As a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple, we only col­lect and use per­son­al data of users with­in the scope of the mere use of our web­site inso­far as this is nec­es­sary for the pro­vi­sion of a func­tion­al web­site as well as our con­tents and ser­vices. The col­lec­tion and use of our users’ per­son­al data gen­er­al­ly only takes place with the user’s con­sent. An excep­tion applies in those cas­es in which obtain­ing pri­or con­sent is not pos­si­ble for actu­al rea­sons and/or the pro­cess­ing of the data is per­mit­ted by legal reg­u­la­tions.

The host provider host­ing the web­site on its serv­er is qwer­tiko GmbH, Wald­straße 41–43, D‑76133 Karl­sruhe, Ger­many.

We have con­clud­ed an order pro­cess­ing con­tract with the host provider.

B.1  Pro­vi­sion of the web­site and cre­ation of log files

For tech­ni­cal rea­sons, our sys­tem auto­mat­i­cal­ly col­lects data and infor­ma­tion each time the web­site is accessed. These are stored in the log files of the serv­er. These are:

- Date and time of access,

- URL (address) of the refer­ring web­site (refer­rer),

- Web pages that are called up by the user’s sys­tem via our web­site,

- Screen res­o­lu­tion of the user,

- retrieved file(s) and mes­sage about the suc­cess of the retrieval,

- Amount of data sent,

- the user’s inter­net ser­vice provider,

- Brows­er, brows­er type and brows­er ver­sion, brows­er engine and engine ver­sion,

- Oper­at­ing sys­tem, oper­at­ing sys­tem ver­sion, oper­at­ing sys­tem type, and

- the anonymised IP address and the user’s inter­net ser­vice provider.

This data is processed sep­a­rate­ly from oth­er data. This data is not processed togeth­er with oth­er per­son­al data of the user. It is not pos­si­ble for us to assign this data to a spe­cif­ic per­son.

Pur­pos­es of data pro­cess­ing

The tem­po­rary pro­cess­ing of data by the sys­tem is nec­es­sary to enable the deliv­ery of the con­tents of our web­site to the user’s com­put­er. For this pur­pose, the user’s IP address must remain stored for the dura­tion of the ses­sion.

The stor­age in log files is done to ensure the func­tion­al­i­ty of the web­site. In addi­tion, we use the data to ensure the secu­ri­ty of our infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy sys­tems. An eval­u­a­tion of the data for mar­ket­ing pur­pos­es does not take place in this con­text.

Legal basis of the data pro­cess­ing

The tem­po­rary stor­age of the data and the log files is based on the legal basis of Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR. Our over­rid­ing legit­i­mate inter­est in this data pro­cess­ing lies in the afore­men­tioned pur­pos­es.

Dura­tion of stor­age

The data is erased as soon as it is no longer required to achieve the pur­pose for which it was col­lect­ed. In the case of the col­lec­tion of data for the pro­vi­sion of the web­site, this is the case when the respec­tive ses­sion has end­ed.

Pos­si­bil­i­ty of objec­tion and removal

The col­lec­tion of data for the pro­vi­sion of the web­site and the stor­age of the data in log files is absolute­ly nec­es­sary for the oper­a­tion of the web­site. Con­se­quent­ly, the user does not have the option to object. How­ev­er, the user can stop using the web­site at any time and thus pre­vent the fur­ther col­lec­tion of the men­tioned data.

B.2  Use of cook­ies by us and by third-par­ty providers

So-called cook­ies are used when using our web­site. These are small text files that are stored on your end device (PC, smart­phone, tablet, etc.). When you access a web­site, a cook­ie may be stored by your brows­er. This cook­ie con­tains a char­ac­ter­is­tic string of char­ac­ters that enables the brows­er to be unique­ly iden­ti­fied when the web­site is accessed again.

