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Terms of contract

22.07.2024

If you would like to use the freely available digital services of Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH, you can conclude a contract with advertising with us under the following conditions:

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Terms of contract

  1. By clicking the button "I agree" a usage contract ("contract with advertising") is concluded between you and us, Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH:

    We provide you with journalistic content together with personalized advertising, advertising tracking, usage analysis and external multimedia content. For this purpose, we enable you to use the freely available content of SZ.de (and insofar as you do not wish to access SZ Plus articles).

    For this purpose, you also provide certain personal data and allow its processing (information such as cookies, device identifier, IP address, etc.) for the following purposes:

  2. We process your data provided for the contract with advertising based for the fulfillment of the contract as shown in these data protection notices. You may submit data protection declarations (objection) for this data processing at any time in accordance with § 327q Abs.1 BGB in the footer of www.sz.de.

  3. You are generally entitled to a right of withdrawal for distance contracts (§ 356 BGB).

  4. If you object to the data processing - this is possible in the footer of www.sz.de under readers without subscription the link "Objection" - we will terminate the contract with advertising without notice, as the continuation is economically unreasonable for us due to the omitted advertising opportunities. With the termination, the use of SZ.de ceases. You can make use of our SZ Plus subscriptions at any time or conclude a contract with advertising again.

  5. You may terminate the contract with advertising at any time with immediate effect by selecting the link "Cancel contract with advertising" in the footer of www.sz.de under Readers without subscription and canceling on the confirmation page that opens. This will result in the immediate termination of the contract with advertising. Upon termination, the use of SZ.de will cease. You can take advantage of our SZ Plus subscriptions at any time or conclude a contract with advertising again.

  6. If you want to use SZ.de on different devices, you must conclude a contract with advertising for each device. Also for an objection to the data processing and for the termination it is necessary that you do this with each device. It is not possible for us to identify you across devices, so we can neither assign the conclusion of contracts nor their termination to you based on the devices you use.

  7. The use of programs that ensure that advertising contained on web pages is not displayed to the viewer (adblocker or advertising filters) violates these contractual conditions after the conclusion of the contract with advertising and entitles us to terminate the contract without notice.

  8. The law of the Federal Republic of Germany shall apply exclusively to legal relationships between you and us. Should individual provisions of these Terms of Use be invalid, this shall not affect the remainder of the contract with Advertising.

These contract conditions can be retrieved and printed out by you above under "save as pdf" or collected from our SZ-Service Zentrum München, Fürstenfelder Str. 7, 80331 Munich, Germany, Mon. to Thurs. 10 am to 6 pm, Fri. 10 am to 4 pm.

Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH, Hultschiner Str. 8, D- 81677 München, Germany
Geschäftsführer: Dr. Christian Wegner (Vors.), Johannes Hauner, Dr. Karl Ulrich, Amtsgericht München HRB 73315.

Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH, Hultschiner Str. 8, D- 81677 München, Germany
Geschäftsführer: Johannes Hauner, Amtsgericht München HRB 129987.

Phone: +49 89 2183-0
Email: kontakt@sz.de
Email-privacy: datenschutz@sz.de

Usage analysis and product optimization

In order to further develop and improve our products, we require usage analysis. This evaluates visitor flows and includes information on behavior, interests or demographic information on visitors, such as age or gender, as pseudonymous values. This allows us to identify when our digital offerings are most frequently used, which functions are reused, and which areas require optimization. For these purposes, profiles, i.e. data summarized to a usage process, are created and information is stored in and read from a browser or terminal device.

The information collected includes, in particular, websites visited and elements used there as well as technical information such as the browser used, the computer system used and information on usage times. IP addresses are also stored.

We use an IP masking procedure (i.e. pseudonymization by shortening the IP address) to protect the data. In general, the data stored in the context of usage analysis, A/B testing of different versions of our online offers or its components and optimization is not clear data from you (such as e-mail addresses or names), but pseudonyms, so that neither we nor the providers of the software used, who act for us as processors, know your actual identity.

Personalized content and marketing

To help you find relevant information more quickly and reliably when using our digital offerings, we offer you the option of personalizing our digital offerings for yourself - for example, by marking certain articles or topics as bookmarked via "Meine SZ. We can also display suitable information to you via your interests. We advertise our products and also offer our services on third-party websites. Of course, these should fit your needs. For this purpose, we use your interests, which we have obtained through our usage analysis. In doing so, we can also determine whether our advertising is effective and what success it has.

Third party advertising (IAB)

Like our print products, our digital products are subject to the requirements of credible and professional quality journalism. That costs money, which is why we offer selected third parties advertising space in our digital products for usage-based advertising - similar to ads in the print products. To play out the content, the respective advertising partner uses its own technologies and cookies. With the help of the insights gained from your usage, ads and content can be played out in a more targeted manner, the user-friendliness of the digital offerings can be improved, and new products can be developed. You can find an up-to-date overview of these third parties in the privacy settings. We are also keen to limit the number of third parties. These third parties are subject to constant review, so it may be that third parties are added or dropped. However, you have an up-to-date overview at all times. The way in which the third parties are selected and their use of advertising space for personalized ads does not change.

