ONLINE PRIVACY GUIDELINES
We respect your privacy. We would like to provide you with full and comprehensive information on the principles and procedures we have put in place to protect your privacy on the Internet, so that you do not need to be concerned about how we treat the personal information you entrust us with online. The server(s) through which this site is provided may not be located in the country from which you have accessed this site; however, we shall only collect, process and use personal information in accordance with these guidelines.
While we do not intend to change our guidelines very frequently, we nevertheless recommend that you take a look at them whenever you visit our site, so that you can be sure that you have read and agreed to our most recent guidelines. We shall not make any retrospective changes, unless we are legally obliged to do so.
The content of our site may include, among other interesting things, entertainment, games, recipes, surveys, lotteries and competitions, as well as adverts and the option to make online purchases. We may also provide information about our company and our products, and offer opportunities to apply for jobs. We hope that you like our site and that you will come back and visit it regularly!
Please take a moment to read through these guidelines. The following short summary is intended to help you do this.
- We shall use your personal information in order to answer your queries or to be able to provide you with a better service. We shall not pass your personal information to third parties without your prior consent.
- We shall only send you materials which you have indicated you wish to receive and shall respect your wishes if you no longer wish to receive information.
- We use cookies and web beacons in order to identify the topics of interest to visitors to our website, to improve its operation and to be able to offer personalised content.
- We shall use secure procedures to protect your data and shall take particular care to protect your credit card information when shopping with us online.
- We reserve the right to use or divulge information under certain circumstances, e.g. enquiries by a court of law or in order to protect our property.
WHEN IS PERSONAL INFORMATION COLLECTED?
We collect personal data, by which a subject can be identified, such as names, addresses, email addresses, information on hobbies or activities, demographic information (age, sex, etc.), information on tastes or preferences, etc., only where this has been voluntarily provided by a visitor. Visitors may choose whether or not they wish to supply personal information in order to take part in a competition, to receive information or to make comments, to register for a loyalty scheme or a chat room or to place an order. We make a particular effort to indicate to children that they require their parents’ permission before they can supply information or order anything online and would urge parents to supervise their children’s online activities. We ask children their age, so that we can offer them age-appropriate content and meet certain legal requirements. If we establish that we are dealing with children, we ask for the name of one of their parents and endeavour to contact them, in order to find out whether the child really does have permission to provide us with the information in question. We have special guidelines for children. If you do not see a “Special pointers for parent” link on our home page, this means that we do not knowingly collect any information from children on the site in question.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE INFORMATION?
Whether or not you give us personal information is up to you, our visitor. We collect verifiable personal information in order to allow you to take part in competitions and to inform you of the results, to send you updates and news by e-mail, to reply to your questions or comments, to register you for certain features and send you brochures and other information on our products and company. We request that visitors who provide their e-mail address let us know whether they wish to receive more extensive information or updates from our site. Only those indicating that they wish to be contacted will be subsequently contacted by e-mail or other means. In addition, we may also ask whether you would like to receive information on other products from our group of companies. Information will only be sent to visitors who expressly state that they wish to receive it. Moreover, we shall also give visitors the option to withdraw at any time, should they no longer wish to receive e-mails or any other information from us.
Personal data will only be used by ourselves, our representatives or business partners who assist us in producing this site and its contents, as well as the products and services made available on the site. Your data will be used only to deal with your queries (for example, in relation to online orders or to offer lotteries or advertisements) and to provide you with a better service, in line with these guidelines. In addition, we may also occasionally ask whether information may be passed on to reliable third parties. On any occasion when information is gathered, we will inform you whether we intend to transmit the same to third parties, indicate the business types in the area of data being collected, describe the information which we intend to pass on (such as your postal or e-mail address) and shall only pass on the data if you agree to this. We only pass on personal data to persons/ institutions, who/which have declared that they will comply with data-protection guidelines.
HOW ARE “COOKIES” AND “WEB BEACONS” USED?
WHAT ARE COOKIES?
“Cookies” are files which are sent from a website to your computer while you are visiting the site. These files include information which our site uses to record important information, which will make the site more efficient and useful for you when you visit it. Our sites use cookies for a variety of reasons. We use cookie technology and IP addresses in order to receive information other than personal data from online visitors and to offer registered visitors the best possible online experience, tailored to their specific requirements.
HOW ARE COOKIES USED?
Visitors to our site use a variety of web browsers and computers. In order to make your visit as straightforward as possible with the technology you use, we automatically record information about the browser type used by visitors (e.g. Internet Explorer, Netscape), their operating system (e.g. Windows, Macintosh) and the domain name of their Internet Service Provider. We also record the total number of visitors as an overall value, in order to update and improve our site. During this process, no personal information is collected which could be used to identify individuals. Using these data, we are able to establish whether the majority of visitors prefer certain features or areas to others, enabling us to keep our site up to date and interesting for the majority of visitors. We also use cookies to help us to prevent children from accessing certain areas or features which are intended only for adults or adolescents in a higher age group.