Cook­ies are used to make our web­site usable at all, to ensure the secu­ri­ty and integri­ty of the web­site, to com­ply with legal require­ments (cook­ie con­sent), to pro­vide a ser­vice express­ly request­ed by the user (essen­tial cook­ies) or to make the web­site more user-friend­ly (non-essen­tial cook­ies).

Our con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem Word­Press uses tech­ni­cal­ly nec­es­sary cook­ies. The con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem would not func­tion oth­er­wise. Only sys­tem-rel­e­vant cook­ies are used. Word­Press uses so-called ses­sion cook­ies by default (with one excep­tion, see below). These are not intend­ed for track­ing or sim­i­lar pur­pos­es, but ensure the cor­rect func­tion­al­i­ty of the sys­tem. As the name sug­gests, these cook­ies are only stored per ses­sion and expire after­wards.

Word­Press ses­sion cook­ies are:

- wordpress_[hash]
When log­ging in, Word­Press uses this cook­ie to store the authen­ti­ca­tion data of Word­Press users. Its use is restrict­ed to the admin­is­tra­tion screen area, /wp-admin/.

- wordpress_logged_in_[hash]
After login, Word­Press sets the WordPress_logged_in_[hash] cook­ie, which indi­cates that the user is logged in — and who the user is. The lat­ter infor­ma­tion is rel­e­vant for some inter­face appli­ca­tions.

- wordpress_test_cookie
This cook­ie is set when nav­i­gat­ing to the login page. This can be used to check whether the brows­er is set to allow cook­ies.

Word­Press cook­ies with a stor­age peri­od of one year:

- wp-settings-[UID] & wp-settings-{time}-[UID].
Word­Press also sets sev­er­al wp-settings-{time}-[UID] cook­ies. The num­ber at the end is the indi­vid­ual user ID from the data­base table “users”. This is used to cus­tomise the view of the admin inter­face and pos­si­bly also the main page inter­face.

All these cook­ies thus do not affect the users of the web­site, but only those who main­tain our web­site in the back­end (i.e. the admin­is­tra­tion inter­face of Word­Press) accord­ing to the order.

Essen­tial cook­ies that affect users of the web­site are set by our con­sent tool Cook­ie-Nav­i­ga­tor for the pur­pose of remem­ber­ing whether or not you have con­sent­ed to the set­ting of non-essen­tial cook­ies.

In addi­tion, cook­ies from third-par­ty providers may be used. These cook­ies could also enable an analy­sis of the user’s surf­ing behav­iour. If this is the case, we will inform you about this sep­a­rate­ly in this or spe­cif­ic pri­va­cy notices direct­ly at the infor­ma­tion about the respec­tive third-par­ty tools (such as analy­sis tools, plu­g­ins or sim­i­lar). For exam­ple, analy­sis tools set their own cook­ies for analy­sis pur­pos­es.

When you access our web­site, you will be informed about the use of cook­ies that are not strict­ly nec­es­sary and your con­sent to the pro­cess­ing of per­son­al data used in this con­text will be obtained.

Pur­pose of data pro­cess­ing

The pur­pose of using strict­ly nec­es­sary cook­ies is to enable the use of desired or explic­it­ly request­ed func­tions of the web­site for users. Some func­tions can­not be offered with­out the use of cook­ies. For these, it is nec­es­sary that the brows­er is recog­nised even after a change of site. User data col­lect­ed through strict­ly nec­es­sary cook­ies is not used to cre­ate user pro­files.
The use of non-essen­tial cook­ies is gen­er­al­ly for the pur­pose of improv­ing the qual­i­ty of our web­site and its con­tent. Through analy­sis cook­ies, we learn, for exam­ple, how the web­site is used and can thus con­stant­ly opti­mise our offer.

