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Privacy Policy

INTRODUCTION

This privacy policy will provide a transparent look into the ways German American Events, LLC uses information collected through the use of our website.

Our goal is to ensure that methods of collecting information and the ways it is used are clear and understandable. If you have any questions, or would like to exercise your privacy rights, please see how to contact us below.

In order to improve and develop our website and technologies as well as our services to you it is possible that this privacy policy may change. We recommend that you read this data privacy statement carefully from time to time.

GERMAN AMERICAN EVENTS, LLC 

The website http://www.christkindlmarket.com provides information and services related to the operation of the Christkindlmarket Chicago, Aurora and Wrigleyville 2024. 

The Christkindlmarket 2024 is organized by German American Events, LLC (GAE, LLC) that is based in Chicago, IL. German American Events, LLC will be hereafter referred to as GAE, LLC or “we”, “us” or “our” in this privacy policy.

TYPE OF INFORMATION WE COLLECT

Through your use of this website, we may collect personal information about you (any information from which a unique person can be identified). In principle, we collect and use personal information of our users only to the extent it is required to provide a functioning website as well as for our content and services (the “Services”). The processing of personal information of our users takes place only to the extent permitted by law.

German American Events, LLC solely collects data from non-EU website visitors. German American Events, LLC does not track or save any personal information from EU-website visitors.

The information collected may fall into one of the below categories:

  • Identity Data: Data that can directly identify you; e.g. your first and last name
  • Contact Data: Data that can be used to contact you; e.g. billing address, delivery address, email address, telephone numbers
  • Financial Data: Details from card used to process a payment
  • Transaction Data: Details about products you have purchased and/or amount of payment
  • Technical Data: This includes information about the type of equipment, software, or tools you use to browse our site
  • Tracking Data: Information collected via cookies and other digital trackers that describe how you interact with our site
  • Usage Data: Data regarding your interactions with our site, including date and time of access, sites accessed before and after use of our site
  • Marketing and Communications Data: Your preferences in receiving marketing communications from us

HOW WE COLLECT INFORMATION

We collect the above information in a variety of ways. Collection points that result from a direct interaction with our site include when you:

  • purchase of any product on Christkindlmarket.com
  • fill out our contact form;
  • express your interest in becoming a supporter;
  • express your interest in becoming a vendor;
  • sign up for a newsletter; or
  • sign up for the Kinder Club.

We also collect information that results from an automated interaction occurring as you browse our site. This typically includes Technical, Tracking, and Usage Data. Such information is collected via Google AdWords, connected social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), and our site itself.

  • Your IP address: Your IP Address is automatically assigned to the computer that you are using by your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
    • An IP Address is identified and logged automatically in our server log files whenever a user visits our site, along with the time of the visit and the page(s) that were visited.
    • We use IP Addresses for purposes such as calculating site usage levels, helping diagnose server problems, and administering our site.
  • Cookies: A cookie is a piece of data stored on a site visitor’s hard drive to help us improve your access to our site and identify repeat visitors to our site.
    • Cookies can also enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our site.
    • Usage of a cookie is in no way linked to any personally identifiable information on our site.
    • Google Analytics uses cookies to collect information about the number of visitors to our site, the webpage that referred visitors to our site, and the pages that visitors view within our site.
    • The Google Analytics cookie remains on your computer after you close your browser; this type of cookie is known as a “persistent” cookie.

Please note that we treat IP Addresses, server log files and related information as non-personal information, except where we are required to do otherwise under applicable law.

HOW WE USE YOUR INFORMATION

We are committed to ensuring that we use your data only in the ways allowed by the law and by your personal preferences. Your information may be used in one of the following ways.

  • To perform the contract entered into with you via purchase (souvenir mug sales, gift box sales, merchandise sales, online marketplace product sales) [Section 6 Subsection 1 lit. b GDPR]
  • To provide you with information regarding our events, products, and/or services after obtaining your consent [Section 6 Subsection 1 lit. a GDPR]
  • To perform necessary functions of our legitimate business interests, as long as your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests [Section 6 Subsection 1 lit. f GDPR]
  • To improve our site experience, share aggregated information about usage and trends, and to inform internal business decisions (anonymous information only)

We respect your privacy and take protecting it seriously. We will not sell or rent any information, whether public or private, to any third partner without your express permission.

LEGAL BASIS WE RELY ON TO PROCESS YOUR INFORMATION

Please see the following chart to understand the legal basis that allows us to process your personal information.