In order to manage this type of advertising in a privacy-compliant manner, we use the Transparency and Consent Framework of the IAB Europe 2.2. This set of rules of the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe ("IAB Europe"), an industry association for online marketing, defines and monitors the privacy-compliant playout of advertising.

Purposes
IAB Europe has defined the following processing purposes:

Store and/or access information on a device

Cookies, device or similar online identifiers (e.g. login-based identifiers, randomly assigned identifiers, network based identifiers) together with other information (e.g. browser type and information, language, screen size, supported technologies etc.) can be stored or read on your device to recognise it each time it connects to an app or to a website, for one or several of the purposes presented here.

Illustration(s)
Most purposes explained in this notice rely on the storage or accessing of information from your device when you use an app or visit a website. For example, a vendor or publisher might need to store a cookie on your device during your first visit on a website, to be able to recognise your device during your next visits (by accessing this cookie each time).

Use limited data to select advertising

Advertising presented to you on this service can be based on limited data, such as the website or app you are using, your non-precise location, your device type or which content you are (or have been) interacting with (for example, to limit the number of times an ad is presented to you).

Illustration(s)

  • A car manufacturer wants to promote its electric vehicles to environmentally conscious users living in the city after office hours. The advertising is presented on a page with related content (such as an article on climate change actions) after 6:30 p.m. to users whose non-precise location suggests that they are in an urban zone.
  • A large producer of watercolour paints wants to carry out an online advertising campaign for its latest watercolour range, diversifying its audience to reach as many amateur and professional artists as possible and avoiding showing the ad next to mismatched content (for instance, articles about how to paint your house). The number of times that the ad has been presented to you is detected and limited, to avoid presenting it too often.

Create profiles for personalised advertising

Information about your activity on this service (such as forms you submit, content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (for example, information from your previous activity on this service and other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (that might include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present advertising that appears more relevant based on your possible interests by this and other entities.

Illustration(s)

  • If you read several articles about the best bike accessories to buy, this information could be used to create a profile about your interest in bike accessories. Such a profile may be used or improved later on, on the same or a different website or app to present you with advertising for a particular bike accessory brand. If you also look at a configurator for a vehicle on a luxury car manufacturer website, this information could be combined with your interest in bikes to refine your profile and make an assumption that you are interested in luxury cycling gear.
  • An apparel company wishes to promote its new line of high-end baby clothes. It gets in touch with an agency that has a network of clients with high income customers (such as high-end supermarkets) and asks the agency to create profiles of young parents or couples who can be assumed to be wealthy and to have a new child, so that these can later be used to present advertising within partner apps based on those profiles.

Use profiles to select personalised advertising

Advertising presented to you on this service can be based on your advertising profiles, which can reflect your activity on this service or other websites or apps (like the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects.

Illustrations(s)

  • An online retailer wants to advertise a limited sale on running shoes. It wants to target advertising to users who previously looked at running shoes on its mobile app. Tracking technologies might be used to recognise that you have previously used the mobile app to consult running shoes, in order to present you with the corresponding advertisement on the app.
  • A profile created for personalised advertising in relation to a person having searched for bike accessories on a website can be used to present the relevant advertisement for bike accessories on a mobile app of another organisation.

Create profiles to personalise content

Information about your activity on this service (for instance, forms you submit, non-advertising content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (such as your previous activity on this service or other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (which might for example include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present content that appears more relevant based on your possible interests, such as by adapting the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find content that matches your interests.

Illustration(s)

  • You read several articles on how to build a treehouse on a social media platform. This information might be added to a profile to mark your interest in content related to outdoors as well as do-it-yourself guides (with the objective of allowing the personalisation of content, so that for example you are presented with more blog posts and articles on treehouses and wood cabins in the future).
  • You have viewed three videos on space exploration across different TV apps. An unrelated news platform with which you have had no contact builds a profile based on that viewing behaviour, marking space exploration as a topic of possible interest for other videos.

Use profiles to select personalised content

Content presented to you on this service can be based on your content personalisation profiles, which can reflect your activity on this or other services (for instance, the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects, such as by adapting the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find (non-advertising) content that matches your interests.

Illustration(s)

  • You read articles on vegetarian food on a social media platform and then use the cooking app of an unrelated company. The profile built about you on the social media platform will be used to present you vegetarian recipes on the welcome screen of the cooking app.
  • You have viewed three videos about rowing across different websites. An unrelated video sharing platform will recommend five other videos on rowing that may be of interest to you when you use your TV app, based on a profile built about you when you visited those different websites to watch online videos.

Measure advertising performance

Information regarding which advertising is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used to determine how well an advert has worked for you or other users and whether the goals of the advertising were reached. For instance, whether you saw an ad, whether you clicked on it, whether it led you to buy a product or visit a website, etc. This is very helpful to understand the relevance of advertising campaigns.

