Data Privacy

Welcome to the TÜV SÜD website annualreport.tuvsud.com. We appreciate your interest in our company. Protection of the personal data you entrust to us is a priority for us, and we want you to feel safe and secure when you visit our website or use our online offers.

TÜV SÜD is a leading technical service organisation operating in the market segments of industry, products and transport. Its range of services embraces advisory services, expert reports and testing, inspection and certification services as well as training. Our objectives include reliability, safety, security and quality in addition to sustainability and profitability.

This privacy statement therefore explains the types of your personal data that are processed by TÜV SÜD when you use our offers and services. All processing of personal data on this website is carried out for the purposes set forth in this Data Privacy Statement.

If you are a natural person residing in the European Union (EU) or the European Economic Area (EEA), please take note of our EU/EEA privacy statement. In this context, please also take note of our further national or company-specific TÜV SÜD websites and their Legal Entity Privacy Statements.

1. Name and contact data of the controller

The data controller of this website is TÜV SÜD AG.

  • TÜV SÜD AG
  • Westendstr. 199
  • 80686 Munich, Germany

2. Contact data of the data protection officer

If you have further questions regarding the processing of your personal data, you can contact our data protection officer directly, who is also available in the case of requests for information, applications or complaints:

3. Processing of your personal data

We understand “personal data” to include all information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. When you access and use our website, we process your personal data in the following cases and for the following purposes:

3.1. Contacting TÜV SÜD AG for a specific purpose

TÜV SÜD AG will process your enquiry in the contact form, based on its legitimate interest in contacting you in order to respond to your specific enquiry and processing your concern in the best possible manner. This corresponds with your own interest in the processing of your concern. To do so, we need your email address, your first name, last name and title, and the name of your company and the corresponding country/region.

In specific cases, your enquiry may necessitate the involvement of another TÜV SÜD company. In this case, we might have to transfer your enquiry-related data to another legal entity of TÜV SÜD in order to process your enquiry in the best possible and customer-friendly manner.

In some cases, we may also use service providers that process data to handle your enquiry (e.g. for email marketing, software development or support with the processing of customer enquiries). In these specified cases, the information will be transferred to such service providers to enable further processing. To ensure your data privacy is protected, we carefully select and regularly audit our external service providers.

3.2. Contacting other TÜV SÜD companies for a specific purpose

Various points on our website offer the possibility to contact a specific TÜV SÜD company. You can contact TÜV SÜD companies via the following channels in particular: by telephone or email, by entering your data in a contact form, by requesting further information material or as part of a request for quotation.
In the above cases, the TÜV SÜD company receiving your enquiry or request will be the controller responsible for data processing. Wherever you are offered the possibility to contact a TÜV SÜD company, we will also provide you with transparent information about the controller in the specific case. In these cases, the data will only be processed by the receiving TÜV SÜD company once the data has been sent.

3.3. Links to social networks

Our website uses social media buttons. The buttons show the logos of the respective social network. Please note that these buttons are only icons with embedded links. They are not social plugins. When you click one of these buttons, you leave our website and thus our sphere of responsibility.

4. Data processing by cookies, plugins and cookie banners

A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. These cookies are set by us and referred to as first-party cookies. Depending on which of our websites you visit, we also use third-party cookies. These are cookies stored under a different domain from the one you are currently visiting. They are used in our advertising and marketing efforts and to help us understand your browsing behaviour on our website (e.g. which pages you access and how long you stay on the individual pages).

We use a cookie consent tool to manage our cookies and your cookie consent and its documentation. Below is a list of the types of cookies used on our websites (for a more detailed list see our Cookie Notice). We categorise cookies as follows

  • Strictly necessary cookies
  • Performance cookies

You can opt out of each entire cookie category (except strictly necessary cookies) by clicking the “Cookie Settings” button in the Cookie Notice of the website in question.

This page is available in various languages. The cookie consents requested by the cookie banner when you access our website apply to all cookies for all languages, and therefore all our national sites. Various national sites fall under the responsibility of different TÜV SÜD companies. Thus, by accepting cookies in our cookie banner you also give your consent to other legal entities of TÜV SÜD and TÜV SÜD AG. The Privacy Statements of the TÜV SÜD company that is the controller of the website can be found here.

