Date of last revision: February 20, 2018
IMPORTANT: New privacy policy from May 1, 2019
We, Swiss Academic Software GmbH, located at Florhofstrasse 2, 8820 Wädenswil, Switzerland, develop and distribute the Citavi software program and have contact with prospective customers, customers, and users.
This privacy policy explains what data we collect and store, either from you or from third parties, and what we do with it.
Where not expressly stated below, we never share data with third-parties unless required to do so because of a court decision.
If you want to:
please contact our data protection specialist, Hans Siem Schweiger, at support@citavi.com.
If your deletion request cannot be honored due to legal storage obligations, we will let you know. Services affected by the deletion of your data may no longer be used after your data has been deleted.
If you are unhappy with how we handle your data or inquiries related to your data, please write to us at support@citavi.com. We will review what happened, let you know the outcome of our review, and potentially work to find an improvement. Independently of this, you retain your right to file a complaint with the relevant authorities.
The applications and processes that collect data in the situations described below can changeare constantly changing. This privacy policy will be regularly updated to reflect these changes. We will let you know about any changes by notifying you at log in.
Your data will be at least partially be processed in Switzerland, where we have our company headquarters. In accordance with Art. 45 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Commission has decided that Switzerland has an adequate data protection level.
In your Citavi account you can view, change, and delete the personal information you sent to us during a purchase or when requesting a site license. The information is saved in our customer database, which is run by Microsoft on servers located in Dublin and Amsterdam.
The legal basis for data usage is the End User License Agreement for Citavi that you agreed to when creating a Citavi Account and/or when installing Citavi.
A Citavi account is created under the following circumstances:
You can create the account with different information depending on the circumstances:
If you don't provide an email address during registration, we will request that you to add it. In addition, you have the option of adding additional data to your account, such as a profile image.
We use the data provided for the creation of the account and the data added by you later on for the following purposes:
If you sign in to your Citavi account with a Facebook, Google, or Microsoft account, the service you're using will request that you allow Citavi access to certain information.
You can view, restrict, or remove app permissions on the following pages:
If you log in to Citavi Account using your university account (Shibboleth login), the following data (known in Shibboleth as “attributes”) will regularly be sent to us:
We confirm that we meet the requirements of the GÉANT Data Protection Code of Conduct, which can be downloaded here::
http://www.geant.net/uri/dataprotection-code-of-conduct/v1
Data in Citavi Account are saved for as long as you continue to use Citavi Account. We determine whether or not you are still using Citavi Account based on if you have logged into Citavi Account at least once during the past year. If you have not, we will notify you by email that you need to log in to Citavi Account to show that you still wish to use Citavi. If you do not log into Citavi Account during the specified period, we will delete your Citavi account and all cloud projects you created with your Citavi Account.
For the creation and management of your accounts and your licenses, we may send you emails to confirm that the email address used for registration belongs to you or still belongs to you. Confirmation occurs when you click the confirmation link in the email. We use the SendGrid platform to send these emails. SendGrid is offered by the company SendGrid, Inc., 1801 California Street, Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202, USA.
SendGrid’s privacy policy can be found here:
https://sendgrid.com/policies/privacy/
The servers SendGrid uses to process data are located in the United States of America, so your email address will be transferred there. In an attempt to maintain a similar data security level as in Switzerland and the EU, we have signed a data processing agreement with SendGrid that contains the EU's standard contractual clauses. If you would like an electronic copy of the agreement, please write to us at support@citavi.com.
When working with Citavi you can save your project information in different locations, depending on the edition you are using:
If you save your project locally or in an SQL database, we have no access to your data.
If you are using Citavi Cloud storage space, your project information will be saved in a datacenter that Microsoft operates in Germany. T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, serves as data trustee and monitors all physical and technical access to the data. You can learn more at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/clouds/germany/.
Project information is only accessed on a technical level in order to make Citavi’s program features available to you. Without your express consent, we never personally view information that you’ve saved in your projects. For support questions that cannot be answered in another way, you can temporarily invite a member of the Citavi Support Team to one of your Citavi projects.
If you have an active Internet connection while working with Citavi, Citavi will sometimes attempt to communicate with our servers or the servers of other information providers. In our manual, we describe the communication that occurs in detail:
https://www.citavi.com/sub/manual6/en/index.html?privacy_information.html
We statistically evaluate anonymized server connection information to ensure sufficient infrastructure performance.
