DATA CONTROLLER:                 

Kärcher (U.K.) Ltd.
Brookhill Way, Banbury, Oxfordshire OX16 3ED

Tel. No. +44 (0) 1295 752000
Fax No.  +44 (0) 1295 266436 

www.karcher.co.uk

DATA PROTECTION OFFICER:                

Data Protection Officer
Kärcher (U.K.) Ltd.
Brookhill Way, Banbury, Oxfordshire OX16 3ED

Tel. No. +44 (0) 1295 752000
Fax No.  +44 (0) 1295 266436 
www.karcher.co.uk
data.officer@karcher.co.uk

We collect personal information from you through your contact with us, including by phone, by email, and through our websites. For example, you will provide information to us when you contact our customer service teams, place an order, register your warranty, complete a survey, competition or questionnaire, update your preferences and account information, or rate one of our products on our website.

Kärcher Websites

When visiting the Kärcher websites, you transmit data to our web server via your Internet browser (for technical reasons).  The following data is recorded during the communication between your Internet browser and our web server:

• Date and time of the request
• Name of the requested file
• Page from which the file was requested
• Access status (file transferred, file not found, etc)
• We browser and operating system used
• Complete IP address of requesting computer
• Transferred data volume

For reasons of technical security, in particular to prevent attempts to attack our web server, this data is temporarily stored by us.  It is not possible for us to draw conclusions regarding individuals on the basis of this data.

Further personal information is only collected if you provide it voluntarily, for example as part of an enquiry or registration.  Depending on the area concerned, Kärcher uses the personal data you provide to answer your enquiries, to process your order and for the purpose of technical administration of the websites.

We use this information so that we can see how well our websites are working, how they are used and what is looked at most often.

That information is, predominantly, collected through our use of cookies and similar technologies.

Cookies

Cookies are used for behavioural targeting on our website.  These are text files by means of which data containing usage information (websites visited, number of visits, visiting times, length of stay on pages, etc) are stored on your hard disk.

The profiles are anonymised and evaluated for statistical purposes, in order to allow the interests of the respective user when Internet advertising (e.g. banners) is uploaded to other websites.  Cookies do not hold any personal data such as name, address or email.

By continuing to use our websites and apps, you accept that cookies will be set on your device.

Behavioural Advertising

Your IP (Internet Protocol) address is collected via the use of our websites, directly from the behavourial targeting service provider.  This is GroupM Competence Center GmbH.  Your IP address is anonymised and cannot be traced back to you again.  The purpose of collecting this data is for user oriented advertising.

You can opt out of Xaxis Interest-Based Advertising through their website:
https://www.xaxis.com/privacy-policy/

Adobe Analytics

The website also uses Adobe Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Adobe Systems Software Ireland Limited (“Adobe”).  Adobe Analytics uses “cookies” to help the website analyse how users are navigating the site.  The IP address is anonymised before storage.  The information will allow reports to be compiled on website activity and to provide other services relating to website use and internet use to the website operator.

You can prevent this data from being collected by downloading and installing the browser plug-in at the following link:
https://www.adobe.com/uk/privacy.html

Social Media

You may use social media to contact us about your Kärcher products, or to let people know what you think about our products.  Our marketing team review social media and online sites to get a better understanding of what people are saying about us and our products and this enables us to facilitate contact from consumers who prefer to contact us in this way.

You should review the privacy policies of these sites to ensure you are happy and informed of how your personal information is being collected and shared.

Kärcher Owned Kärcher Centers/trade shows and events

When you visit us in person at our stores, trade shows and events you may share personal information with us such as your name, contact details and payment information.

We will also collect personal information about you through our use of CCTV, filming and photography. CCTV cameras are primarily used for security purposes in our KOKO stores.  We sometimes film and take photographs at trade shows and events; we use film and photographs for our business purposes (for example, to post on our social media pages). We will display notices at our stores, stands and events where we use CCTV, or where we intend to film or take photographs, to let you know that we will collect personal information about you.

Information collected from Third Party data providers

We collect information from third party data providers which enable us to provide information on relevant offers and services from Kärcher.  The information includes demographic and lifestyle data in order to provide comparative insights into affluence of households within your area.

