Privacy Statement

Because it's important.

SCHMITSPARTNERS Rechtsanwälte Partnerschaft mbB, hereinafter “SCHMITSPARTNERS” is committed to respecting the privacy rights of individuals and to ensuring compliance with applicable privacy laws. This privacy statement explains what personal data SCHMITSPARTNERS collects or otherwise processes about you (e.g., as a client or a visitor to our websites) as well as how and why we process that data.

A German version of the privacy policy is also available. [Link to be created]

1

What Personal Data Does SCHMITSPARTNERS Collect?

SCHMITSPARTNERS collects data from individuals with whom it interacts in person, as well as via interactions with its web site. This data is collected in order to provide our consultancy services to you. You provide some of this information directly to us, for example when speaking with one of our representatives or using our online contact form.

We collect other data about you through your interactions with our websites using technologies like cookies and methods for obtaining usage and device data. We use this data to personalize our website to provide you with the best website experience

For more information about the technologies, such as cookies, used and your choices regarding them, see the “Cookies, Web Beacons, and other Technologies” section of this statement.

Data is collected at your consent through your use of the website or explicitly via consent requests. When asked to provide personal data, you may decline. If you decline to provide information required to access our website, you may be unable to visit our website properly.

The data collected depends upon the nature of your interaction with SCHMITSPARTNERS and the web features you use, as well as any decisions you make about providing data, including decisions through privacy settings that you may set on your browser or device. Categories of data collected may include the following depending on your choices:

Contact Information and Name. This data includes first and last name, email address, postal address, telephone number, fax number, company name and similar contact data.

Device and Usage Data. SCHMITSPARTNERS collects information about the device you use to access our websites, and the interactions of you and your device with our web properties and applications. That personal data includes the Internet Protocol address (IP address) associated with your computer or device, the access time, the domain name of your Internet Service Provider, your device type and identifiers, browser type, operating system, the content or pages you view on the SCHMITSPARTNERS website, time spent on our sites, and similar usage and device information. This data is collected using cookies, web beacons and other technologies. For more information about these technologies and your choices regarding them, see the “Cookies, Web Beacons, and other Technologies” section of this statement.

2

How Does SCHMITSPARTNERS Use Personal Data?

SCHMITSPARTNERS uses the personal data that it collects for three purposes:

  1. Provision of our consultancy services to you
  2. Managing and supporting the relationship with our clients; and
  3. Communications, including promotional communications.

As part of any communications, we offer you the opportunity to choose whether or not we can use your personal data in the described way. You may at any time choose e.g. not to receive marketing communications from us by following the unsubscribe instructions included in each marketing e-mail you receive, by indicating so when we call you, or by contacting us as outlined in the “How to Contact Us” section of this statement.

Mobile Applications and Social Computing Environment. SCHMITSPARTNERS makes available mobile applications for download from various mobile application marketplaces. When downloading and using these applications, you are asked to provide certain personal data. Such information will be subject to and protected in accordance with this statement, except for the personal data that is automatically made available to other participants in such social computing environment as part of your profile or settings. In this case the processing of your personal data by respective social computing service providers is subject to their respective privacy statements. Such privacy statements provide specific information about their personal data collection and handling practices. We recommend that you read those supplemental statements to understand how the social media service providers are processing your personal data trough their applications and tools.

Any content you post, such as pictures, information, opinions, or any other type of personal data that you make available to other participants in such social computing environment, is not subject to this privacy statement. Rather, such content is subject to the terms of use of the respective social computing services provider, and any additional guidelines and privacy information provided in relation to its use, as well as the process by which you can remove your content from such tools or get help to do so. Please refer to the respective social computing service provider to better understand yours, SCHMITSPARTNERS’, and other parties’ rights and obligations with regard to such content. You should be aware that the content you post on any such social computing environment may be made broadly available to others inside and outside SCHMITSPARTNERS due to your profile and settings.

3

SCHMITSPARTNERS shares personal data with third parties as required to comply with applicable law or regulation, respond to proper law enforcement requests or other valid legal process, or to comply with applicable government reporting obligations.

SCHMITSPARTNERS also uses and shares personal data with social media service providers as outlined in the section Mobile Applications and Social Computing Environment above and the section Social Media Widgets below.

4

SCHMITSPARTNERS Legal Basis for Processing of Personal Data

As discussed above, SCHMITSPARTNERS processes personal data for a number of reasons. In all cases, SCHMITSPARTNERS ensures that such processing is legal, fair, and reasonable. The various processing activities are justified by varying legal bases under the GDPR and similar laws.