HOW ARE COOKIES USED TO TAILOR YOUR VISIT TO OUR SITE TO YOUR SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS?
Cookie technology helps us to offer content which is precisely tailored to our visitors’ interests, making it easier for our visitors to order products, take part in lotteries and competitions and for us to offer other functions on our site. Sites offering online shopping use cookies in order to record and process the goods in your shopping basket. In such cases, we may, in certain circumstances, link personal data to a cookie file.
WHAT HAPPENS IF I DON’T WANT ANY COOKIES?
The cookies we use on this site have been designed to improve your online experience with us. You can change the settings on your computer so that you are warned every time a cookie is sent, or you can set your browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator) to block all cookies. (See your browser’s help menu for information on how to change or update your cookie settings.) If you decide to block all cookies, you may be unable to access certain of the above features.
WHAT ARE WEB BEACONS AND HOW ARE THEY USED?
Some of our web pages and e-mail updates may contain electronic images, known as web beacons, which are sometimes called single-pixel GIF, clear GIF or pixel tags. With your help we can count the number of visitors who have accessed our website. Web beacons are incorporated into promotional e-mails/newsletters, in order to count how many subscribers have read them. Web beacons make it possible to compile statistical information on the activities and topics of greatest interest to our customers, in order to provide them with more personalised content. They are not used to access personal data without your prior consent.
HOW ABOUT CHAT ROOMS, BULLETIN BOARDS AND OTHER INTERACTIVE FORUMS?
In order to entertain our visitors, we may offer chat rooms, bulletin boards or other interactive forums, where visitors can post comments or provide information. If there is a chat room or bulletin board on this site, please read our chat room rules before entering it, as well as our general business conditions, which are binding on you. Our chat room rules contain age-related and other restrictions on participation, and requirements such as parental consent for children. As you know, anything you send online can be seen anywhere in the worldwide. We do not provide any guarantees or enter into any undertakings in relation to information which you voluntarily submit.
IS CREDIT CARD AND OTHER INFORMATION SENT IN THE COURSE OF TRANSACTIONS SECURE?
We go to great lengths to ensure the security of your transactions. We use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to communicate with your browser software when you order online from us and transmit credit card or similar information online as part of this process. SSL is the industry-standard security protocol, which makes it extremely difficult for third parties to intercept any credit card/transaction/order information you send us when placing your order. No additional measures are taken to encrypt or protect information transmitted to or by us. We take precautionary measures to protect your credit card details held on our internal systems.
HOW IS PERSONAL INFORMATION PROTECTED?
We have put safeguards in place to verify that our internal procedures meet our high data-protection standards. Moreover, we shall do everything within our power to ensure that third parties, working with us as our representatives to provide this site and its contents and to process your orders and queries, agree to comply with the protection of any personal information to which they must have access in order to service our site and our visitors.
WHAT ABOUT LINKS TO OTHER SITES?
We may offer links to sites external to the Mars Group. However, we try to refer only to sites which share our values. You should always review the data-protection principles of any site to which there is a link, in order to obtain information on their approach to collecting information, e.g. their use of cookies. We are not responsible for the content of, or the principles applied to, information collected by sites belonging to other companies. Whenever you visit another site, you should read the data-protection and other guidelines.
IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE I SHOULD KNOW?
We reserve the right to use, retain or divulge information in the form required to comply with laws, regulations or legal requirements, to follow up customer complaints or to pursue possible legal violations, in order to protect the integrity of the site, to answer your queries or to assist with legal investigations.
WHAT SHOULD I DO IF I HAVE QUESTIONS, WOULD LIKE TO ACCESS INFORMATION, WOULD LIKE TO UPDATE OR DELETE INFORMATION OR DO NOT WISH TO RECEIVE ANY FURTHER INFORMATION?
If you would like US to access, update, amend or delete any information we may have about you (subject to applicable legal exceptions), or you do not wish to receive any further information from us, or if you have any questions on our data protection principles, please address your requests to the data protection coordinator (Privacy Coordinator) at Privacy.Policy@Effem.com.
You may also contact our Global Corporate Privacy Coordinator in writing, by fax or by telephone at the following address and numbers:
Privacy Coordinator / Consumer Affairs
Mars, Inc.
800 High Street
Hackettstown, N.J. 07840, USA
Phone: 1-908-852-1000
Fax: 1-908-850-2624
Updated: 20 January 2003