Privacy

For technical reasons, the following data sent by your internet browser to us or to our server provider will be collected, especially to ensure a secure and stable website: These server log files record the type and version of your browser, operating system, the website from which you came (referrer URL), the webpages on our site visited, the date and time of your visit, as well as the IP address from which you visited our site.

The data thus collected will be temporarily stored, but not in association with any other of your data.

The basis for this storage is Art. 6 Para. 1 lit. f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest lies in the improvement, stability, functionality, and security of our website.

The data will be deleted within no more than seven days, unless continued storage is required for evidentiary purposes. In which case, all or part of the data will be excluded from deletion until the investigation of the relevant incident is finally resolved.

a) Session-Cookies

We use cookies on our website. Cookies are small text files or other storage technologies stored on your computer by your browser. These cookies process certain specific information about you, such as your browser, location data, or IP address.

This processing makes our website more user-friendly, efficient, and secure, allowing us, for example, to display our website in different languages.

The legal basis for such processing is Art. 6 Para. 1 lit. b) GDPR, insofar as these cookies are used to collect data to initiate or process contractual relationships.

If the processing does not serve to initiate or process a contract, our legitimate interest lies in improving the functionality of our website. The legal basis is then Art. 6 Para. 1 lit. f) GDPR.

When you close your browser, these session cookies are deleted.

 b) Third-party cookies

If necessary, our website may also use cookies from companies with whom we cooperate for the purpose of advertising, analyzing, or improving the features of our website.

Please refer to the following information for details, in particular for the legal basis and purpose of such third-party collection and processing of data collected through cookies.

c) Disabling cookies

You can prevent or restrict the installation of cookies by changing the settings on your browser. Likewise, you can use the browser to delete cookies that have already been stored. However, the steps and measures required vary, depending on the browser you use. If you have any questions, please use the help function or consult the documentation for your browser or contact its maker for support. Browser settings cannot prevent so-called flash cookies from being set. Instead, you will need to change the setting of your Flash player. The steps and measures required for this also depend on the Flash player you are using. If you have any questions, please use the help function or consult the documentation for your Flash player or contact its maker for support.

If you prevent or restrict the installation of cookies, not all of the functions on our site may be fully usable

If you contact us via email or the contact form, the data you provide will be used for the purpose of processing your request. The provision of the data is necessary in order to process and answer your inquiry; otherwise we will not be able to answer it in full or at all.

The legal basis for this data processing is Art. 6 Para. 1 lit. b) GDPR.

Your data will be deleted once we have fully answered your inquiry and there is no further legal obligation to store your data, such as if an order or contract resulted therefrom.

Our website uses Google Fonts to display external fonts. This is a service provided by Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Irland (hereinafter: Google).

To enable the display of certain fonts on our website, a connection to the Google server in the USA is established whenever our website is accessed.

The legal basis is Art. 6 Para. 1 lit. f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest lies in the optimization and economic operation of our site.

When you access our site, a connection to Google is established from which Google can identify the site from which your request has been sent and to which IP address the fonts are being transmitted for display.

Google offers detailed information at

https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated
https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en

in particular on options for preventing the use of data.

In order to be able to display fonts and visual elements of our website, we use FontAwesome’s external fonts. FontAwesome is a service of

Fonticons Inc., 6 Porter Road, Apartment 3R, Cambridge, MA 02140, USA, hereinafter referred to as „FontAwesome”.

When you access our website, a connection is established to the FontAwesome server in the USA in order to enable and update the display of fonts and visual elements.

The legal basis is Art. 6 para. 1 lit. f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest lies in the optimization and economic operation of our website.

By connecting to the FontAwesome server when you access our website, FontAwesome can determine from which website your request was sent and to which IP address the font should be sent.

At https://fontawesome.com/privacy FontAwesome offers further information, in particular on the options for preventing data use.

You can also find us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube with our own presence. For this purpose, we use plug-ins that contain offers from third parties not affiliated with us. With the social media presences of the SMITH Consortium, we expand our multimedia information offering to you and have the opportunity to exchange information with you on topics that are important to you. Beyond the respective providers of the social networks, we also collect and process personal user data on fan pages. With this privacy policy, we inform you about which data we collect from you in our social media appearances and how we use it.

In connection with the social media channels we maintain, we are jointly responsible with the social media providers for the collection of your data, the data processing on our respective social media channel and its disclosure by transmission, for this purpose Art. 26 GDPR. The legal basis for the processing is our legitimate interests according to Art. 6 (1) lit. f

GDPR, in order to carry out public relations work and to communicate directly with you. For any further processing in connection with the offer in conjunction with the social media channels, the social media providers are the sole responsible parties within the meaning of the GDPR.

On the website provided by us via the social media provider, the social media provider grants us access to the following categories of data:

The social media provider grants us access to statistical analyses that provide information about the use of our social media website. The analyses visible to us do not allow us to analyze the usage behavior of individual persons. We can only view aggregated data (including number of hits, likes, followers, region of origin, age group, gender) that provide information about our audience and the use of our social media website. The data of the respective user underlying the analyses is not transmitted to us. We can set the target group to be reached for the social media website or for individual published posts. The setting is made on the basis of general parameters (e.g. age group, language, region, interests), which can be used to target our content to specific groups. Based on the data provided to us by the social media provider, it is not possible for us to address or identify individual persons.

Insofar as you contact us directly via the social media provider or interact with us in any other way and thereby deliberately transmit personal data (e.g. direct networking with our social media website), we store and process this personal data for the purposes for which you transmitted it to us.

We process this data solely for the purpose of publicizing content on our social media website in a manner appropriate to the target group and to better understand and optimize the use of our social media website.

We store user names and comments that are blocked or deleted due to a breach of netiquette. These are only kept for the purpose of providing evidence, if necessary, in the event of legal disputes within the statute of limitations.

For additional data processing purposes and data categories, please refer to the offer listed below for each social media platform separately.

a) Links on the website (LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube)

When you visit our website, no personal data is initially passed on to the operators of the social media platforms. On our website, you will only find passive links to LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. They are neither deactivated social media buttons nor active plug-ins. Therefore, personal data is only transmitted to the operators of the social media platforms when you actively click on the links and are thus redirected to the social media website itself.

The legal basis for the processing of data on access via link on our website based on your consent is Art. 6 Para. 1 lit. a GDPR, which you grant by activating the link (1st click). We would like to point out that during data processing by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, data of users may be processed outside the area of the European Union. This may result in risks for users because, for example, it could make it more difficult to enforce users’ rights. For details, please refer to the privacy policy of YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.

b) LinkedIn

We have a profile on LinkedIn. The provider is LinkedIn Ireland Unlimited Company, Wilton Plaza, Wilton Place, Dublin 2, Ireland. LinkedIn uses advertising cookies.

You can recognize the LinkedIn plugins by the LinkedIn logo on our site. When you visit our pages, a direct connection is established between your browser and the LinkedIn server via the plugin. LinkedIn thereby receives the information that you have visited our site with your IP address. If you click on the LinkedIn logo while logged into your LinkedIn account, you can link the content of our pages on your LinkedIn profile. This allows LinkedIn to associate the visit to our pages with your user account. We would like to point out that we, as the provider of the pages, have no knowledge of the content of the transmitted data or its use by LinkedIn. You can find more information on this in the privacy policy of LinkedIn.

If you would like to deactivate LinkedIn advertising cookies, please use the following link: https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/guest-controls/retargeting-opt-out

For details on their handling of your personal data, please refer to LinkedIn’s privacy policy: https://www.linkedin.com/legal/privacy-policy

c) Twitter

After clicking on the Twitter link, you will be redirected to our Twitter channel, a service of Twitter Inc. 1355 Market Street, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA. The link is recognizable by the corresponding logo of Twitter. The Twitter channel @SMITHConsortium is used for press and public relations on all Consortium topics.

If you visit our channel, Twitter Inc, 1355 Market Street, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA, as the operator of Twitter, stores and processes personal data to the extent described in the privacy policy. The data controller for individuals living outside the United States is Twitter International Company, One Cumberland Place, Fenian Street, Dublin 2 D02 AX07, Ireland. The privacy policy can be found here: https://twitter.com/en/privacy

We have no influence on the type and scope of the data processed by Twitter, the type of processing and use or the transfer of this data to third parties. We also have no effective control options in this respect.

With the use of Twitter, your personal data is collected, transferred, stored, disclosed and used by Twitter Inc. and thereby transferred to the United States, Ireland and any other country in which Twitter Inc. does business, and stored and used there, regardless of your place of residence.

Twitter processes on the one hand your voluntarily entered data such as name and user name, email address, telephone number or the contacts of your address book when you upload or synchronize it.

On the other hand, Twitter also evaluates the content you share to determine what topics you are interested in, stores and processes confidential messages that you send directly to other users, and can determine your location using GPS data, wireless network information, or your IP address in order to send you advertising or other content.

For evaluation purposes, Twitter Inc. may use analysis tools such as Twitter or Google Analytics. The SMITH Consortium has no influence on the use of such tools by Twitter Inc. and has not been informed about such potential use. If tools of this type are used by Twitter Inc. for the SMITH Consortium account, the SMITH Consortium has neither commissioned nor approved this nor otherwise supported it in any way. Nor does it provide the data obtained to it during the analysis. Only certain non-personal information about tweet activity, such as the number of profile or link clicks through a particular tweet, is viewable by the SMITH Consortium through our account. Moreover, the SMITH Consortium has no way to prevent or disable the use of such tools on our Twitter account.

Finally, Twitter also receives information when you view content, for example, even if you have not created an account. This so-called “log data” can be the IP address, the browser type, the operating system, information about the website you visited previously and the pages you viewed, your location, your mobile provider, the terminal device you use (including device ID and application ID), the search terms you used and cookie information.

You have options to limit the processing of your data in the general settings of your Twitter account and under the item “Privacy and security”. In addition, you can restrict Twitter’s access to contact and calendar data, photos, location data, etc. on mobile devices (smartphones, tablet computers) in the settings options there. However, this depends on the operating system used.

We only process data to the above-mentioned and limited extent.

d) Youtube

We use YouTube on our website. This is a video portal of YouTube LLC, 901 Cherry Ave,

94066 San Bruno, CA, USA, hereinafter referred to as “YouTube”.

YouTube is a subsidiary of Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland, hereinafter referred to as “Google”.

We use YouTube in connection with the “Enhanced Privacy Mode” function in order to be able to show you videos. The legal basis is Art. 6 Para. 1 lit. f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest lies in improving the quality of our website. According to YouTube, the “enhanced data protection mode” function means that the data described in more detail below is only transmitted to the YouTube server when you actually start a video.

Without this “Enhanced Privacy Mode”, a connection to the YouTube server in the USA is established as soon as you call up one of our Internet pages on which a YouTube video is embedded.

This connection is necessary to be able to display the respective video on our website via your Internet browser. In the course of this, YouTube will at least record and process your IP address, the date and time as well as the website you visited. In addition, a connection to Google’s advertising network “DoubleClick” is established.

If you are logged in to YouTube at the same time, YouTube will assign the connection information to your YouTube account. If you wish to prevent this, you must either log out of YouTube before visiting our website or make the appropriate settings in your YouTube user account.

For the purpose of functionality as well as for the analysis of user behavior, YouTube permanently stores cookies on your end device via your Internet browser. If you do not agree with this processing, you have the option to prevent the storage of cookies by a setting in your Internet browser. You can find more information on this above under “Cookies”.

Google provides further information on the collection and use of data as well as your rights and protection options in this regard in the data protection information available at https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en

For ease of use and information purposes, our website contains links to other websites. You will be provided with videos via external links in addition to website links. When you click on the video link on our website, you will be redirected to the external website (e.g. YouTube). You will only be shown the video on the external website and your personal data will be processed there.

Such websites are operated independently of us. If we provide links to websites of other organizations, this privacy statement does not apply to the processing of personal data by those organizations. Linked sites have their own privacy policies or statements; we encourage you to review them carefully when visiting linked sites. To the extent that linked sites you visit are not owned or controlled by us, we are not responsible for the content of such sites, nor are we responsible for any use or privacy practices of such sites.