Privacy policy

1 What is this privacy policy about?

CryoSolutions AG (hereinafter also referred to as "we", "us") obtains and processes personal data concerning you or also other persons (so-called "third parties"). We use the term "data" here synonymously with "personal data" or "personal data".

Personal data refers to data relating to specific or identifiable persons, i.e. conclusions about their identity are possible on the basis of the data itself or with corresponding additional data. "Particularly protectable personal data" is a category of personal data that is particularly protected by the applicable data protection law. Personal data requiring special protection includes, for example, data revealing racial and ethnic origin, health data, information on religious or ideological beliefs, biometric data for identification purposes and information on trade union membership. Section 3 provides details of the data we process under this Privacy Policy. "Processing" means any handling of personal data, such as obtaining, storing, using, adapting, disclosing and deleting it.

In this Privacy Policy, we describe what we do with your data when you use www.cryosolutions.ch (the "Website").

When you submit or disclose information about other people, such as family members, co-workers, etc., we assume that you are authorized to do so and that the information is accurate. By submitting data about third parties, you confirm this. Please also ensure that these third parties have been informed of this privacy policy.

This website is intended exclusively for persons resident in Switzerland. This privacy policy is designed to meet the requirements of the revised Swiss Data Protection Act ("revDSG").

2 Who is responsible for the processing of your data?

CryoSolutions AG, Amsleracherweg 8, CH-5033 Buchs (the "CryoSolutions"), is responsible for the data processing of CryoSolutions AG described in this Privacy Policy, unless otherwise communicated in individual cases.

You can contact us for your data protection concerns and to exercise your rights under Section 11 as follows:
CryoSolutions AG, Amsleracherweg 8, CH-5033 Buchs, t.kuettel@cryosolutions.ch.

3 What data do we process?

We process different categories of data about you. The main categories are as follows:

Technical data

When you use our website, we collect the IP address of your terminal device and other technical data to ensure the functionality and security of this offer. This data also includes logs recording the use of our systems. In order to ensure the functionality of these offers, we may also assign an individual code to you or your end device (e.g. in the form of a cookie, see section 11). The technical data in itself does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about your identity. However, in the context of user accounts, registrations, access controls or the processing of contracts, they may be linked to other data categories (and thus possibly to your person). Information on the data protection provisions of the provider Cyon can be found here.

Technical data includes, among other things, the IP address and information about the operating system of your terminal device, the date, region and time of use, and the type of browser you use to access our electronic offerings. This may help us to provide you with the correct formatting of the website or to show you a website customized for your region, for example. Based on the IP address, we know through which provider you access our offers (and thus also the region), but we can usually not deduce from it who you are. This changes when you create a user account, for example, because personal data can then be linked to technical data (e.g., we can see which browser you use to access an account through our website). Examples of technical data also include logs that occur in our systems (e.g., the log of user logins to our website).

Registration data

Certain offers e.g. of contests and services (e.g. login areas of our website, newsletter delivery etc.) can only be used with a user account or registration, which can be done directly with us or via our external login service providers. In doing so, you must provide us with certain data, and we collect data about the use of the offer or service.

Registration data includes, but is not limited to, the information you provide when you create an account on our website (e.g., username, password, name, email). You must also register if you wish to subscribe to our newsletter.

Communication data

When you are in contact with us via the contact form, email, phone or chat, or other means of communication, we collect the data exchanged between you and us, including your contact details and the boundary data of the communication.

Communication data includes your name and contact details, the manner and place and time of the communication and usually its content (i.e. the content of emails, chats, etc.). This data may also include information about third parties.

Behavioral and preference data

Depending on the relationship we have with you, we try to get to know you and better tailor our products, services and offers to you. To do this, we collect and use data about your behavior and preferences. We do this by evaluating information about your behavior in our area, and we may also supplement this information with information from third parties - including publicly available sources. Based on this, we can, for example, calculate the probability that you will use certain services or behave in a certain way. The data processed for this purpose is partly already known to us (e.g. when you use our services), or we obtain this data by recording your behavior (e.g. how you navigate on our website). We anonymize or delete this data when it is no longer meaningful for the purposes pursued, which may be between 2-3 weeks (for movement profiles) and 24 months (for product and service preferences) depending on the nature of the data. This period may be longer if required for evidentiary reasons or to comply with legal or contractual requirements, or if technically necessary. We describe how tracking works on our website in section 11.