Purpose Type of Data Used Legal Basis for Processing this Data
To process and deliver your online store order

·         Identity

·         Contact

·         Financial

·         Transaction

Performance of a contract with you

Necessary for our legitimate business interests

To deliver information to you via email lists (Kinder Club, general newsletter, etc.)

·         Identity

·         Contact

Your unambiguous consent
To communicate via email or phone in response to your inquiries (your email or telephoned request to any of our staff members)

·         Identity

·         Contact

Performance of a contract with you (when applicable)

Necessary for our legitimate business interests

To process and act upon your participation and/or winning in Sweepstakes

·         Identity

·         Contact

Performance of a contract with you (when applicable)

Your unambiguous consent

To reserve and book your table reservation space

·         Identity

·         Contact

·         Financial

·         Transaction

Performance of a contract with you
To engage qualified volunteers to help our events grow

·         Identity

·         Contact

Performance of a contract with you

Necessary for our legitimate business interests (to ensure all staff is qualified and has best interests of event in mind, to maintain a safe and welcoming environment)

To attract and retain high quality vendors

·         Identity

·         Contact

·         Transaction

Performance of a contract with you

Necessary for our legitimate business interests (to ensure vendors are highest quality)

To attract and retain high quality entertainment

·         Identity

·         Contact

Performance of a contract with you

Necessary for our legitimate business interests (to maintain a safe and welcoming environment)

In order to resolve legal claims or disputes involving you or us ·         All relevant categories depending on the nature of the allegation or claim Necessary to bring or defend a claim

WHEN DO WE DISCLOSE YOUR INFORMATION

We respect your privacy and take protecting it seriously. We will not sell or rent any information, whether public or private, to any third partner without your express permission.

Within German American Events LLC: We may share and process information internally within the German American Events LLC and with our parents, subsidiaries and affiliates. Our personnel may have access to your information as needed to provide and operate the Services in the normal course of business. This includes information regarding your use and interaction with the Services.

List Partners: German American Events LLC engages certain third-party list affiliates on a strategic basis to provide information and resources to members and non-members alike. We carefully manage our list partners and control access to our information to ensure we only provide resources we believe could be useful to you. Depending on the circumstances, we may obtain your consent to certain information sharing, or may share your information where we have a legitimate interest to do so.

Service Providers: We work with various organizations and individuals to help provide the Services to you (“Service Providers”), such as website and data hosting companies and companies providing analytics information, like Google Analytics. We need to engage such third-party Service Providers to help us operate, provide, and market the Services. These third parties have only limited access to your information and may use your information only to perform these tasks on our behalf. Information we share to our Service Providers may include both information you provide to us and information we collect about you, including personal information and information from data collection tools like cookies, web beacons, and log files.

We take reasonable steps to ensure that our Service Providers are obligated to reasonably protect your information on our behalf. If we become aware that a Service Provider is using or disclosing information improperly, we will take commercially reasonable steps to end or correct such improper use or disclosure.

We share personal information with our Service Providers on the legal basis of our legitimate interests in providing you with the Services. Our engagement of Service Providers is often necessary for us to provide the Services to you, particularly where such companies play important roles like helping us keep our Services operating and secure. In some other cases, these service providers aren’t strictly necessary for us to provide the Services, but help us make it better, like by helping us conduct research into how we could better serve our users. In these latter cases, we have a legitimate interest in working with service providers to make our Services

Business Transactions: We may purchase other businesses or their assets, sell our business assets, or be involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets. Your information, including personal information, may be among assets sold or transferred as part of a business transaction. In some cases, we may choose to buy or sell assets. Such transactions may be necessary and in our legitimate interests, particularly our interest in making decisions that enables our organization to develop over the long term.

Safety and Lawful Requests: We may be required to disclose our users information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We generally do not disclose our users’ information unless we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. We may share your information when we believe it is necessary to comply with applicable laws, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Services or using our name, or to protect the safety of any person. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents, or government agencies. Nothing in this policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you may have to a third party’s, including a government’s, request to disclose your information.

Aggregated Non-Personal Information: We may disclose aggregated, non-personal information received from providing the Services, including information that does not identify any individual, without restriction. We may share demographic information with business partners, but it will be aggregated and de-personalized, so that personal information is not revealed.

DELETION OF YOUR DATA

Personal information will be deleted or anonymized as soon as the purpose for storing such data no longer applies. Data may be stored longer than this period if prescribed by law or other provisions the data subject is subject to.

