PRIVACY & COOKIE POLICY

Merak attaches great importance to the protection of your personal data. This Privacy & Cookie Policy explains how we process your personal data and what rights you have in relation to your personal data.

This Privacy & Cookie Policy applies to the processing of personal data of our prospects and (former) customers, their possible employees, appointees and/or contact persons, the persons who visit our branches, websites or social media pages, as well as the persons who contact us in another way or communicate their personal data.

1. DATA CONTROLLER

N.V. Merak, Steenhoevestraat 6, 2800 Mechelen, Belgium, with company number 0417.226.296, and for certain local activities also her branches Merak B.V., Postbus 307, 1500 EH Zaandam, the Netherlands and Merak A.G., Buchserstrasse 34, 8108 Dällikon, Switzerland (hereinafter referred to as “Merak”, “we” or “us”), is responsible for the processing of your personal data. Merak hereby complies inter alia with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and the free movement of these data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (hereinafter referred to as the "GDPR").

You can contact us by mail to the abovementioned address of N.V. Merak, by telephone on +32 (0)15 28 40 60 or by e-mail at info@merak.be.

2. PERSONAL DATA THAT WE COLLECT

You can transfer your personal data to us when you contact us, when you visit our website (e.g. when you ﬁll in the contact form, when you register on MyMerak or when you go through the order process), when you use our products and services, or when you visit our social media pages. In some cases, we may also receive your personal data via our affiliated companies, third parties (e.g. data suppliers for the purposes of direct marketing or to ensure the accuracy of our data), or parties with whom you have a relationship (e.g. your employer).

We may for example process the following data: your name and ﬁrst name, address, company, contact details (e-mail, telephone, mobile phone, fax, ...), customer number, payment data, log-in data, communicated notiﬁcations, etc. Some data are also collected automatically via cookies and similar technologies when you visit our website. You can find more information about the use of cookies in article 7 of this Privacy & Cookie Policy.

3. PURPOSES OF THE PROCESSING

Your personal data may be processed inter alia:

to be able to provide you with Merak’s products or services and to guarantee their proper functioning;
to answer your question or request;
to provide you with information or to send you e-mails with offers that might be of interest to you;
in the context of customer and dispute management;
for the purpose of market research and the development of new services and activities;
in the context of a possible recruitment or vacancy;
to ensure the security of the website, to compile statistics or carry out analyses regarding the use of our website, and to keep the content of our website and social media pages optimal;
to combat fraud and infringement;
to comply with legal obligations or to respond to requests from competent authorities.

These processing activities are based inter alia on (i) your consent, (ii) the preparation, execution or termination of a contract, (iii) legal or regulatory provisions to which we are subject, and/or (iv) our legitimate interests (such as our interest to provide an excellent service, to maintain our customer relationship, to be able to offer a secure website, etc.).

Your personal data will be kept for a period necessary to achieve the intended purpose, or as long as we are legally obliged to do so or need the data in the context of a legal action.

Please note that our website may contain links or references to other sites that Merak does not control and to which this Privacy & Cookie Policy does not apply. We therefore advise you to carefully read the privacy policies of each website you visit, as these may differ from this Privacy & Cookie Policy.

4. COMMUNICATION TO THIRD PARTIES

Merak may share your personal data with possible legal successors and other entities within the group and with some of our contractual partners, for example to ensure the proper follow-up of your registration, order or request, to enable the provision of our services. If Merak transfers or is obliged to transfer your personal data to other companies, it will do so on the basis of your consent, unless we are required to do so by law or if we can rely on our legitimate interest in doing so (e.g. transfer to legal service providers in the event of a dispute). Should your personal data be transferred to companies outside the European Economic Area, this will only be done on the basis of adequacy decisions or appropriate safeguards.

5. YOUR RIGHTS

You have the right to access your personal data, the right to correction and deletion of these data, as well as the right to limit the procession of your personal data. In addition, you also have the right to data portability and the right to object to the processing of your data. However, Merak points out that the exercise of these rights is subject to certain legal conditions.

If the processing of your data is based on your consent, you can withdraw this consent at any time.

Furthermore, you always have the right to object to the processing of your personal data for direct marketing purposes.

You can exercise these rights – if applicable – by sending an e-mail to info@merak.be, via the ‘contact’ section on our website or by mail to the address of N.V. Merak (mentioned in article 1 of this Privacy & Cookie Policy). Merak reserves the right to request proof of your identity.