4.1. Strictly necessary cookies

These cookies are necessary for the website to function. They cannot be deactivated in your systems. They are usually only set in response to actions taken by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy preferences, logging in or filling in forms. Most of these cookies are session cookies, which means they will be deleted automatically once you leave our website.

[+] We use cookies for the following actions:

  • Website display
    To display our website, we collect and save the Internet Protocol (IP) address assigned to your computer while you are browsing our website, in order to send the content accessed by you (e.g. texts, images and downloadable files etc.) to your computer. The website serves as the main presentation of TÜV SÜD to the outside world. Beyond the above, these cookies also help you navigate our website.
  • Protection from malfunctions and misuse, improvement of our website
    Our website processes personalised information on visitor behaviour, including your IP address and the times at which you access our website, for the purpose of identifying and tracking malfunctions or misuse of our online offers or telecommunication services and equipment and to improve website performance. This website uses services provided by Cloudflare (provider: Cloudflare, Inc., 101 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA). Cloudflare operates a content delivery network (CDN) and provides website security features (web application firewall). Data transfer between your browser and our servers takes place through Cloudflare’s infrastructure, where it is analysed to prevent attacks. Cloudflare uses cookies for this purpose to enable you to access our website. The use of Cloudflare is in the interests of ensuring secure use of our website and of preventing malicious attacks from the outside. For more detailed information, see Cloudflare’s privacy policy. https://www.cloudflare.com/de-de/privacypolicy/
  • Opt-in/opt-out cookies in the cookie banner
    To comply with our obligations to document your consent given or not given or your withdrawal of consent, we save your decision in the opt-in or opt-out cookie.

For more detailed information about the cookies used and their specific lifespans, see our Cookie Notice.

4.2. Performance cookies

These cookies allow us to count visitors to our website and traffic sources, enabling us to measure and improve the performance of our site for your benefit and enhance your visitor experience. By measuring these performance indicators, we learn which pages are the most and least popular and how visitors navigate the site. If you do not accept these cookies, we will not know when you have accessed our site and will not be able to monitor its performance.

[+] We use cookies for the following actions:

  • Matomo
    We use Matomo (formerly known as Piwik), a web analytics service that analyses users’ browsing behaviour. Matomo software is supplied by InnoCraft Ltd., 150 Willis St, 6011 Wellington, New Zealand.
    The statistics collected help us to improve our offer and make the website more interesting for you as a user. To this end, we process your truncated IP address and information about the pages of our website which you have accessed, about your browser and the time you have spent on our pages.
    We use Matomo with the “Automatically anonymize visitor IPs” setting. This means IP addresses are not stored in full. Instead, 2 bytes from the IP address are masked (e.g. 192.168.xxx.xxx), making it impossible to trace the truncated IP address back to the computer used to access the website.
    Users’ interest in the protection of their personal data is sufficiently taken into account through anonymisation of IP addresses, hosting on our company’s own servers, and the fact that we do not transfer any data to Matomo. These data will be erased as soon as they are no longer needed for the purposes for which we collected them or if you withdraw your consent.

5. Further recipients of personal data

Your personal data are passed on to law-enforcement authorities where this is necessary to clarify unlawful use of our services or for the purpose of asserting our legal rights. However, such a transfer will only take place if there is concrete evidence of illegal conduct or misuse. A transfer of personal data can also take place where this helps to enforce the terms and conditions of use or other agreements. We are also under legal obligation to provide information to certain public bodies on request. These include law-enforcement authorities, authorities prosecuting administrative offences punishable by a fine, and financial authorities.

6. Security

Personal data which you transfer through our website and the Internet are transferred in encrypted form. We use Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption technology for this purpose. TLS technology encrypts and protects your personal data during transfer via our website and the Internet. Our website can include links to other websites. If you use such links you will be directed automatically to another website. We assume no liability for the data privacy regulations of such websites. For your own security, you should carefully read the data protection regulations of the websites concerned.

7. Changes to this privacy statement

The applicable version of this privacy statement can always be accessed at annualreport.tuvsud.com.