Legal basis for data pro­cess­ing

In the case of absolute­ly nec­es­sary cook­ies, the fol­low­ing applies: The legal basis for stor­ing absolute­ly nec­es­sary cook­ies in your end device and access­ing them is § 25 (2) (2) TTDSG. The legal basis for the fur­ther pro­cess­ing of per­son­al data using the infor­ma­tion stored in the cook­ie is Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR, i.e. an over­rid­ing legit­i­mate inter­est on our part. Our legit­i­mate inter­est lies in the above-men­tioned pur­pos­es.
In the case of cook­ies that are not absolute­ly nec­es­sary, the fol­low­ing applies: The legal basis for stor­ing cook­ies that are not absolute­ly nec­es­sary in your end device and access­ing them is your con­sent pur­suant § 25 (1) TTDSG. The legal basis for the fur­ther pro­cess­ing of per­son­al data using non-essen­tial cook­ies is the con­sent giv­en at the same time in accor­dance with Art. 6 (1) (a) GDPR.

Dura­tion of stor­age

Some of the cook­ies we use are delet­ed again after the end of the brows­er ses­sion, i.e. after you close your brows­er (so-called ses­sion cook­ies). Oth­er cook­ies remain on your end device and enable us or the third-par­ty providers to recog­nise your brows­er on your next vis­it (per­ma­nent or sta­t­ic cook­ies). If we have stored the cook­ies on the basis of your con­sent, we will end fur­ther data pro­cess­ing with your with­draw­al. Oth­er­wise, we store the data col­lect­ed on the basis of an over­rid­ing legit­i­mate inter­est until the legit­i­mate inter­est no longer exists, the con­sid­er­a­tion of inter­ests comes to a dif­fer­ent result or you have effec­tive­ly object­ed in accor­dance with Art. 21 GDPR (Cf. the visu­al­ly high­light­ed noti­fi­ca­tion to spe­cial right of objec­tion under C.). It is reg­u­lar­ly checked whether the legit­i­mate inter­est still exists.

Pos­si­bil­i­ty of objec­tion and removal

Cook­ies are stored on your com­put­er and trans­mit­ted from it to our site. There­fore, you have full con­trol over the use of cook­ies. By chang­ing the set­tings in your inter­net brows­er, you can deac­ti­vate or restrict the trans­mis­sion of cook­ies. Cook­ies that have already been stored can be delet­ed at any time.
Note: If cook­ies are deac­ti­vat­ed for our web­site, it may no longer be pos­si­ble to use all the func­tions of the web­site to their full extent.

If you do not give your con­sent or with­draw the con­sent you have giv­en, you can also pre­vent the use of cook­ies that are not absolute­ly nec­es­sary.

B.3  Use of the secu­ri­ty plu­g­in WP Cer­ber Secu­ri­ty

On our web­site we use the plu­g­in WP Cer­ber Secu­ri­ty, which is offered by Cer­ber Tech Inc. New York, NY, 1732 1st Ave, 10128, USA.

WP Cer­ber Secu­ri­ty is a pop­u­lar secu­ri­ty plu­g­in for Word­Press web­sites. The plu­g­in sets a num­ber of cook­ies in the visitor’s brows­er that are used to detect and pre­vent var­i­ous types of mali­cious behav­iour.

The plu­g­in sets sev­er­al absolute­ly nec­es­sary cook­ies. Accord­ing to the provider, no data is col­lect­ed or processed in this con­text — nei­ther by the ser­vices nor by the soft­ware offered.

The col­lect­ed IP address­es are imme­di­ate­ly anonymised by the plu­g­in WP H‑Data Pro­tec­tion — unless they doc­u­ment intru­sion attempts.

For more infor­ma­tion on the col­lec­tion and use of data by WP Cer­ber Secu­ri­ty, please refer to the pri­va­cy pol­i­cy of the provider Cer­ber at https://wpcerber.com/privacy-policy/

Pur­pose of the data pro­cess­ing

The use of this secu­ri­ty plu­g­in is sole­ly for the secu­ri­ty and integri­ty of our web­site and our infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy sys­tems. It is also used for fraud pre­ven­tion (anti-spam). The plu­g­in blocks unwant­ed intrud­er via IP or sub­net and pro­tects against fur­ther attempts of intru­sion when a set lim­it of retries is reached. This makes brute force attacks or dis­trib­uted brute force attacks by bot­nets impos­si­ble. In addi­tion, by cre­at­ing an IP black­list or whitelist, it is pos­si­ble to block or allow logins from cer­tain IP address­es. (More infor­ma­tion about the func­tions at: https://wpcerber.com/).