For complaints in connection to the processing of your personal data, you can always contact the supervisory authority in your country. E.g. for Belgium this is the Data Protection Authority (www.dataprotectionauthority.be).

6. SECURITY AND CONFIDENTIALITY

Merak has adopted appropriate technical and organisational security measures to prevent the destruction, loss, falsification, alteration, unauthorised access or accidental disclosure of personal data to third parties, as well as any other unauthorised processing of these data.

7. COOKIES

We use cookies when you visit our websites www.merakbe (including https://mymerak.merak.be), www.merak.nl (including https://mymerak.merak.be) and www.merak.ch. A cookie is a small text and number file that is stored in your browser or on your computer’s hard drive.

Upon your first visit to our websites you can set your cookie preferences via a selection menu. You can modify your preferences any time via our websites, and you can always deactivate the use of cookies via your browser settings. These settings can usually be found in the 'Options' or 'Preferences' menu of your web browser. To better understand these settings, the following links may be useful. If not, you should consult the 'Help' function in your web browser for more details.

Please note that rejecting cookies may cause the website to malfunction.

Below you will find more information about the different uses of cookies on our website.

Cookies for the proper functionality of the website

These cookies are necessary for our websites to function properly and to provide access to our services. They help us guarantee the safety of the websites, remember your preferences (e.g. language preferences) and allow your use of the website (e.g. remember the contents of your shopping cart). Therefore these cookies are always placed.

Name of the cookie	Provider	Expiration
language	merak.be, merak.nl and merak.ch	5 years
laravel_session	merak.be, merak.nl and merak.ch	1 day
__RequestVerificationToken	mymerak.merak.be and mymerak.merak.nl	Session
ASP.NET_SessionId	mymerak.merak.be and mymerak.merak.nl	Session
TS#	mymerak.merak.be and mymerak.merak.nl	Session
mymerak#lang mymeraknl#lang	mymerak.merak.be and mymerak.merak.nl	Session
cookiesmymerak	mymerak.merak.be and mymerak.merak.nl	29 days
f5avrbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb	mymerak.merak.be and mymerak.merak.nl	Session

Analytical cookies

These cookies are used to analyze the behavior of visitors of our website based on statistical data. This helps us to improve the functioning of our website, to understand the interests of our users and to measure the effectiveness of the content of our websites. Merak inter alia uses Google Analytics (for more information, see: https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites?hl=en) and Sitecore Engagement Analytics.

Name of the cookie	Provider	Expiration
_ga	merak.be, merak.nl and merak.ch mymerak.merak.be and mymerak.merak.nl	2 years
_gat	merak.be, merak.nl and merak.ch mymerak.merak.be and mymerak.merak.nl	1 day
_gid	merak.be, merak.nl and merak.ch mymerak.merak.be and mymerak.merak.nl	1 day
SC_ANALYTICS_GLOBAL_COOKIE	mymerak.merak.be and mymerak.merak.nl	10 years

Advertising cookies

Advertising cookies allow to track your internet behavior inside and outside our website and to adapt advertisements to your interests. Here third parties are used, in particular Facebook (to deliver a series of advertising products, such as real time bidding from third party advertisers), Google DoubleClick (to register and report the website user's actions after viewing or clicking one of the advertiser's ads with the purpose of measuring the efficacy of an ad and to present targeted ads to the user) and Google AdWords (to re-engage visitors that are likely to convert to customers based on the visitor's online behavior across websites).

Name of the cookie	Provider	Expiration
_fbp	merak.be and merak.nl	3 months
ads/ga-audiences	google.com	Session
pagead/1p-user-list/#	google.com	Session
IDE	doubleclick.net	1 year
test_cookie	doubleclick.net	1 day
fr	facebook.com	3 months
tr	facebook.com	Session

Social media cookies

Finally we would like to point out that at the bottom of our webpages links are included to our social media pages on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This implies that, when clicking on these links you are reverted to these social media channels, which can place cookies. We recommend to consult the terms of use and the privacy policy on the concerned social media pages to understand how the network handles your personal data.

8. MODIFICATIONS

Merak may amend this Privacy & Cookie policy from time to time. We therefore invite you to always consult the latest version of this policy on our website.

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