Preference data tells us what your needs are, which products or services might be of interest to you, or when and how you are likely to respond to messages from us. We obtain this information from the analysis of existing data, such as behavioral data, so that we can get to know you better, tailor our advice and offers more precisely to you and generally improve our offers. In order to improve the quality of our analyses, we may combine this data with other data that we also obtain from third parties such as address dealers, public offices and publicly accessible sources such as the Internet, e.g. with information on your household size, income class and purchasing power, shopping behavior and contact data of relatives and anonymous information from statistical offices.

Behavioral and preference data can be analyzed on a person-related basis (e.g., to show you personalized advertising), but also on a non-person-related basis (e.g., for market research or product development). Behavioral and preference data can also be combined with other data (e.g., movement data can be used for contact tracing as part of a health protection concept).

Much of the information contained in this data is disclosed by you to us (e.g., via forms, in the course of communication with us, in connection with contracts, when using the website, etc.). You are not obliged to do so, subject to individual cases, e.g. in the context of binding protection concepts (legal obligations). When using our website, the processing of technical data is unavoidable. However, in the case of behavioral and preference data, you generally have the option of objecting or not giving your consent.

Insofar as this is not inadmissible, we also take data from publicly accessible sources (e.g. debt collection registers, land registers, commercial registers, media or the Internet incl. social media) or receive data from other companies within our group, from public authorities and from other third parties (such as credit agencies, address dealers, associations, contractual partners, Internet analysis services, etc.).

4 For what purposes do we process your data?

We process your data for purposes related to communication with you, in particular to respond to inquiries and assert your rights and to contact you in case of queries. For this purpose, we use in particular communication data and master data and, in connection with offers and services used by you, also registration data. We retain this data to document our communication with you, for training purposes, for quality assurance and for follow-up inquiries.

We process data for marketing purposes and relationship management, e.g. to send our customers and other contractual partners personalized advertising on products and services from us and from third parties (e.g. from advertising contractual partners). This may take the form of newsletters and other regular contacts (electronically, by mail, by telephone), via other channels for which we have contact information from you, but also as part of individual marketing campaigns (e.g. events, competitions, etc.) and may also include free services (e.g. invitations, vouchers, etc.). You can refuse such contacts at any time or refuse or revoke your consent to be contacted for advertising purposes. With your consent, we can target our online advertising on the Internet more specifically to you.

We continue to process your data for market research, to improve our services and operations, and for product development.

We strive to continuously improve our products and services (including our website) and to be able to react quickly to changing needs. We therefore analyze, for example, how you navigate through our website or which products are used by which groups of people and how new products and services can be designed. This provides us with information on the market acceptance of existing products and services and the market potential of new ones. To this end, we process in particular master data, behavioral data and preference data, but also communication data and information from customer surveys, polls and studies and other information, e.g. from the media, social media, the Internet and other public sources. As far as possible, we use pseudonymized or anonymized data for these purposes. We may also use media monitoring services or conduct media monitoring ourselves and process personal data in the process in order to conduct media work or to understand and respond to current developments and trends.

5 on what basis do we process your data?

Insofar as we ask you for your consent for certain processing (e.g. for the processing of particularly sensitive personal data, for marketing mailings, for the creation of personalized movement profiles and for advertising control and behavior analysis on the website), we will inform you separately about the corresponding purposes of the processing. You may revoke consents at any time with future effect by notifying us in writing (by post) or, where not otherwise specified or agreed, by e-mail; you will find our contact details in section 2. For revocation of your consent for online tracking, see section 11. Where you have a user account, revocation or contact with us may also be carried out via the relevant website or other service, if applicable. Once we have received notification of the withdrawal of your consent, we will no longer process your data for the purposes to which you originally consented, unless we have another legal basis for doing so. The revocation of your consent will not affect the lawfulness of the processing carried out on the basis of the consent until the revocation.