When Citavi connects to the Citavi servers, no personally identifiable information is transferred. Project data is only transferred if it is necessary for an online search. For example, the DOI or ISBN number might be sent in order to retrieve the corresponding bibliographic information.
You can delete individual cloud projects. Upon deletion, you 14 days in which you can restore them. After that, they will be deleted permanently. If you delete your Citavi account or if it is deleted due to inactivity, all cloud projects created with it will also be deleted.
The legal basis for data usage is the End User License Agreement for Citavi that you agreed to when creating a Citavi Account and/or during your installation of Citavi.
We use the Microsoft Azure service Application Insights to help improve Citavi and to better fix errors Depending on the option selected under Tools > Options > General, Citavi sends the following information to this service:
For technical reasons, we cannot guarantee that the transferred data will always be completely anonymous. For example, your user name might be visible in a file path. If you experience an error while attempting to access a file, the error information sent to us would contain the file path containing your user name. We never make use of such personal information, and we use all data transferred to us solely for the purposes described within this section.
Application Insights automatically deletes any data like this that might be personally identifiable within 90 days.
The legal basis for data usage is the End User License Agreement for Citavi that you agreed to when creating a Citavi Account and/or during your installation of Citavi.
We statistically analyzewebsite visits.
Whenever you visit our website, the following information is automatically transmitted to our web server:
If JavaScript is enabled, we can also obtain the following information from your browser:
We use Google Analytics, a web analysis service provided by Google Inc. (“Google”), to statistically analyze website visits. Google Analytics uses cookies, which are small text files that are saved on your device and that make it possible to analyze how you used the website. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website would usually be sent to one of Google’s servers in the USA and saved there. However, we have enabled IP anonymization on our website so that the IP address from Google will be shortened beforehand within member states of the European Union or in other contracting states to the Agreement on the European Economic Area. The full IP address will only be sent to a Google server in the USA and then shortened there in exceptional cases.
Google uses this information on our behalf to analyze your use of the website, to create reports about website activities, and to provide us with additional information about your use of the website and other information regarding your Internet use. The IP address transferred from your browser to Google Analytics will not be combined with other data from Google.
Using the following methods, you can prevent Google Analytics’ statistical analysis of your website visits:
Google’s privacy policy can be found here:
https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/.
The legal basis for using cookies and Google Analytics is Art. 6 Para. 1 under letter f of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and our legitimate interest: we want to improve the functionality of our website so that users can quickly find information relevant to them and potentially purchase licenses more easily.
We offer you the chance to subscribe to various email newsletters. We use the online service MailChimp for sign up and email delivery. Mailchimp is offered by the company Rocket Science Group, 675 Ponce de Leon Ave NE, Suite 5000, Atlanta, GA 30308, USA.
If you sign up for a newsletter, your name and email address are saved by MailChimp and used to send the newsletter to the email address you provided.
In addition, MailChimp also collects the following information: if and when you open a newsletter, if you click the links in a newsletter, your IP address, the browser or email program you are using, and other details of this sort. MailChimp uses single-pixel GIFs (also known as web beacons) in newsletter emails to collect this information.
We can view this information in the online service's interface.
You can unsubscribe from a newsletter at any time by clicking the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the newsletter.
The legal basis for the use of your data is your click on the confirmation link for the newsletter you signed up for.
You can cancel the newsletter at any time and in this way take back the use of your data. An unsubscribe link can be found in the footer of each newsletter.
MailChimp's privacy policy can be found at http://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/. Although the privacy policy is primarily written for users of the service (us in this case) it also contains important information for newsletter subscribers.
The servers which MailChimp uses for processing data are located in the United States (see section 14 in MailChimp's privacy policy). This means thatthe personal information you provide when signing up for a newsletter is transferred there. In an attempt to maintain a similar data protectionlevel as in Switzerland and the EU, we have signed a data processing agreement with MailChimp that contains the EU's standard contractual clauses (see section 15 in MailChimp's privacy policy). If you would like an electronic copy of the agreement, please write to us at support@citavi.com.
If a university or organization has signed a site license agreement, the contact person will receive a monthly email containing statistics for how many licenses have been requested in addition to other news relevant for site license customers.
To send these emails, we use a locally installed computer program. Personal information is only saved on our local network drive.
Please write to us at support@citavi.com if you no longer wish to receive the monthly site license newsletter.
The legal basis for this data usage is the site license agreement between Swiss Academic Software GmbH and the university or organization.