Legal basis of the data pro­cess­ing

We have an over­rid­ing legit­i­mate inter­est in the secu­ri­ty and integri­ty of our web­site and our infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy sys­tems, so that the legal basis here is Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR. The set­ting and read­ing of cook­ies is also car­ried out on the basis of § 25 (2) (2) TTDSG.

Dura­tion of stor­age

The IP address­es are anonymised imme­di­ate­ly. Only those that are imme­di­ate­ly recog­nised as intru­sion or attack attempts are not anonymised in order to be able to block them in the future.

Pos­si­bil­i­ty of objec­tion and removal

There is no pos­si­bil­i­ty for the user to object to or remove this, oth­er than to refrain from using our web­site alto­geth­er or to ter­mi­nate it.

B.4  Use of the analy­sis tool Mato­mo

This web­site uses Mato­mo, an open-source web analy­sis tool from InnoCraft Ltd, 150 Willis St, 6011 Welling­ton, New Zealand (https://matomo.org), to col­lect and store data for mar­ket­ing and opti­mi­sa­tion pur­pos­es. The data col­lect­ed with Mato­mo is not used by us to per­son­al­ly iden­ti­fy the vis­i­tor to the web­site and is also not merged with per­son­al data.

Stan­dard: Use of Mato­mo with­out cook­ies

If you do not give us con­sent to analy­sis mea­sures dur­ing your web­site vis­it, we use the Mato­mo
tool with­out cook­ies. This means the fol­low­ing:

We have made all data pro­tec­tion set­tings to achieve the widest pos­si­ble pseu­do­nymi­sa­tion and anonymi­sa­tion of data. This is because we are not inter­est­ed in who is behind a web­site vis­it, but only in how the web­site is used. There­fore, all IP address­es are only stored in such a way that the last 6 dig­its are replaced by an “X” (e.g. 192.168.xxx.xxx) and a user ID is auto­mat­i­cal­ly replaced by the sys­tem with a pseu­do­nym. Only the data alien­at­ed / pseu­do­nymised / anonymised in this way is stored and used for sta­tis­tics. Fur­ther­more, we have set Mato­mo in such a way that any cook­ies are pre­vent­ed. This means that no data is stored on your end device. And: We have set up Mato­mo in such a way that a “do-not-track” mes­sage from your brows­er is auto­mat­i­cal­ly respect­ed.

All Mato­mo data is processed by us exclu­sive­ly on our own web serv­er. No third par­ty receives this data. This is there­fore data that is eval­u­at­ed exclu­sive­ly by us.

By all these mea­sures, we are con­vinced that con­sent is not required here and that we can base this data pro­cess­ing on a legit­i­mate inter­est.

Pur­pose of the data pro­cess­ing

The analy­sis tool is used to improve the qual­i­ty of our web­site and its con­tent by deter­min­ing how the web­site is used through user behav­iour. In this way, we can con­stant­ly opti­mise our inter­net offer, which is also in the inter­est of the users.

Legal basis of the data pro­cess­ing

The legal basis for the pro­cess­ing of per­son­al data is Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR, i.e. a legit­i­mate inter­est on our part. Our legit­i­mate inter­est lies in the above-men­tioned pur­pos­es. Our con­sid­er­a­tion has shown that we are pur­su­ing legit­i­mate pur­pos­es in analysing user behav­iour in order to improve and opti­mise our web­sites and that the rea­son­able expec­ta­tions of web­site vis­i­tors today are also direct­ed towards analysing user behav­iour. We also assume that the infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed here will guide the expec­ta­tions of users of our web­site that an analy­sis will be car­ried out.