Where we do not ask you for your consent for processing, we base the processing of your personal data on the fact that the processing is necessary for the initiation or execution of a contract with you (or the entity you represent) or that we or third parties have a legitimate interest in doing so, so in particular to pursue the purposes and related objectives described above under section 4 and to be able to implement appropriate measures. Our legitimate interests also include compliance with legal requirements, insofar as this is not already recognized as a legal basis by the applicable data protection law in each case (e.g., in the case of the GDPR, the law in the EEA and Switzerland). However, this also includes the marketing of our products and services, the interest to better understand our markets and to safely and efficiently manage and develop our business, including operations.

If we receive sensitive data (e.g. health data, information on political, religious or ideological views or biometric data for identification purposes), we may also process your data on the basis of other legal grounds, e.g. in the event of disputes due to the need for processing for a possible lawsuit or the enforcement or defense of legal claims. In individual cases, other legal grounds may come into play, which we will communicate to you separately where necessary.

6 Who do we disclose your data to?

In connection with our contracts, the website, our services and products, our legal obligations or otherwise to protect our legitimate interests and the other purposes listed in section 4, we also disclose your personal data to third parties, in particular to the following categories of recipients:

Service providers

We work with service providers in Switzerland and abroad who process data about you on our behalf or in joint responsibility with us or who receive data about you from us in their own responsibility (e.g. IT providers, advertising service providers, login service providers). For information on the service providers used for the website, see section 11.

In order to provide our products and services efficiently and to enable us to concentrate on our core competencies, we procure services from third parties in numerous areas. These services include, for example, IT services, the dispatch of information, marketing, sales, communication or printing services, address checkers (e.g. to update address lists in the event of relocations). We disclose to these service providers in each case the data required for their services, which may also concern you. Our service providers may also process data on how their services are used and other data that arise in the course of using their services as independent data controllers for their own legitimate interests (e.g., for statistical evaluations or billing). Service providers provide information about their independent data processing in their own data protection statements.

Contractual partners including customers

First of all, this refers to customers (e.g. service recipients) and other contractual partners of ours, because this data transfer results from these contracts. They receive, for example, registration data on issued and redeemed vouchers, invitations, etc.. If you work for such a contractual partner yourself, we may also transfer data about you to them in this context. The recipients also include contractual partners with whom we cooperate or who advertise on our behalf and to whom we therefore transmit data about you for analysis and marketing purposes (these may again be service recipients, but also, for example, sponsors and providers of online advertising). We require these partners to send you advertising or to play it out based on your data only if you have consented to this (for the online area, see section 11).

If you act as an employee for a company with which we have concluded a contract, the processing of this contract may result in us informing the company, for example, how you have used our service. Cooperation and advertising contract partners receive selected master data, contract data, behavioral data and preference data from us so that, on the one hand, they can carry out non-personal evaluations in their area (e.g., about the number of our customers who have viewed their advertising) and, on the other hand, they can also use data for advertising purposes (including targeting you). For example, advertising contractors should be able to communicate with and send advertising to matching other customers of ours.

Other persons

This refers to other cases where the inclusion of third parties results from the purposes according to section 4, e.g. service recipients, media and associations in which we participate or if you are part of one of our publications.
Other recipients are, for example, delivery addressees or third-party payees specified by you, other third parties also in the context of agency relationships (e.g. if we send your data to your lawyer or bank) or persons involved in official or legal proceedings. If we cooperate with media and transmit material to them (e.g. photos), you may also be affected by this under certain circumstances. The same applies when we publish content (e.g., photos, interviews, quotes, etc.), for example, on our website or in other publications. In the course of business development, we may sell or acquire businesses, parts of businesses, assets or companies, or enter into partnerships, which may also result in the disclosure of data (including about you, e.g. as a customer or supplier or as a supplier representative) to the persons involved in these transactions. Communications with our competitors, industry organizations, associations and other bodies may also involve the exchange of data that also relates to you.