We may also collect information in relation to our customers from:

• Any service providers who work with us in relation to your business, if we do not provide our products to you directly
• Organisations who carry out customer satisfaction surveys or market research on our behalf, or who provide us with statistics and other information (for example, about your interests, purchases and type of household) to help us to improve our products and services
• Fraud-detection and credit-reference agencies

Our main reason for collecting and using your personal information is to provide and improve the service, products and experiences that you and our customers expect from a leading worldwide provider of cleaning technology. Whether our justification is necessary for us to provide you with a particular product, or for our “legitimate interests (see below),” Kärcher is committed to take steps to honour your privacy.

We use your personal information as follows:

• To communicate with you
• To respond to queries and requests
• To provide services and support for our products
• In order to conduct customer satisfaction surveys to identify service and product improvements and improve your experience of dealing with Kärcher
• To inform you of changes to Kärcher’s terms and conditions, policies and other related information we may need to tell you about
• To communicate information about our products and services (if you are happy for us to do this)
• To provide you with information relating to service updates regarding our products

Legitimate Interest

We process your personal information for a number of legitimate interests, including managing all aspects of our relationship with you, for marketing, to help us improve our services and products, and in order to exercise our rights.

Legitimate interest is one of the legal reasons why we may process your personal information. Taking into account your interests, rights and freedoms, legitimate interests which allow us to process your personal information will include:-

• Detection and prevention of fraudulent actions
• Security of our websites, products and IT systems
• Customising and improving the way you shop with us
• Compliance with legal obligations, i.e. regulatory bodies or law enforcement authorities
• Effectiveness of advertisements and promotions
• To develop and carry out marketing activities and to show you information that is of interest to you, based on our understanding of your preferences.  
• Statistical research and analysis in order that we can monitor and improve products, services, websites, apps, or develop new ones
• To enforce or apply our website terms of use, our policy terms and conditions or other contracts, or to protect our (or our customers’ or other people’s) rights, property or safety
• To exercise our rights, to defend ourselves from claims and to keep to laws and regulations that apply to us and the third parties we work with; and
• To take part in, or be the subject of, any sale, purchase, merger or takeover of all or part of the Kärcher business.

For more information on how to exercise your right to object, please see the section below “Your Rights.”

Kärcher Websites

We use your information from visits to our websites to ensure we identify how to improve the overall experience for our visitors/customers.

For more information on how to exercise your right to object to the monitoring of our websites please see the section below “Your Rights.”

Other potential uses of Personal Information

• For claims or disputes arising from the purchase of Kärcher products or warranty claims
• Detection and prevention of fraudulent actions
• Compliance with legal obligations

We may use your personal information to send you marketing by post, by phone, through social media, by email and by text.

We can only use your personal information to send you marketing material if we have your permission or a legitimate interest as described above.

If you don’t want to receive marketing communications from us, you can tell us by contacting us at any time. Otherwise, you can always contact us to update your contact preferences.

You have the right to object to direct marketing and profiling (the automated processing of your information to help us evaluate certain things about you, for example, your personal preferences and your interests) relating to direct marketing.

For more information on how to exercise your right to object to marketing communications please see the section below “Your Rights.”

By law, we must tell you about profiling (automated processing of your information to help us evaluate certain things about you, for example, your personal preferences and your interests).

Like many businesses, we sometimes use automation to provide you with better and consistent service, and marketing information we think will be of interest to you (including discounts on our products and services). This will involve evaluating information about you.

You have the right to object to direct marketing and profiling relating to direct marketing. If you do this, we will no longer carry out profiling for direct marketing purposes. You also have the right to object to profiling in other circumstances set out below.

For more information on how to exercise your right to object to the above, please see the section below “Your Rights.”

We like to keep you and all our customers up to date with Kärcher information regarding the release of new products onto the market, owner information, offers or upcoming events

We do this in various ways, including e-mail, post, via social media platforms and by phone.   We want to make sure you are happy with these communications and how we stay in touch with you.

We will only send you marketing communications if you are happy for us to do so.

