personal data collected in the context of a registration for the newsletter will be disclosed exclusively for the dispatch of our newsletter MailChimp (USA). Otherwise, we do not pass on your personal data to other third parties. There are exceptions in a few processes. This is the case, for example, when we have postal deliveries carried out by third parties, e.g. printers.

External service providers who process data on our behalf are obliged to comply with the relevant security regulations within the meaning of the Federal Data Protection Act. We have ensured that the external service providers have a data protection declaration. They may also only transfer the processing of personal data to a third party with our prior approval and under guarantee of the security precautions.

For how long do we store personal information?
As a rule, we store data for the duration of our contractual relationship with you or for as long as we have a legitimate interest in storing your data. In all other cases, we delete your personal information, with the exception of data we are obliged to store by law (e.g. due to statutory storage periods).

Which data is processed when you visit our websites?
You can basically visit our websites without submitting your personal data. Each access is temporarily stored in a log file on the server of our website. This involves the following technical data:

• date and time of access
• web page from which you came to our site, possibly with search term
• name and URL of visited file
• conducted searches
• your computer’s operating system (given by the user agent)
• your browser (given by the user agent)
• device type in case of access by cell phone
• used transmission protocol
• IP address

Collecting and processing these data serves the purposes of system security and stability, fault and performance analysis as well as internal statistical data, and allows us to constantly improve our internet service. The IP address is moreover used for presetting the website’s language. Finally, for keeping track of website visits we use cookies as well as tools and applications. You will find more detailed information in the next section.

What are cookies and how are they used?
Cookies are small text files or text information that in the course of your visit are placed in your computer. If you call up our website again, your browser sends the cookies back to us and so allows us to automatically recognize you as a return visitor. Cookies help us to constantly improve our website and to facilitate navigation for you.

In case you decide against cookies, you can disable and delete them any time. For further information please consult your browser’s Help and Support sections. However, please note that deactivating all or some cookies may reduce the functionality of some of our sites. Moreover, when using a different browser or terminal you have to disable or deactivate the cookies once again.

What are tracking tools and how are they used?
Tracking tools are web analysis services which, by using cookies, provide us with data for evaluating the use of our websites. These are services which anonymize all data. This statistical information on the use of our online services (particularly website and newsletter) allows us to work on a user-friendly design, to carry out range measurements, and to conduct market research. Tracking tools are used for these purposes. They collect data which is analyzed with the help of cookies and results in usage profiles, which never are linked with personalized data. In fact, tracking tools either do not use IP addresses in the first place or abbreviate them straight away after collection.

In addition to the data listed above (see “Which data is processed when you visit our websites?”) we thereby obtain the following information:

• users’ navigation paths around our site
• users’ lengths of stay on the website or sub-sites
• last sub-site before leaving the website
• country, region, or town from where the website is accessed
• terminal (type, version, color depth, resolution, width and height of browser window)
• returning or new visitor

This information helps us with evaluating the use of our website. In case of your objection you can, as explained in the previous section, refuse the creation of user profiles by comprehensively deactivating the use of cookies.

Social media
Our websites contain links or plug-ins to various social media. If you click on the links you are directed to the corresponding social media pages. Please note that for these pages the present privacy statement is not valid. Information on the regulations in force on these pages can be gained by consulting the privacy statements on the websites of the respective providers.

Links or plug-ins must be activated before personal data are transferred to the respective provider. By accessing a linked page, you start activating the respective provider’s data processing.

Newsletter
Our online services include a subscription to our newsletter. If you should decide later on against receiving our newsletter you can at any time and with immediate effect cancel your subscription. Deregistration from the e-mail newsletter is possible via a link printed in the newsletter. Alternatively, you can contact us via the information given under “Contact”.

Data security
In order to protect your personal data stored with us against manipulation, partial or full data loss, and unauthorized access by third parties we have put in place technical and organizational procedures designed to safeguard all personal information. These procedures are constantly reviewed and updated in line with technological developments.

Your rights as to your data
With regard to your data you can exercise the following rights:

• request information about your personal data (“data subject access request”).
• request that your data be corrected, complemented, disabled or deleted, conditionally upon possible previous contractual and/or statutory rights and obligations, for instance the storage period.
• withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal data at any time and with immediate effect.

For exercising your rights, it suffices to write to us by mail or send us an email.

Amendments
We reserve the right to alter or complement this statement at any time, at our own discretion and in accordance with data protection regulations. Only the current version applies, as published on our website.

Contact details
In case you desire more information on your rights as to your personal data or have other questions relating to the matter, please contact the following address:

Christoph Merian Stiftung
Dr. Alexander Suter
Datenschutzverantwortlicher
St. Alban-Vorstadt 12
4052 Basel
Switzerland
T +41 61 226 33 29
a.suter@cms-basel.ch