All these categories of recipients may in turn involve third parties, so that your data may also become accessible to them. We can restrict processing by certain third parties (e.g. IT providers), but not by other third parties (e.g. authorities, banks, etc.).

We reserve the right to disclose such data even if it concerns secret data (unless we have expressly agreed with you that we will not disclose such data to certain third parties, unless we are legally obliged to do so). Notwithstanding the foregoing, your data will continue to be subject to appropriate data protection even after disclosure in Switzerland and the rest of Europe. For disclosure to other countries, the provisions of Section 8 apply. If you do not want certain data to be disclosed, please let us know so that we can check whether and to what extent we can accommodate you (Section 2).

In many cases, the disclosure of even secret data is necessary in order to process contracts or provide other services. Even non-disclosure agreements do not generally exclude such data disclosure, nor does disclosure to service providers. However, depending on the sensitivity of the data and other circumstances, we ensure that these third parties handle the data appropriately. We cannot comply with your objection to data disclosure where the data disclosures in question are necessary for our activities.

We also allow certain third parties to collect personal data from you on our website and at events organized by us (e.g. media photographers, providers of tools that we have embedded on our website, etc.). Insofar as we are not decisively involved in these data collections, these third parties are solely responsible for them. If you have any concerns or wish to assert your data protection rights, please contact these third parties directly. See section 11 for the website. 7.

7 Will your personal data also be transferred abroad?

As explained in section 6, we also disclose data to other bodies. These are not only located in Switzerland. Your data may therefore be processed both in Europe and outside Europe; in exceptional cases, however, in any country in the world.

If a recipient is located in a country without adequate legal data protection, we contractually oblige the recipient to comply with the applicable data protection law (for this purpose, we use the revised standard contractual clauses of the European Commission, which are available here), unless it is already subject to a legally recognized set of rules to ensure data protection and we cannot rely on an exemption provision. An exception may apply in particular in the case of legal proceedings abroad, but also in cases of overriding public interests or if the performance of a contract requires such disclosure, if you have consented or if it is a matter of data made generally available by you, the processing of which you have not objected to.

Many countries outside of Switzerland or the EU and the EEA do not currently have laws that guarantee an adequate level of data protection from the perspective of the DPA. The contractual arrangements mentioned above can partially compensate for this weaker or missing legal protection. However, contractual arrangements cannot eliminate all risks (namely of government access abroad). You should be aware of these residual risks, even though the risk may be low in individual cases, and we take further measures (e.g., pseudonymization or anonymization) to minimize it.

Please also note that data exchanged via the Internet is often routed via third countries. Your data may therefore end up abroad even if the sender and recipient are in the same country.

8 How long do we process your data?

We process your data for as long as our processing purposes, the legal retention periods and our legitimate interests of processing for documentation and evidence purposes require it or storage is technically necessary. You will find further information on the respective storage and processing periods for the individual data categories in section 3 and for the cookie categories in section 11. If there are no legal or contractual obligations to the contrary, we will delete or anonymize your data after the storage or processing period has expired as part of our normal processes.

9 How do we protect your data?

We take appropriate security measures to maintain the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your personal data, to protect it against unauthorized or unlawful processing, and to protect it against the risks of loss, accidental alteration, unauthorized disclosure or access.

10 What rights do you have?

Under certain circumstances, applicable data protection law grants you the right to object to the processing of your data, in particular that for direct marketing purposes, profiling for direct marketing purposes and other legitimate interests in the processing.

To help you control the processing of your personal data, you also have the following rights in connection with our data processing, depending on applicable data protection law:

The right to request information from us as to whether we are processing data about you and, if so, what data we are processing;
The right to have us correct data if it is inaccurate;
The right to request that we delete data;
The right to request that we provide certain personal data in a commonly used electronic format or transfer it to another controller;
The right to withdraw consent, insofar as our processing is based on your consent;
The right to obtain, on request, further information necessary for the exercise of these rights.