It's possible to contact us directly with questions regarding Citavi. We offer a few different ways to do so: our online form www.citavi.com/ticket, the contact form in Citavi Account, and by email.
If you use our online form, you can choose whether your question will be visible in our forum for all users or if it should be sent directly to the Citavi team. Forum posts are public and can be answered by other users. Private questions will only be answered by the Citavi team.
Your questions and answers will be processed by the online service UseResponse offered by the company UseResponse Inc., 412 N. Main Street, STE 100 Buffalo, WY, 82834, USA. UseResponse stores information on servers from the cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean located in its German datacenter in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
We have signed a data processing agreement with UseResponse that contains the EU's standard contractual clauses. If you would like an electronic copy of the agreement, please write to us at support@citavi.com.
Private questions and forum posts are saved for an indefinite length of time to help with follow-up questions or, in the case of forum posts, so that other users have access to them if they have similar questions.
Questions regarding license purchases may be forwarded to one of our online resellers so that they can contact you.
In addition, your question is saved in our customer database, which is run by Microsoft on servers located in Dublin and Amsterdam.
The legal basis for data usage is either the End User License Agreement for Citavi that you agreed to when creating a Citavi Account and/or when installing Citavi, or, in the case of inquiries by prospective customers, your implied acceptance of the license agreement.
If you request a quote for a license purchase or if you purchase licenses in our online shop, your contractual partner is our e-commerce provider cleverbridge AG located at Gereonstrasse 43-65, 50670 Cologne, Germany. Cleverbridge AG's privacy policy can be found here and their general terms and conditions can be found here.
To request a quote or to place an order, you need to provide the following information:
If you purchase licenses for an organization, you also need to specify the organization's name and provide a telephone number. You also have the option of entering a billing address that differs from the delivery address.
This information is used as described in cleverbridge AG's privacy policy. Using a software program that cleverbridge AG provides to us, we can view this data.
When you complete a purchase you also enter payment information, such as your credit card number or bank details. This information is processed by cleverbridge AG as detailed in its privacy policy and cannot be viewed by us.
After completing a purchase with cleverbridge AG, the order details and status are transferred to us and saved in our customer database. Our customer database is run by Microsoft on servers located in Dublin and Amsterdam.
We use the information you provide while placing an order for the following purposes:
This data is deleted after the expiration of the period for the obligation of data retention for commercial and tax requirements.
The legal basis for data usage is either the End User License Agreement for Citavi that you agreed to when creating a Citavi Account and/or when installing Citavi, or, in the case of inquiries by prospective customers, your implied acceptance of the license agreement.
We work with partners who distribute Citavi for us in a number of countries. If you purchase a Citavi license from one of these partners, please familiarize yourself with the partner's privacy policy and general terms and conditions of business:
Orders placed by our partners are carried out by cleverbridge AG located at Gereonstrasse 43-65, 50670 Cologne, Germany. The following information is necessary to process your order:
This information is also transferred to cleverbridge AG.
After the partner completes a purchase with cleverbridge AG, the order details and status are transferred to us and saved in our customer database. Our customer database is hosted by Microsoft on servers located in Dublin, Ireland and Amsterdam, Netherlands.
We use the information you provide while placing an order for the following purposes:
This data is deleted after the expiration of the period for the obligation of data retention for commercial and tax requirements.
The legal basis for data usage is the End User License Agreement for Citavi that you agreed to when creating a Citavi Account and/or when installing Citavi, or, in the case of inquiries by prospective customers, your implied acceptance of the license agreement.
If you request or order services or site licenses from us, we will send you quotes and invoices created with the online application billomat, which is offered by Billomat GmbH & Co. KG located at Burgschmietstraße 2-4, 90419 Nuremberg, Germany. We save the necessary information in the online application and in our customer database, which is run by Microsoft on servers located in Dublin and Amsterdam.
You can view billomat's privacy policy here:
https://www.billomat.com/en/privacy
This data is deleted after the expiration of the period for the obligation of data retention for commercial and tax requirements.
The legal basis for data usage is the End User License Agreement for Citavi that you agreed to when creating a Citavi Account and/or when installing Citavi, or, in the case of inquiries by prospective customers, your implied acceptance of the license agreement.
An end user license under a site license agreement can be accessed in your Citavi Account (see “Creating and using Citavi accounts” above). Additionally, when you use a site license, we save your affiliation with the university or organization offering the site license.