As the party responsible for the website www.abifor.com, Abifor AG ("abifor") takes the obligation to data protection very seriously and designs its website in such a way that only as little personal data as necessary is collected, processed and used. Under no circumstances will personal data be rented or sold to third parties for advertising purposes. No personal data will be used for advertising or marketing purposes without the express consent of the visitor.

At abifor, only those persons have access to personal data who need these data to carry out their tasks within the responsible party, who are informed about the legal provisions on data protection and who have undertaken to comply with them in accordance with the applicable legal provisions (Art. 5 of the EU basic data protection regulation (EU GDPR and Art. 4.5 +7 of the Swiss Data Protection Act ("DSG"))). The collection, processing, use and transfer of the collected personal data takes place according to Art. 6, paragraph 1 EU-GDPR and Art. 12, 13 DPA only to the extent necessary for the implementation of a contractual relationship between ABIFOR as the responsible party and the visitor as the data subject.
 

Collection and Processing of Personal Data

We primarily process personal data that we obtain from our clients and other business partners as well as other individuals in the context of our business relationships with them or that we collect from users when operating our websites, apps and other applications.

Insofar as it is permitted to us, we obtain certain personal data from publicly accessible sources (e.g., debt registers, commercial registers, press, internet) or we may receive such information from authorities or other third parties (such as e.g.credit rating agencies). Apart from data you provided to us directly, the categories of data we receive about you from third parties include, but are not limited to, information from public registers, data received in connection with administrative or court proceedings, information in connection with your professional role and activities (e.g., in order to conclude and carry out contracts with your employer), information about you in correspondence and discussions with third parties, credit rating information (if we conduct business activities with you personally), information about you given to us by individuals associated with you (family, consultants, legal representatives, etc.) in order to conclude or process contracts with you or with your involvement (e.g. references, your delivery-address, powers of attorney), information regarding legal regulations such as anti-money laundering and export restrictions, bank details, information regarding insurances, our distributors and other business partners for the purpose of ordering or delivering services to you or by you (e.g., payments made, previous purchases), information about you found in the media or internet (insofar as indicated in the specific case, e.g. in connection with job applications, media reviews, marketing/sales, etc.), your address and any interests and other socio-demographic data (for marketing purposes), data in connection with your use of our websites (e.g., IP address, MAC address of your smartphone or computers, information regarding your device and settings, cookies, date and time of your visit, sites and content retrieved, applications used, referring website, localization data).
 

Purpose of Data Processing and Legal Grounds

We primarily use collected data in order to conclude and process contracts with our clients and business partners, in particular in connection with the production and sales of thermoplastic adhesives to our clients and the procurement of products and services from our suppliers and subcontractors, as well as in order to comply with our domestic and foreign legal obligations. You may be affected by our data processing in your capacity as an employee of such a client or business partner.

In addition, in line with applicable law and where appropriate, we may process your personal data and personal data of third parties for the following purposes, which are in our (or, as the case may be, any third parties') legitimate interest, such as:

• providing and developing our products, services and websites, apps and other platforms, on which we are active;
• communication with third parties and processing of their requests (e.g., job applications, media inquiries);
• review and optimization of procedures regarding needs assessment for the purpose of direct customer approach as well as obtaining personal data from publicly accessible sources for customer acquisition;
• advertisement and marketing (including organizing events), provided that you have not objected to the use of your data for this purpose (if you are part of our customer base and you receive our advertisement, you may object at any time and we will place you on a blacklist against further advertising mailings);
• market and opinion research, media surveillance;
• asserting legal claims and defense in legal disputes and official proceedings;
• prevention and investigation of criminal offences and other misconduct (e.g. conducting internal investigations, data analysis to combat fraud);
• ensuring our operation, including our IT, our websites, apps and other appliances;
• video surveillance to protect our domiciliary rights and other measures to ensure the safety of our premises and facilities as well as protection of our employees and other individuals and assets owner by or entrusted to us (such as e.g. access controls, visitor logs, network and mail scanners, telephone recordings);

If you have given us your consent to process your personal data for certain purposes (for example when registering to receive newsletters or carrying out a background check), we will process your personal data within the scope of and based on this consent, unless we have another legal basis, provided that we require one. Consent given can be withdrawn at any time, but this does not affect data processed prior to withdrawal.

Anonymous data collection

The provider of the pages automatically collects and stores information in so-called server log files, which your browser automatically transmits to us. These include:

• Browser type/ Browser version
• used operating system
• Referrer URL
• Host name of the accessing computer
• Time of server enquiry

These data cannot be related to any specific person. These data are not merged with other data sources. We reserve the right to check these data retrospectively upon becoming aware of concrete indications of unlawful use.
 

The rights of data subjects

In accordance with and as far as provided by applicable law (as is the case where the GDPR is applicable), you have the right to access, rectification and erasure of your personal data, the right to restriction of processing or to object to our data processing, in particular for direct marketing purposes, for profiling carried out for direct marketing purposes and for other legitimate interests in processing in addition to right to receive certain personal data for transfer to another controller (data portability). Please note, however, that we reserve the right to enforce statutory restrictions on our part, for example if we are obliged to retain or process certain data, have an overriding interest (insofar as we may invoke such interests) or need the data for asserting claims. If exercising certain rights will incur costs on you, we will notify you thereof in advance. We have already informed you of the possibility to withdraw consent in Section 3 above. Please further note that the exercise of these rights may be in conflict with your contractual obligations and this may result in consequences such as premature contract termination or involve costs. If this is the case, we will inform you in advance unless it has already been contractually agreed upon.

In general, exercising these rights requires that you are able to prove your identity (e.g., by a copy of identification documents where your identity is not evident otherwise or can be verified in another way). In order to assert these rights, please contact us at the addresses provided in Section 1 above.

In addition, every data subject has the right to enforce his/her rights in court or to lodge a complaint with the competent data protection authority. The competent data protection authority of Switzerland is the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (http://www.edoeb.admin.ch).
 

Retention Periods for your Personal Data

We process and retain your personal data as long as required for the performance of our contractual obligation and compliance with legal obligations or other purposes pursued with the processing, i.e. for the duration of the entire business relationship (from the initiation, during the performance of the contract until it is terminated) as well as beyond this duration in accordance with legal retention and documentation obligations. Personal data may be retained for the period during which claims can be asserted against our company or insofar as we are otherwise legally obliged to do so or if legitimate business interests require further retention (e.g., for evidence and documentation purposes). As soon as your personal data are no longer required for the above-mentioned purposes, they will be deleted or anonymized, to the extent possible. In general, shorter retention periods of no more than twelve months apply for operational data (e.g., system logs).
 

Data Security

We have taken appropriate technical and organizational security measures to protect your personal data from unauthorized access and misuse such as internal policies, training, IT and network security solutions, access controls and restrictions, encryption of data carriers and transmissions, inspections.
 

Obligation to Provide Personal Data To Us

In the context of our business relationship you must provide us with any personal data that is necessary for the conclusion and performance of a business relationship and the performance of our contractual obligations (as a rule, there is no statutory requirement to provide us with data). Without this information, we will usually not be able to enter into or carry out a contract with you (or the entity or person you represent). In addition, the website cannot be used unless certain information is disclosed to enable data traffic (e.g. IP address).
 

Profiling

In establishing and carrying out a business relationship, we generally do not use any fully automated individual decision-making (such as pursuant to article 22 GDPR). Should we use such procedures in certain cases, we will inform you separately on this and advise you of your relevant rights if required by law.
 

Contact form and e-mail contact 

If the user of this website sends an e-mail or a message to Abifor AG via the contact form, abifor AG processes and uses these personal data, such as name, address, telephone and fax number, e-mail address, etc. exclusively for the purpose of answering the user's message. These data will not be passed on to third parties. The data are stored until the contact with the user is terminated. The user enters personal or business information and data on an expressly voluntary basis.
 

Export and processing of data in countries outside the European Economic Area

In the context of our business activities and in line with the purposes of the data processing set out in Section 3, we may transfer data to third parties, insofar as such a transfer is permitted and we deem it appropriate, in order for them to process data for us or, as the case may be, their own purposes. In particular, the following categories of recipients may be concerned: 

• our service providers (such as e.g. banks, insurances), including processors (such as e.g. IT providers and Document shredding company);
• dealers, suppliers, subcontractors and other business partners;
• clients;
• domestic and foreign authorities or courts;  
• the public, including users of our websites and social media;
• competitors, industry organizations, associations, organizations and other bodies; ;
• other parties in possible or pending legal proceedings;

together Recipients.

Certain Recipients may be within Switzerland but they may be located in any country worldwide. In particular, you must anticipate your data to be transmitted to any country in which the Abifor group is represented by affiliates, branches or other offices as well as to other countries in Europe and the USA where our service providers are located (such as Microsoft).

If a recipient is located in a country without adequate statutory data protection, we require the recipient to undertake to comply with data protection (for this purpose, we use the revised European Commission’s standard contractual clauses, which can be accessed here: eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dec_impl/2021/914/oj, unless the recipient is subject to a legally accepted set of rules to ensure data protection and unless we cannot rely on an exception. An exception may apply for example in case of legal proceedings abroad, but also in cases of overriding public interest or if the performance of a contract requires disclosure, if you have consented or if data has been made available generally by you and you have not objected against the processing.
 

Notes

The service providers engaged by the responsible party have their headquarters and operate their IT infrastructure exclusively within the European Union and Switzerland. This also applies to any use of Cloud-based services. Contracts exist with the service providers which comply with the data protection and data security requirements of the EU GDPR and the DPA. Even if external service providers are called in, abifor remains the party responsible for data processing.


External links

You will find links on our pages which refer to pages of third parties for information purposes. If this is not obviously recognisable, we will point out the fact that this is an external link. The responsible party has no influence on the content and design of these pages of other providers. The guarantees of this data protection declaration therefore do not apply to external providers.
 

Use of cookies

The responsible party uses so-called "cookies" to individually design and optimise the customer's online experience and online time. A cookie is a text file that is either temporarily stored in your computer's memory ("session cookie") or stored on your hard drive ("permanent" cookie). Cookies contain, for example, information about the user's previous access to the corresponding server or information about which offers have been called up so far. Cookies are not used to run programmes or download viruses onto your computer. Instead, the main purpose of cookies is to provide an offer specially tailored to the customer and to make use of the service as comfortable as possible. The responsible party uses session cookies and permanent cookies. 
 

Session cookies

The responsible party mainly uses "session cookies", which are not stored on the customer's hard drive and are deleted when the browser is exited. Session cookies are used for login authentication and system load balancing.
 

Permanent cookies

In addition, the responsible party uses "permanent cookies" to store the personal usage settings that a customer enters when using the services of the responsible party and thus to be able to personalise and improve the service. The permanent cookies ensure that the customer finds his/her personal settings again when he/she visits the websites of the responsible party. In addition, the service providers who have commissioned the responsible party to analyse user behaviour use permanent cookies in order to identify returning users. These services only store the data transmitted by the cookie in anonymous form. The customer’s IP address cannot be assigned.
 

Prevention of cookies

The visitor has the possibility to refuse cookies at any time. This is usually done by selecting the appropriate option in the browser settings or by using additional programmes. For more information, refer to the help function of your browser. If the customer decides to disable cookies, this can reduce the scope of the service and have a negative impact on the use of the services of those responsible.
 

Google Analytics 

The Abifor AG website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google Inc. ("Google"). Google Analytics uses so-called "Cookies", text files that are stored on your computer and that allow an analysis of your use of the website. The information generated by the cookie about your use of this website (including your IP address) is transferred to and stored on a Google server in the USA. Google will use this information to evaluate your use of the website, to compile reports on website activity and to provide the website operator with further services associated with website and internet use. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law or where such third parties process the data on Google's behalf. Under no circumstances will Google associate the IP address of the user of this website with other Google data. The user may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on his/her browser; however, Abifor AG would like to point out that in this case, he/she may not be able to use the full functionality of this website.

By using this website, the user agrees to the processing of data collected about the user by Google in the aforementioned manner and for the aforementioned purpose.
 

Friendly Captcha

Our website uses the "Friendly Captcha" service.
This service is offered by Friendly Captcha GmbH, Am Anger 3-5, 82237 Wörthsee, Germany.
Friendly Captcha is a novel, privacy-friendly protection solution to make it more difficult for automated programs and scripts (so-called "bots") to use our website.
For this purpose, we have integrated a program code from Friendly Captcha into our website, for example for contact forms, so that the visitor's end device can establish a connection to the Friendly Captcha servers in order to receive a calculation task from Friendly Captcha. The visitor's terminal solves the calculation, which requires certain system resources, and sends the calculation result to our web server. The server contacts the Friendly Captcha server via an interface and receives a response stating whether the puzzle was solved correctly by the end device. Depending on the result, we can apply security rules to requests via our website and thus, for example, process or reject them.

The data is used exclusively to protect against spam and bots as described above.
- Friendly Captcha does not set or read any cookies on the visitor's end device.
- IP addresses are only stored in hashed, i.e. one-way encrypted form and do not allow us and Friendly Captcha to draw any conclusions about an individual person.
- If personal data is stored, this data is deleted within 30 days.
The legal basis for the processing is our legitimate interests in protecting our website from abusive access by bots, i.e. spam protection and protection against attacks such as mass requests), Article 6 (1) f (DS-GVO).
 

Amendments of this Data Protection Statement

We may amend this Data Protection Statement at any time without prior notice. The current version published on our website shall apply. If the Data Protection Statement is part of an agreement with you, we will notify you by e-mail or other appropriate means in case of an amendment.
 

Additional information and contacts

If you have any further questions on the subject of data protection at the responsible party, please contact our company's data protection officer. You can ask which of your data are stored with us. In addition, you can send information, requests for erasure and correction of your data and suggestions at any time by letter or eMail to the following address:

Abifor AG
Stefanie Simschek 
Luegislandstrasse 31
Postfach 525
CH-8051 Zürich
Switzerland
eMail:  stefanie.simschek(at)abifor.com

Abifor AG © September 2023