If you wish to exercise the above rights vis-à-vis us (or vis-à-vis one of our group companies), please contact us in writing, at our premises or, unless otherwise stated or agreed, by e-mail; you will find our contact details in section 2. In order for us to be able to rule out any misuse, we must identify you (e.g. by means of a copy of your ID card, unless this is not possible otherwise).

You also have these rights with respect to other entities that cooperate with us on their own responsibility - please contact them directly if you wish to exercise rights in connection with their processing. You will find details of our important cooperation partners and service providers in section 6, further details in section 11.

Please note that conditions, exceptions or restrictions apply to these rights under the applicable data protection law (e.g. to protect third parties or trade secrets). We will inform you accordingly if necessary.

If you do not agree with our handling of your rights or data protection, please let us or our data protection officers (Section 2) know. You also have the right to complain to the data protection supervisory authority.

11 Do we use online tracking and online advertising techniques?

We use various techniques on our website that allow us and third parties we engage to recognize you when you use our website and, in some circumstances, to track you across multiple visits. In this section, we inform you about them.

In essence, this is so that we can distinguish accesses by you (via your system) from accesses by other users, so that we can ensure the functionality of the website and carry out evaluations and personalizations. In doing so, we do not want to infer your identity, even if we can do so to the extent that we or third parties engaged by us can identify you through a combination with registration data. Even without registration data, however, the technologies used are designed in such a way that you are recognized as an individual visitor each time you access the site, for example by our server (or the servers of third parties) assigning you or your browser a specific recognition number (so-called "cookie").

Other techniques may also be used to make you more or less likely to be recognized (i.e. distinguished from other users), such as "fingerprinting". Fingerprinting combines your IP address, the browser you use, screen resolution, language choice and other information your system tells each server), resulting in a more or less unique fingerprint. This can eliminate the need for cookies.

So whenever you access a server (for example, when using a website or an app, or because an email visibly or invisibly integrates an image), your visits can be "tracked" (traced). If we integrate offers from an advertising contractor or provider of an analytics tool on our website, they may track you in the same way, even if you cannot be identified in individual cases.

We use such techniques on our website and allow certain third parties to do so as well. You can program your browser to block, deceive, or delete existing cookies from certain cookies or alternative techniques. You can also enhance your browser with software that blocks tracking by certain third parties. You can find more information about this on the help pages of your browser (usually under the keyword "Privacy") or on the websites of the third parties that we list below.

A distinction is made between the following cookies (techniques with comparable functionalities such as fingerprinting are included here):

Necessary cookies: some cookies are necessary for the functioning of the website as such or certain functions. They ensure, for example, that you can switch between pages without losing information entered in a form. They also ensure that you remain logged in. These cookies only exist temporarily ("session cookies"). If you block them, the website may not work. Other cookies are necessary so that the server can store decisions or entries made by you beyond one session (i.e. one visit to the website), if you request this function (e.g. selected language, given consent, the function for an automatic login, etc.). These cookies have an expiration date of up to 24 months.
Performance cookies: in order to optimize our website and corresponding offers and to better adapt them to the needs of users, we use cookies to record and analyze the use of our website, possibly even beyond the session. We do this through the use of third-party analytics services. We have listed these below. Performance cookies also have an expiration date of up to 24 months. Details can be found on the websites of the third-party providers.
Marketing Cookies: We and our advertising partners have an interest in targeting advertising to those we want to target. We have listed our advertising partners below. For this purpose, we and our advertising partners - if you consent - also use cookies that can be used to record the content accessed or contracts concluded. This allows us and our advertising contractors to display advertisements that we think you will be interested in, on our website, but also on other websites that display advertisements from us or our advertising contractors. These cookies have an expiration period ranging from a few days to 12 months, depending on the situation. If you consent to the use of these cookies, you will be shown appropriate advertising. If you do not consent to these cookies, you will not see less advertising, but simply any other advertising.