Data Processed to Provide Consultancy Services. In those cases where data is collected in order to provide our consultancy services, SCHMITSPARTNERS processing is based upon your consent or the client agreement we have agreed upon with you.

Promotional Communications. In those cases where data is collected in order to provide promotional materials or communications, SCHMITSPARTNERS processing is based upon your consent.

5

How Does SCHMITSPARTNERS Secure Personal Data?

SCHMITSPARTNERS maintains administrative, technical, organizational, and physical measures designed, taking into account the nature of the data and the processing, the state of the art, the costs of implementation, and the potential for impact to the rights and freedoms of individuals whose data is being processed, to protect personal data in accordance with this statement and applicable laws against loss, and unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure, Such measures include, by way of example, encryption and strict access controls.

6

How Long Does SCHMITSPARTNERS Retain Personal Data?

The retention of personal data collected depends on the purpose it has been collected for. For example, we will retain your client account data in our database for as long as your client account is active and thereafter as required by legal obligations (e.g. tax retention periods), to resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. Requests regarding data retention may be made as outlined in the “Your Rights as a Data Subject” section of this statement.

7

Cookies, Web Beacons, and Other Technologies

As discussed above, we collect information from your visits to our website in order to help us gather statistics about usage and effectiveness of the website; personalize your experience and to tailor our interactions with you. We do so through the processing of transaction logs, as well as the use of various technologies, including scripts, tags, Local Shared Objects (Flash cookies), Local Storage (HTML5) beacons, and cookies. A cookie is a piece of data that a website can send to your browser, which may then be stored on your computer as a tag that identifies your computer. While cookies are often only used to measure website usage (such as number of visitors and duration of visit) and effectiveness (such as topics visitors are most interested in) and to allow for ease of navigation or use and, as such, are not associated with any personal information, they are also used at times to personalize a known visitor’s experience to a website by being associated with profile information or user preferences. Over time, this information provides valuable insight to help improve the user experience.

Cookies are typically categorized as “session” cookies or “persistent” cookies. Session cookies help you navigate through websites efficiently, keeping track of your progression from page to page so that you are not asked for information you have already provided during the current visit. Session cookies are stored in temporary memory and erased when the web browser is closed. Persistent cookies, on the other hand, store user preferences for current and successive visits. They are written on your device’s hard disk, and are still valid when you restart your browser.

We use session cookies, for example, for media performance analytics. We use persistent cookies, for example, to record your choice of language and country location.

When accessing our website we ask you to consent to the cookies used on our website. We use cookies to remember your choices. If you do not wish to consent, you can opt out using this link: Disable Analytics. We use cookies to remember your choices. If you desire to change your choices, you can do so at anytime using this link: Disable Analytics, or use an Opt-out Browser Add-on as described below.

In addition you can generally express your cookies preferences regarding the use of most cookies and similar technologies though your web browser. Look under the heading “tools” (or similar heading) in your particular browser for information about controlling cookies. You can set your browser in most instances to notify you before you receive a cookie, giving you the chance to decide whether to accept it or not.

You can also generally set your browser to turn off cookies. Since cookies allow you to take advantage of some of our websites’ features, we recommend that you leave them turned on. If you block, turn off, or otherwise reject our cookies, some web pages may not display properly or some web interactions may not be completed. Our website also uses web beacons or other technologies to provide the best web experience. These technologies are used on a number of pages across the website. When you as a visitor access our website, a non-identifiable notice of that visit is generated, which is processed by us or by a third-party service provider or ours. These web beacons usually work in conjunction with cookies. If you don’t want your cookie information to be associated with your visits to the website, you can set your browser to turn off cookies. If you turn off cookies, web beacon and other technologies will still detect visits to these sites; however, they will not be associated with information otherwise stored in cookies.

We may use Local Shared Objects, such as Flash cookies, and Local Storage, such as HTML5, to store content information and preferences. Third parties with whom we partner to provide certain features on our website also use Flash cookies or HTML5 to collect and store information. Various browsers may offer their own management tools for removing HTML5.

To manage Flash cookies, please visit
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html.
We may also include web beacons in marketing email messages or our newsletters in order to determine whether messages have been opened and links contained within have been clicked on.

Google Analytics. We use Google Analytics for our sites, a web analysis service of Google Inc. (1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA; “Google”). The use includes the “Universal Analytics” operating mode. This facilitates the assignment of data, sessions, and interactions across several devices to a pseudonymous user ID and thus the analysis of a user’s activities across devices by the usage of cookies.

We have activated IP anonymisation for our website. So Google will shorten your IP address using cookies and process only the shorten IP address. Details of this process are described by Google at: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052 Only in exceptional cases will Google Analytics transfer the full IP Address to its severs located in the USA and shortened it there. The IP address transferred by your browser will not be merged with other data Google holds. On our behalf Google will use your data for analytics relating to your use of the website, to compile reports on the site activity, and to provide us with other services related to website and Internet use.

For more information on Google’s terms of use, please visit https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html. Its Google Analytics privacy statement is available at https://policies.google.com/privacy/partners.

You may also prevent Google from collecting the data generated by the cookie and relating to your use of the website (including your IP address) and from processing this data by downloading and installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, available here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en. Opt-out cookies prevent the future collection of your data when you visit the site. To prevent Google Universal Analytics from collecting data across several devices, you must opt out on all systems and devices used.

Third-Party Social Media Widgets. In addition, third-party social media widgets (e.g., Facebook’s “Share” or “Like” button), the playing of videos embedded on our website and operated by third-party video-sharing providers (e.g., YouTube), may log certain information such as your IP address, browser type and language, access time, and referring website addresses, and, if you are logged in to those social media sites, they may also link such collected information with profile information they may have about you. We do not control these third-party tracking technologies. Please make yourself familiar with these third-party web beacons and cookies usage and read their privacy statements to understand their data collection practices and the choices offered to you (e.g., for YouTube, https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en).
Depending upon your privacy settings with the social media service providers, we may be able to collect information from your profile set up for their social media services when you interact with the widgets.

We may include applications (or “widgets”) from third-party social media offerings that allow you to follow or interact with us on social media platforms. These widgets, such as a Facebook “Share” or “Like” button, are visible to you on the web page you visit. When you use these widgets or when you are logged into those platforms, the respective social media service providers may be able to collect information about your use of our website. Please view the applicable social media platform’s privacy statement to better understand their data collection practices and choices they make available to you. The privacy statement of the social media platforms controls the collection, use, and disclosure of all personal information transmitted to that network.

8

Links to Third-Party Websites and Third-Party Applications

To allow you to interact with other website on which you may have accounts (such as Facebook and other social media service providers) or join communities on such sites, we may provide links or embed third-party applications that allow you to log in, post content, or join communities from our sites. We may also provide you with general links to third-party websites.

Your use of these links and applications is subject to the third parties’ privacy statements, and you should become familiar with these third-party sites’ privacy statements before using the links or applications. SCHMITSPARTNERS is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of those other third-party websites.

9

Notification of Changes to this Statement

We will post a notice for 30 days at the top of this page notifying individuals when this statement is updated or modified in a material way. If we are going to use your personal information in a manner different from that what is stated in this statement at the time of collection, we will notify you, and you will have a choice as to whether or not we can use your personal information in such a way. We recommend that you check this statement regularly to familiarize yourself with SCHMITSPARTNERS practices and to be aware of any material changes.

10

How to Contact Us

If you have a question about this statement or SCHMITSPARTNERS’ handling of your personal data, or if you wish to provide instructions regarding our use of your data as set forth in this statement, you may contact us:

By sending an email to:
privacy@schmitspartners.com
or
By writing to:
SCHMITSPARTNERS
Schmits Rechtsanwälte Partnerschaft mbB
Attn: Data Protection Officer
Maximilianstrasse 2
80539 Munich, Germany

11

Your Rights as a Data Subject

You have the right to request access to and rectification or erasure of your personal data or restriction of processing and to object to processing of such data as well as the right to data portability. You also have the right to withdraw any consent that you may have given for the processing of personal data at any time.
You may make such requests by contacting us as set forth in the “How to Contact Us” section of this statement.

Please note that before SCHMITSPARTNERS is able to provide you with any access to personal data, correct any inaccuracies, or delete your personal data, we may ask you to verify your identity and to provide other details to help us to respond to your request. We will contact you within 30 days of your request.

12

SCHMITSPARTNERS’ Supervisory Authority

The Supervisory Authority of SCHMITSPARTNERS is the

Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht, BayLDA
Postfach 606, 91511, Ansbach, Germany
Telefon: +49 (0) 981 53 1300
Telefax: +49 (0) 981 53 98 1300
E-Mail: poststelle@lda.bayern.de

13

How to Report a Concern

You may report any concerns you have regarding our processing activities of personal data by contacting us as outlined in the “How to Contact Us” section.

You may also choose to report your concern directly to our Supervisory Authority via the BayLDA’s form to report a concern.