Illustration(s)e

  • You have clicked on an advertisement about a “black Friday” discount by an online shop on the website of a publisher and purchased a product. Your click will be linked to this purchase. Your interaction and that of other users will be measured to know how many clicks on the ad led to a purchase.
  • You are one of very few to have clicked on an advertisement about an “international appreciation day” discount by an online gift shop within the app of a publisher. The publisher wants to have reports to understand how often a specific ad placement within the app, and notably the “international appreciation day” ad, has been viewed or clicked by you and other users, in order to help the publisher and its partners (such as agencies) optimise ad placements.

Measure content performance

Information regarding which content is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used to determine whether the (non-advertising) content e.g. reached its intended audience and matched your interests. For instance, whether you read an article, watch a video, listen to a podcast or look at a product description, how long you spent on this service and the web pages you visit etc. This is very helpful to understand the relevance of (non-advertising) content that is shown to you.

Illustration(s)

  • You have read a blog post about hiking on a mobile app of a publisher and followed a link to a recommended and related post. Your interactions will be recorded as showing that the initial hiking post was useful to you and that it was successful in interesting you in the related post. This will be measured to know whether to produce more posts on hiking in the future and where to place them on the home screen of the mobile app.
  • You were presented a video on fashion trends, but you and several other users stopped watching after 30 seconds. This information is then used to evaluate the right length of future videos on fashion trends.

Understand audiences through statistics or combinations of data from different sources

Reports can be generated based on the combination of data sets (like user profiles, statistics, market research, analytics data) regarding your interactions and those of other users with advertising or (non-advertising) content to identify common characteristics (for instance, to determine which target audiences are more receptive to an ad campaign or to certain contents).

Illustration(s)

  • The owner of an online bookstore wants commercial reporting showing the proportion of visitors who consulted and left its site without buying, or consulted and bought the last celebrity autobiography of the month, as well as the average age and the male/female distribution of each category. Data relating to your navigation on its site and to your personal characteristics is then used and combined with other such data to produce these statistics.
  • An advertiser wants to better understand the type of audience interacting with its adverts. It calls upon a research institute to compare the characteristics of users who interacted with the ad with typical attributes of users of similar platforms, across different devices. This comparison reveals to the advertiser that its ad audience is mainly accessing the adverts through mobile devices and is likely in the 45-60 age range.

Develop and improve services

Information about your activity on this service, such as your interaction with ads or content, can be very helpful to improve products and services and to build new products and services based on user interactions, the type of audience, etc. This specific purpose does not include the development or improvement of user profiles and identifiers.

Illustration(s)

  • A technology platform working with a social media provider notices a growth in mobile app users, and sees based on their profiles that many of them are connecting through mobile connections. It uses a new technology to deliver ads that are formatted for mobile devices and that are low-bandwidth, to improve their performance.
  • An advertiser is looking for a way to display ads on a new type of consumer device. It collects information regarding the way users interact with this new kind of device to determine whether it can build a new mechanism for displaying advertising on this type of device.

Use limited data to select content

Content presented to you on this service can be based on limited data, such as the website or app you are using, your non-precise location, your device type, or which content you are (or have been) interacting with (for example, to limit the number of times a video or an article is presented to you).

Illustration(s)

  • A travel magazine has published an article on its website about the new online courses proposed by a language school, to improve travelling experiences abroad. The school’s blog posts are inserted directly at the bottom of the page, and selected on the basis of your non-precise location (for instance, blog posts explaining the course curriculum for different languages than the language of the country you are situated in).
  • A sports news mobile app has started a new section of articles covering the most recent football games. Each article includes videos hosted by a separate streaming platform showcasing the highlights of each match. If you fast-forward a video, this information may be used to select a shorter video to play next.

Copyright

  1. The use of our publications, in particular the journalistic content, is permitted exclusively for personal, non-commercial purposes, unless the user has applied for the right to commercial use on an individual basis when registering. Passing on the content to third parties is prohibited, regardless of the purpose and type of passing on. Any further use is prohibited without the express consent of the publisher, irrespective of any possible protection of this content under the German Copyright Act (UrhG) and irrespective of the scope of such legal protection. In particular, it is not permitted to use our publications, in whole or in part, for the purpose of producing, supporting, improving or operating other news and information offerings or for other (commercial) purposes a) using technical aids such as crawlers, spiders, by means of scraping or text and data mining; b) to edit or otherwise change, translate, reformulate, shorten or summarize with the help of artificial intelligence programs; or c) to publish or make available to defined groups of persons or individual third parties, whether in their original form or in edited, translated, reformulated, abridged, expanded or summarized form, regardless of the means of transmission (online or otherwise) in any form. Actions that are mandatorily permitted under copyright law remain unaffected by the above provisions. Uses that are not permitted under copyright law are not permitted by the above provisions, even in individual cases. Furthermore, it is not permitted to use our publications for the training, development and/or improvement of (generative) AI systems. In particular, the publisher expressly reserves the right to text and data mining within the meaning of Section 44b UrhG.

  2. Further rights, in particular the right to commercial use of journalistic content (e.g. republication) as well as transferable rights of use, media monitoring and analysis, multi-user licenses or licenses for libraries and schools can be acquired via www.sz-archiv.de. Rights to create an electronic press review can be obtained from Presse-Monitor Deutschland GmbH (PMG) (www.pressemonitor.de).