MARKETING CHOICES

We do not use any site statistics or tracking to determine which products we will market to you on the Christkindlmarket website. All direct marketing efforts will result from unambiguous consent given while you interact with our site or from contracts you have performed with us. If you feel that you have received a message in error, please contact us, we are happy to update your preferences at any time.

We do work with third-party advertising services on external web pages. These third parties may use cookies or other methods of tracking to serve you our advertisement. Please see section “Third-Party Links” for additional information.

CHILDREN’S ONLINE PRIVACY PROTECTION ACT

As per the requirements of COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), we do not collect any information from anyone under 13 years of age. Our website, products, and services are all directed to people who are at least 13 years old or older. If we become aware that we have collected personal information from a child under the age of 13, we will delete that information from our records.

THIRD-PARTY COMPANIES AND LINKS

When necessary to perform the purpose of the data collection, we may share information with third-party companies. These include:

  • Mailchimp for newsletter distribution
  • SquareUp for online purchases payments
  • Gebrueder Weiss, ShipBob, UPS for shipping
  • Google Analytics for website optimization
  • WordPress.com for website operation
  • WooCommerce for e-commerce platform
  • Eventbrite for event registration and ticket purchase

Occasionally, at our discretion, we may share links to third parties on our website. We may also advertise on third-party sites. These third-party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.

Known third party sites include:

  • Google Maps – This website uses the web mapping service Google Maps of Google Inc. By using this site you give your consent to the collection and processing of data potentially collected in an automated fashion by Google and its representatives. Terms of use of Google Maps.
  • YouTube – embedded YouTube videos on our website are stored on the servers of the provider YouTube. Embedding of the videos is carried out with the activated option for advanced data privacy settings. If you play these videos, YouTube cookies and DoubleClick cookies are stored on your computer, and data is potentially transmitted to Google Inc. This includes IP address and cookie ID, the specific address of our accessed page, system date and time of access, your browser ID. Full terms of use for YouTube can be found here.
  • Christkindlmarket vendors’ websites for online purchases.

Your Rights & Choices Regarding Your Information

We seek to ensure all individuals are provided with the rights mandated by their governing jurisdiction. Not all of the rights discussed in this privacy policy will apply to each individual data subject and may not apply to you depending upon your jurisdiction.

You may benefit from a number of rights in relation to your information that we process. Some rights apply only in certain limited cases, depending on your location. If you would like to manage, change, limit, or delete your personal information, you can do so by contacting us. Upon request, we will provide you with information about whether we hold any of your personal information.  In certain cases where we process your information, you may also have a right to restrict or limit the ways in which we use your personal information. In certain circumstances, you also have the right to request the deletion of your personal information, and to obtain a copy of your personal information in an easily accessible format.

To the extent that such rights are mandated by the laws applicable to the individual data subject, such as all data subjects residing in the European Union (“EU”), the following rights may apply:

  • the right to access (GDPR, Article 15);
  • the right to rectification (GDPR, Article 16);
  • the right to erasure (GDPR, Article 17);
  • the right to restrict processing (GDPR, Articles 18);
  • the right of object (GDPR, Article 21);
  • and if applicable, the right to data portability (GDPR, Article 20).

You may also have a right to lodge a complaint with an appropriate data privacy regulatory authority (GDPR, Article 77).

If we process your information based on our legitimate interests as explained in this privacy policy, or in the public interest, you can object to this processing in certain circumstances. In such cases, we will cease processing your information unless we have compelling legitimate grounds to continue processing or where it is needed for legal reasons. Where we use your data for direct marketing purposes, you can always object using the unsubscribe link in such communications or changing your account settings.

Where you have provided consent to certain data processing, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time by contacting us at: info@christkindlmarket.com. A withdrawal of consent will not affect the validity of our use of your personal information up until the point you have withdrawn your consent.

If you no longer wish to use the services or receive service-related messages (except for legally required notices), then you may contact us using the information above.

UPDATING THIS POLICY

In the future, we may need to change this privacy statement. All changes will be made here so that you will always know what information we gather, how we might use that information and whether we will disclose it to anyone. This statement was last updated on April 1, 2024.

CONTACT US

Feel free to contact us at any time if you have questions about your information or about our privacy policy.

This site is managed by:

German American Events, LLC (GAE, LLC)

150 North Michigan Avenue, 35th Floor

Chicago, IL 60601, USA,

a subsidiary of the German American Chamber of Commerce of the Midwest, Inc. Please click here for their full privacy policy

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