We will only allow other Kärcher Group companies to send you marketing communications if you have told us you are happy for this to happen

We will never pass on information outside the Kärcher Group to be used for marketing purposes.

If you wish to stop receiving marketing communications from Kärcher you have the right to request to stop receiving information this way. For more information on how to exercise your right to object to the above, please see the section below “Your Rights.”

We sometimes need to share your information with other people or organisations for the purposes set out in this privacy notice.

We may share your information with:

• Other members of the Kärcher Group
• Distributors who help sell our products on our behalf
• Those appointed by Kärcher to deliver products to you
• Third parties that help us with mailing services, product services and repairs processing product purchases, financial services, audit services, administrative services, IT technologies (e.g. data storage), security services and insurance claims;
• Third parties that help us provide services and responses to you
• People or organisations we have to, or are allowed to, share your personal information with by law (for example, for fraud-prevention or safeguarding purposes,
• The police and other law-enforcement agencies to help them perform their duties, or with others if we have to do this by law or under a court order;

If we share your personal information, we will make sure appropriate protection is in place to protect your personal information in line with data protection laws.

We are committed to protecting your personal information. We use appropriate technical and organisational measures, to protect your personal information and privacy, and review those regularly. We protect your personal information using a combination of physical and IT security controls, including access controls that restrict and manage the way in which your personal information and data is processed, managed and handled.

Our procedures mean that we may occasionally request proof of identity before we share your personal information with you.

We do not knowingly collect any personal information from children.  Our products, services and websites are not aimed at children.

If you are a child, please do not attempt to become a registered user of our websites, apps or products or otherwise provide us with any personal information. If we learn that we have inadvertently obtained personal information from a child, we will delete that information as soon as possible.

If you are aware a child has contacted us, please contact: data.officer@karcher.co.uk

Kärcher may transfer your personal information to third parties based outside of the European Economic Area that help us provide services and responses to you. For example, (but not limited to), your data may be transferred to a third party call centre in the country of South Africa, where our UK registered partner, Quantanite, operates. The legal basis of this transfer is Legitimate Interest for the purposes of dealing with (including, but not limited to) customer queries and orders.

We only keep your personal information for as long as we need to, to be able to use it for the reasons given in this privacy notice, and for as long as we are required to keep it by law. The actual period for which we store your personal information will vary depending on the type of personal information and how it is used. For example, when you buy a product from us, we will store information about you and your purchase for at least the term of your warranty or guarantee.

If you would like more information about how long we will keep your information for, please contact us at data.officer@karcher.co.uk

We will review and update this privacy policy at least once a year and will note the date it was last updated below.

If we change our privacy policy, we will detail the changes below. If we have your e-mail address, we may also e-mail you with information on those changes. If we need to, we will also ask you to confirm that you are happy with those changes.

• This privacy policy was last updated in May 2018 to comply with the GDPR regulations

You have the right to access your information and to ask us to correct any mistakes and delete and restrict the use of your information. You also have the right to object to us using your information, to ask us to transfer of information you have provided and to withdraw permission you have given us to use your information. For more information, see below.

• Right of access: the right to make a written request for details of your personal information and a copy of that personal information
  Right to rectification: the right to have inaccurate information about you corrected or removed
  
  
• Right to erasure ('right to be forgotten'): the right to have certain personal information about you erased
  
  
• Right to restriction of processing: the right to request that your personal information is only used for restricted purposes
  
  
• Right to object: the right to object to processing of your personal information in cases where our processing is based on the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or we have let you know the processing is necessary for our or a third party’s legitimate interests. You can object to our use of your information for profiling purposes where it is in relation to direct marketing
  
  
• Right to data portability: the right to ask for the personal information you have made available to us to be transferred to you or a third party in machine-readable formats
  
  
• Right to withdraw consent: the right to withdraw any consent you have previously given us to handle your personal information. If you withdraw your consent, this will not affect the lawfulness of Karcher’s use of your personal information prior to the withdrawal of your consent and we will let you know if we will no longer be able to provide you your chosen product or service

Please note: Other than your right to object to the use of your data for direct marketing (and profiling to the extent used for the purposes of direct marketing), your rights are not absolute: they do not always apply in all cases and we will let you know in our correspondence with you how we will be able to comply with your request.

