Date effective: 15 May 2019
The Swiss Quality as well as all of its affiliates and subsidiaries (altogether, “The Swiss Quality”, “us” or “we”) are aware of the importance of your privacy, and we are dedicated to being straightforward about the technologies we use. Read this Cookie Policy to understand why and how cookies, web beacons, clear gifs, pixels, and other technologies like these (altogether, “Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies”) can be stored on your device and accessed from it when you visit or use any website or app that has a link pointing to this Policy (altogether, “the Sites”). You should read this Cookie Policy alongside our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
You agree, by proceeding with accessing or using our Sites, that we can access and store Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies as set out in this Cookie Policy.
Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies – What are they?
A cookie is defined as a small text file that is stored on your device and accessed from it when you go onto one of our Sites, so long as you give your consent. The other tracking technologies function in a similar way to cookies and put small data files onto your devices or track your activity on the website, which helps us glean information about the way you use our Sites. This lets our Sites recognize and distinguish your device from the devices belonging to other users of the Sites. Below you’ll find more information about cookies and other tracking technologies.
For further information go to www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.eu
How are Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies used on our Sites?
Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies are used by The Swiss Quality to identify you and your interests, to record your preferences, and to keep track of how you use our Sites. They also help us control access to particular content on our Sites, protect the sites, and process your requests.
In order to run our Sites, and for research reasons, The Swiss Quality has carried out contracts with third-party service providers to keep track of and analyse our Site users’ statistical usage as well as information about site user volume. Persistent cookies are employed by these third parties to assist us in improving user experience, managing the content on our Site, and analysing the ways in which users navigate and use the Sites.
First-party Cookies and Third-party Cookies
Cookies that belong solely to The Swiss Quality and are put onto your device by The Swiss Quality are referred to as “First-party Cookies”. Cookies placed by another party onto your device via our site are called “Third-party Cookies.” Third-party service providers may be contracted by The Swiss Quality in order to send e-mails to users who have given us their contact information. Third-party service providers may put Cookies on these users’ devices in order to help us assess and increase the effectiveness of our e-mails, and/or to help us see whether the e-mails have been opened and links within clicked on.
You can refer to the privacy policies of these companies below for more information on how they use and collect information on The Swiss Quality’s behalf.
These are the types of cookies we use:
Persistent Cookies.
We use persistent Cookies to give you a better experience of using the Sites. This includes keeping a record of your consent to our Cookie Policy in order to delete the cookie message which initially appears when you access the Sites.
Session Cookies.
Temporary Session Cookies are deleted from your device when you close your web browser. Session Cookies are used by The Swiss Quality to help us track internet usage in the way described above.
You can decide not to accept browser Cookies by selecting the appropriate setting on your browser. However, it’s possible you’ll be unable to access particular parts of the Sites if you choose this setting. Our system will use Cookies automatically when you access our Sites unless you have changed the browser setting so that it denies Cookies.
We will not keep for longer than necessary to fulfil the purposes above any data collected by the Sites and/or via Cookies placed on your device. At any rate, The Swiss Quality will not keep such information for longer than a year.
We use Cookies for these purposes:
| Cookie Type | Purpose |
| Strictly Necessary/ Technical | These Cookies are essential to let us run our Sites so that you can access them in the way you wish. These Cookies, for example, let us see that you have made an account and logged into that account in order to access Site content. They also include Cookies that permit us to record and remember your previous actions in the same browsing session and keep our Sites secure. |
| Analytical/ Performance | We or third-party service providers use these Cookies to analyse Site performance and determine how the Sites are utilized. For example, these Cookies keep track of our most frequently visited pages, and where our visitors are coming from. These Cookies may be connected to you if you subscribe to a newsletter or register in some other way with the Sites. Google Analytics cookies, for instance, are analytical/performance cookies. |
| Functionality | This type of cookie lets us operate the Sites in line with the selections you make. We can “remember” you in-between visits thanks to these cookies. For example, we are able to recognize your user name and recall your personal customization of the Sites and services, for instance by adjusting text size, languages, fonts, and other changeable parts of web pages, and we can then show you the same customizations when you visit in the future. |
| Third-Party Advertising | We collect information about your behaviour on these and other sites using these Cookies in order to give you targeted advertising. We may also permit our third-party service providers to use Cookies on the Sites for the same reasons stated above, which includes collecting information regarding your online activities over time and on different websites. These Cookies are created by third-party service providers such as Google, Adobe, LinkedIn, and Facebook, each of which possesses their own privacy policies, and they can use their Cookies to provide target advertising to you via other websites, based on information from your visit to our Sites. |
How do I decline or take away my consent to the use of Cookies?
In the event that you do not want Cookies placed on your device, you can change the setting of your Internet browser to reject either all or some Cookies and also to warn you when a Cookie has been put onto your device. If you’d like to know more about how to go about this, please check your browser ‘help’ / ‘tool’ or ‘edit’ section or go to www.allaboutcookies.org . Also be aware that if you block all Cookies (including strictly necessary Cookies) using your browser settings, some functionalities of our Sites may be inaccessible to you.
It is possible to manually remove previously stored Cookies whenever you wish. Please note, however, that this does not mean the Sites can’t put more Cookies on your device, except when you have changed your Internet browser settings in the manner explained above.
If you are located in Europe, please visit www.youronlinechoices.eu for more information on how user-profiles are developed, and how targeting/advertising Cookies are utilised. If you are in the United States, go to www.aboutads.info/choices .
Contact
Please get in touch with any other queries about our Cookie Policy at:
The Swiss Quality
Legal Department
14 Rue du Lac
1207 Geneva, Switzerland
privacy_information[@]theswissquality.ch