Cookie Policy

1. Scope and Purpose of the Processing

Cookies: We use so-called cookies in some areas of our website, for example to recognise the preferences of visitors and to be able to design the website accordingly. This facilitates navigation, performance and a higher degree of user-friendliness from a website. Cookies also help us to identify particularly popular areas of our website. Cookies are small files that are stored on the hard drive of a visitor's computer. They allow information to be stored for a certain period of time and to identify the visitor's computer. For better user guidance and individual service presentation, we use permanent cookies. We also use so-called session cookies, which are automatically deleted when you close your browser. You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies or so that it informs you about the placement of cookies. This makes the use of cookies transparent for you.

Important: If you completely exclude the use of cookies, you may not be able to use certain functions of our website.


2. Categories of Cookies

We may use the following four categories of cookies on our website:

• Necessary Cookies
• Performance Cookies
• Functionality / personalisation Cookies
• Targeting Cookies.

Necessary cookies: These cookies are necessary so that you can move around the website and use its functions, for example when accessing password-protected areas. Without these cookies, we cannot provide you with certain services you have requested and the website cannot function properly. We use cookies to uniquely identify registered users so that they can be identified during their stay and when they return to the website.

Performance cookies: These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for example, which pages they visit most frequently and whether they receive error messages from websites. These cookies do not collect any data that can be used to identify visitors. All information collected with the help of these cookies is anonymous and serves exclusively to improve the functionality and service of the website. We therefore use performance cookies to generate statistics on how our website is used and to see how effective our advertising campaigns are.

Functionality / personalisation cookies: These cookies allow websites to remember a visitor's previous information (e.g. user name, language or selected market) in order to offer optimised features tailored to the visitor. For example, a website can provide you with up-to-date information about your market by storing your current location in a cookie. These cookies also serve to maintain the settings you make on the website (e.g. font or font size and other user-adjustable options). They are also used to provide services you have requested, for example when you want to watch a video. These cookies are not able to track your browser activity on other websites. They do not collect any information about you that can be used for advertising purposes and cannot trace where you were on the Internet outside our website. We therefore use functionality/personalisation cookies to recognise you the next time you visit our website and to personalise content and save your settings (for example, your preferred market).

Targeting Cookies: These cookies are used to tailor advertising even more specifically to you and your interests. They also serve to limit how often you see an advert, measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign and understand people's behaviour after viewing an advert. Targeting cookies are usually placed on the pages of advertising networks with the consent of the website operator. You recognise that the user has visited a website and pass this information on to other companies, e.g. advertising companies. They are often linked to a website functionality provided by this company. We therefore use targeting cookies to link to social networks that may then use the information about your visit to tailor advertising on other websites to you and to provide the advertising networks we use with information about your visit so that, based on your browsing behaviour, you can later be presented with the advertising that you may be interested in.


3. Browser Settings

Most internet browsers are already set to accept cookies by default. However, you can change your internet browser settings so that it only accepts certain cookies or no cookies at all. However, we would like to point out that you may no longer be able to use all the functions of our website if cookies are disabled by your internet browser settings on our website.

You can also use your internet browser settings to delete cookies already stored in your browser. Furthermore, it is possible to set your internet browser so that it informs you before cookies are stored. Since the different internet browsers may differ in their respective functions, we ask you to use the respective help menu of your internet browser for the setting options.

If you would like a comprehensive overview of all third-party access to your internet browser, we recommend that you install specially developed plug-ins.