If you make a request, we will ask you to confirm your identity if we need to, and to provide information that helps us to understand your request better. If we do not meet your request, we will explain why.

In order to exercise your rights please contact data.officer@karcher.co.uk

If you have any questions, comments, complaints or suggestions in relation to this notice, or any other concerns about the way in which we process information about you, please contact our Data Protection Officer: data.officer@karcher.co.uk.

You also have a right to make a complaint to your local privacy supervisory authority:

Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire, United Kingdom
SK9 5AF

Phone: 0303 123 1113 (local rate) or 01625 545 745 (national rate)

a) Subscribing to our newsletter

On our website you have the option to subscribe to a free newsletter. When you register for the newsletter, the data you enter on the input screen (title, first and last name, email address, newsletter preferences) are transmitted to us and stored.

In addition, the following data are collected when registering:

●      Date and time of the registration

As part of the registration process, your consent is obtained for the processing of the data and reference is made to this Privacy Policy.

Once you have subscribed to our newsletter, we will regularly send you information on our promotions, offers and services by email.

If you subscribe to the newsletter on certain forms (e.g. the product registration form "Register & Win", warranty extensions, checkout from the online shop) or if you have subscribed the newsletter in the past, the information from this form as well as your online shop purchase history will be added to your existing newsletter profile or used as a basis for creating a new newsletter profile. This information is used to personalise newsletters in order to provide you with the most suitable information on our promotions, offers and services.

b) Newsletter for existing commercial customers

If you are an existing customer and were informed of your right of objection when your email address was collected and upon each use, we may process any of your data (first and last name, email address) that are available to us in order to send you regular information about our promotions, offers and services by email. If you wish, you can object to the relevant notices at any time.

c) Measuring opening and click rates

To improve our newsletters, we measure opening and click rates. To do this, the newsletters contain a pixel-sized file (a so-called tracking pixel), which is retrieved from our server or that of our mailing service provider when the newsletter is opened. As part of the retrieval process, technical information, such as information about the browser you are using and your system as well as the time of retrieval, will first be collected.

This information is used to improve our newsletter from a technical perspective based on the technical data or the target groups and their reading behaviour. This analysis also includes determining whether the newsletters are opened, when they are opened, and which links are clicked on. This information is assigned to the respective recipient and stored in their profile. We use these analyses to identify the reading habits of our visitors and adapt our content to suit them or to send different content that aligns with our visitors’ interests.

Unless otherwise stated, no data will be passed on to third parties outside the Kärcher Group in connection with the data processing for sending the newsletters. The data are used solely to send the newsletter.

1.     Legal basis for data processing
The legal basis for the processing of data after subscribing to the newsletter is the user granting their consent under Art. 6 (1) lit. a GDPR.

The legal basis for processing the data of existing customers or for adding form or product data as from chapter 1.a) is our legitimate advertising interests (Art. 6 (1) lit. f GDPR in conjunction with § 7 (3) of the Act against Unfair Competition (UWG)) in sending interest-based advertising.

2.     Purpose of the data processing
The visitor's email address is collected in order to deliver the newsletter. The other personal data collected as part of the registration process is used to prevent misuse of the services or of the email address used.

3.     Duration of storage
The data will be erased as soon as they are no longer required to achieve the purpose for which they were collected. Therefore, the visitor's email address will be stored for as long as the subscription to the newsletter remains active. Your email address will be blocked and erased from our newsletter mailing list after four weeks once you have unsubscribed, unless you have expressly consented to the further use of your data or if we reserve the right to use your data beyond this scope in a manner which is permitted by law and about which we have informed you in this Policy.

4.     Possibility of revocation (if consent has previously been granted) and objection (in the case of § 7 (3) of the Act against Unfair Competition (UWG))
The data subject can revoke consent to the sending of the newsletter at any time. To this end, a corresponding unsubscribe link can be found in each newsletter.

Otherwise, the data subject may object to processing based on legitimate interests (Art. 6 para.1 lit.f GDPR) at any time by sending an email to helpline@karcher.co.uk.