In addition to marketing cookies, we use other techniques to control online advertising on other websites and thereby reduce wastage. For example, we may transmit the e-mail addresses of our users, customers and other persons to whom we want to display advertising to operators of advertising platforms (e.g. social media). If these persons are registered there with the same e-mail address (which the advertising platforms determine by matching), the operators show the advertising we have placed to these persons in a targeted manner. The operators do not receive personal e-mail addresses of persons who are not already known. In the case of known e-mail addresses, however, they learn that these persons are in contact with us and what content they have accessed.

Google Analytics

Google Ireland (based in Ireland) is the provider of the "Google Analytics" service and acts as our order processor. Google Ireland relies on Google LLC (based in the USA) as its order processor (both "Google") for this purpose.

Google uses performance cookies (see above) to track the behavior of visitors to our website (duration, frequency of pages viewed, geographical origin of access, etc.) and creates reports for us on the use of our website on this basis. We have configured the service so that the IP addresses of visitors are shortened by Google in Europe before being forwarded to the USA and thus cannot be traced. We have turned off the "Data Forwarding" and "Signals" settings. Although we can assume that the information we share with Google is not personal data for Google, it is possible that Google can draw conclusions about the identity of visitors from this data for its own purposes, create personal profiles and link this data to the Google accounts of these individuals. If you consent to the use of Google Analytics, you explicitly agree to such processing, which also includes the transfer of personal data (in particular usage data about the website and app, device information and individual IDs) to the USA and other countries. Information on the data protection of Google Analytics can be found here: Google Analytics Privacy Policy and if you have a Google account, you can find further information on processing by Google here Google Privacy Policy & Terms of Use.

12 What data do we process on our pages on social networks?

We may operate pages and other online presences ("fan pages", "channels", "profiles" etc.) on social networks and other platforms operated by third parties and collect the data about you described in section 3 and below there. We receive this data from you and the platforms when you come into contact with us via our online presence (e.g., when you communicate with us, comment on our content or visit our presence). At the same time, the platforms evaluate your use of our online presences and link this data with other data about you known to the platforms (e.g., about your behavior and preferences). They also process this data for their own purposes under their own responsibility, in particular for marketing and market research purposes (e.g. to personalize advertising) and to control their platforms (e.g. which content they show you).

We receive data about you when you communicate with us via online presences or view our content on the corresponding platforms, visit our online presences or are active in them (e.g. publish content, submit comments). These platforms also collect from you or about you, among other things, technical data, registration data, communication data, behavioral data and preference data (for the terms see section 3). These platforms regularly evaluate the way you interact with us, how you use our online presences, our content or other parts of the platform (what you look at, comment on, "like", forward, etc.) statistically and link this data with other information about you (e.g. information about age and gender and other demographic information). In this way, they also create profiles about you and statistics on the use of our online presences. They use this data and profiles to show you our or other advertisements and other content on the Platform in a personalized way and to control the behavior of the Platform, but also for market and user research and to provide us and other entities with information about you and the use of our online presence. We may partially control the evaluations that these platforms generate regarding the use of our Online Presence.

We process this data for the purposes described in section 4, in particular for communication, marketing purposes (including advertising on these platforms, see section 11) and market research. You will find information on the relevant legal basis in section 5. We may ourselves disseminate content published by you (e.g. comments on an announcement) (e.g. in our advertising on the platform or elsewhere). We or the operators of the platforms may also delete or restrict content from or to you in accordance with the usage guidelines (e.g. inappropriate comments).

For more information about the edits of the operators of the platforms, please refer to the privacy notices of the platforms. There you will also learn in which countries they process your data, which rights of access, deletion and other data subjects you have and how you can exercise these or obtain further information. We currently use the following platforms:

Here we operate the LinkedIn CryoSolutions page. The responsible party for operating the platform for users from Europe is LinkedIn Ireland Unlimited Company, Dublin 2, Ireland. Their privacy policy is available under LinkedIn Imprint. Page Insights collects statistics about what visitors do on our site (comment on posts, share content, etc.). It helps us understand how our site is used and how we can improve it. We only receive anonymous, aggregated data in the process.

Can this privacy policy be changed?

This Privacy Policy is not part of any contract with you. We may modify this privacy statement at any time. The version published on this website is the current version.

Last updated: August 2023