Dura­tion of stor­age

The IP address is anonymised before it is stored (see above). Cook­ies are not set. We only store data that no longer has any per­son­al ref­er­ence. In addi­tion, we store data col­lect­ed on the basis of a legit­i­mate inter­est until the legit­i­mate inter­est no longer exists, the con­sid­er­a­tion comes to a dif­fer­ent result or you have effec­tive­ly object­ed in accor­dance with Art. 21 GDPR (Cf. the visu­al­ly high­light­ed noti­fi­ca­tion to spe­cial right of objec­tion under C.). It will be reviewed reg­u­lar­ly, at least annu­al­ly, whether the legit­i­mate inter­est still exists. In par­tic­u­lar, our inter­est no longer exists if the data is no longer suf­fi­cient­ly rel­e­vant for us in terms of eval­u­a­tion and sta­tis­tics of web­site use due to the pas­sage of time, which we assume to be the case after three years at the lat­est and the data is then irre­triev­ably erased.

Pos­si­bil­i­ty of objec­tion and removal

We do not set cook­ies and do not process any per­son­al data when using Mato­mo.

The fol­low­ing gen­er­al­ly applies to cook­ies: You can deac­ti­vate or restrict the trans­mis­sion of cook­ies by chang­ing the set­tings in your inter­net brows­er. Cook­ies that have already been saved can be delet­ed at any time. This can also be done auto­mat­i­cal­ly. Such a “Do-Not-Track” set­ting of your brows­er is under­stood by us as an objec­tion to the fur­ther col­lec­tion and use of your per­son­al data and will of course be observed.

With con­sent: Use of Mato­mo with cook­ies

If you have giv­en us your con­sent for the use of analy­sis tools, we use Mato­mo with cook­ies. This means the fol­low­ing:

From the data col­lect­ed with the help of the tool, user pro­files can be cre­at­ed under a pseu­do­nym. Cook­ies can be used for this pur­pose. Cook­ies are small text files that are stored local­ly in the cache of the site visitor’s inter­net brows­er. The cook­ies enable the recog­ni­tion of the inter­net brows­er. The data col­lect­ed with Mato­mo will not be used to per­son­al­ly iden­ti­fy the vis­i­tor to this web­site with­out the sep­a­rate­ly grant­ed con­sent of the per­son con­cerned, nor will it be merged with per­son­al data about the bear­er of the pseu­do­nym.

We would like to point out that we process all Mato­mo data exclu­sive­ly on our own web serv­er and that no third par­ty receives this data. As a result, we are con­vinced that no con­sent is required here and that we can base this data pro­cess­ing on a legit­i­mate inter­est, since a third-par­ty ref­er­ence is exclud­ed. These are so-called first-par­ty cook­ies that are only set and eval­u­at­ed by us.

Pur­pose of the data pro­cess­ing

The analy­sis tool and the analy­sis cook­ies are used for the pur­pose of improv­ing the qual­i­ty of our web­site and its con­tent. In this way, we learn how the web­site is used and can thus con­tin­u­ous­ly opti­mise our offer.

Legal basis for data pro­cess­ing

The legal basis for the set­ting of cook­ies and the pro­cess­ing of per­son­al data is your con­sent accord­ing to § 25 (1) TTDSG, Art. 6 (1) (a) GDPR.

Dura­tion of stor­age

We store the col­lect­ed data until the pur­pose of its col­lec­tion has ceased to exist, at the longest, how­ev­er, until you with­draw the con­sent you have giv­en us.

Pos­si­bil­i­ty of objec­tion and removal

You may refuse the use of cook­ies by select­ing the appro­pri­ate set­tings on your brows­er. We would like to point out that in this case you may not be able to use all func­tions of this web­site to their full extent.

You can pre­vent fur­ther data pro­cess­ing by us with effect for the future by with­draw­ing the con­sent you have giv­en.

You can also pre­vent the col­lec­tion of data relat­ing to your use of the web­site (includ­ing your IP address) and the pro­cess­ing of this data by us by using the opt-out option: