We use so-called “cookies” on our websites. Cookies are small text files that are placed on the hard drive of your computer by your browser. The cookies we use do not store any personal data, so that personal identification is impossible.
a) Cookies improve
the functionality of our websites
One reason we use cookies is to better understand how our websites are being used so as to improve their attractiveness, content, and functionality. For example, cookies help us to determine whether sub-pages of our website are being visited, and, if so, which ones and what content is of interest to users. Specifically, we record the number of accesses to a page, the number of sub-pages viewed, the amount of time spent on our websites, the sequence of pages visited, which search terms led you to us, the country, region and, if necessary, city from which the access was made, what Internet browser with what language setting you use, and the percentage of mobile terminals that access our websites. The IP address of your computer, which is transmitted for technical reasons, is automatically anonymized and does not permit any conclusions to be drawn as to your identity.
b) Cookies
for use-based online advertising
We reserve the right to use information that we have obtained from cookies and an anonymized analysis of your pattern of website use in order to display specific advertising for certain of our products on our websites. We believe that you, as a user, profit from this, because we run advertising or content that we believe matches your interests – based on your surfing behavior – and you see less randomly displayed advertising and less content that is of little interest to you.We reserve the right to use information that we have obtained from cookies and an anonymized analysis of your pattern of website use in order to display specific advertising for certain of our products on our websites. We believe that you, as a user, profit from this, because we run advertising or content that we believe matches your interests – based on your surfing behavior – and you see less randomly displayed advertising and less content that is of little interest to you.
As a company, we have voluntarily submitted ourselves to self-regulation by the German Data Protection Council for Online Advertising (DDOW). You can find the self-regulation code to which we subscribe and additional information at the link: www.meine-cookies.org/ddow.html.
c) How to
prevent “cookies” from being stored on your hard drive or delete them
You can set your Internet browser to prevent the storage of cookies on your hard drive, and you will be asked each time whether you agree to the placement of a cookie. You can delete cookies that have been placed on your hard drive at any time. The specifics of how this is done can be found in the operating instructions for your browser.
d) Google
Analytics
This website uses Google Analytics, a web analysis service of Google Inc. (“Google”). Google Analytics uses a specific form of “cookie,” i.e. text file, which is stored on your computer and enables an analysis of your use of the website. The information about your use of this website generated by the cookie is generally transmitted to a Google server in the USA and stored there. We would like to point out that Google Analytics has been expanded on this website to include the code “gat._anonymizeIp();” to ensure the anonymized recording of IP addresses (so-called IP masking). Due to the IP anonymization on this website, your IP address is shortened by Google within theterritory of the EU and the Treaty States of the European Economic Community. Only in exceptional cases is the full IP address transmitted to a Google server in the USA and shortened there.
Google uses this information on our behalf to analyze your use of this website in order to compile reports on website activities and provide additional services related to website use and Internet use to the website operator. The IP address transmitted to Google Analytics by your browser is not consolidated with other data by Google. You can prevent the storage of cookies by making the proper setting using your browser software, see Section 5 c), above. In addition, you can prevent Google from recording the data related to your use of the website generated by the cookie (including your IP address) and from processing this data by downloading and installing the browser plug-in available at the link: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. You can find further information
about terms of use and data protection at http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/
or http://www.google.com/analytics/privacyoverview.html.
We also use
Google Analytics to analyze data from AdWords and any cookies from “DoubleClick”
for statistical purposes. If you do not want this to be done, you can
deactivate it with the Ad Preferences Manager
(http://www.google.com/settings/ads/onweb).