1 The data controller
We are pleased that you are visiting a social media page of SMA Solar Technology AG, Sonnenallee 1, 34266 Niestetal, Germany , info@sma.de, entered in the Commercial Register of the Kassel District Court under No. HRB 3972 (hereafter abbreviated to "SMA"). SMA operates its own social media pages together with the operator of the respective social media platforms:
Facebook (Facebook Ireland Limited, 4 Grand Canal Square, Dublin 2, Ireland) for the Facebook pages
Instagram (Facebook Ireland Limited, 4 Grand Canal Square, Dublin 2, Ireland) for the Instagram pages
LinkedIn (if you are a resident of the European Union, the European Economic Area or Switzerland, LinkedIn Ireland Unlimited Company, Wilton Plaza, Wilton Place, Dublin 2 Ireland; if you reside outside the European Union, the European Economic Area or Switzerland, LinkedIn Corporation, 1000 W. Maude Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94085, USA) for the LinkedIn pages
YouTube (Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland) for the YouTube pages
TikTok (TIKTOK Information Technologies UK Limited One London Wall 6th Floor EC2Y 5EB London, GB) for the TikTok pages
In this data protection declaration, we inform you about the processing of your personal data by SMA in the context of your visit to our social media pages. The operator of the respective social media platform bears sole responsibility for the processing of personal data on the social media platform upon which we operate our social media pages (you will find further information on processing your personal data by the operator of the respective social media platform under 2.2).
2 Processing your personal data
2.1 Processing your personal data by SMA
When you visit a social media page of SMA, as the operator of the social media page we process your activities and interactions with our social media page (e.g., the content of your messages, inquiries, posts or comments that you address to us or leave on our social media pages or when you like or share our posts) and your publicly visible profile data (e.g., your name and your profile image). Which personal data from your profile is publicly visible depends on your profile settings. You can adjust your settings yourself on the social media platform (for further information, see 2.2). In general, please remember to avoid communicating or sharing sensitive data or confidential information (e.g., job applications, bank or payment data) on social media platforms. For these data, we recommend using a secure communication channel (e.g., letter post, e-mail). We operate our social media pages and process the data mentioned above for the purpose of providing information about us and our products, as well as communicating with our followers and interested parties. As part of our community management, we might supplement the activities, interactions and publicly visible profile data you published on social media pages with our own data for improved classification. This data processing is done on the basis of our above-mentioned justified interests (Art. 6 (1) letter f of the GDPR) and, if applicable, in order to answer the messages, inquiries, posts or comments that you submit to us (Art. 6 (1) letter b of the GDPR). We verify whether comments or other interactions on our social media pages violate applicable law or the relevant community guidelines and delete the respective comments if necessary. If such comments occur frequently, we might possibly process the participating usernames for internal coordination. We base this processing on our justified interest (Art. 6 (1) letter f of the GDPR) to provide a reputable website and fulfill the regulatory requirements.
You can request an offer via the social media channels. In this case, we process the contact data you listed (last name, first name, e-mail and telephone) and the technical data for choosing a photovoltaic system. To create a detailed offer, we will forward your request to one or more solar power professionals. In line with your request, they will process the data you listed in order to initiate a contract (Art. 6 (1) letter b of the GDPR). For this purpose, your data will be saved for one year and then deleted.
You can also subscribe to our marketing newsletter via some of the social media channels. In this case, your e-mail address will be used for our own marketing purposes until you unsubscribe. You will then receive regular information via e-mail on current topics and e-mails on special occasions, e.g., for special promotions, surveys or training offers. These e-mails may be personalized and tailored based on our information about you.
When you subscribe to our marketing newsletter, if you have not provided your consent in writing, we use what is known as the double opt-in process, which means that we will only send you a marketing newsletter by e-mail when you have expressly confirmed to us in advance that we should activate marketing newsletter delivery. We will then send you a notification e-mail and ask you to confirm that you want to receive our newsletter by clicking the link included in the e-mail.
The legal basis for processing your data is your consent in accordance with Art. 6 (1) letter a of the GDPR if you have expressly subscribed to our marketing newsletter. In line with the legal specifications, it may also be possible for you to receive our newsletter from us without express consent because you have ordered goods or services from us, we obtained your e-mail address in this context and you did not object to receiving information by e-mail. In this case, the legal basis is our justifiable interest to communicate direct advertising to you in accordance with Art. 6 (1) letter f of the GDPR.
We use the Salesforce Pardot marketing automation tool to distribute our marketing newsletter. Pardot is marketing automation software by Salesforce.com EMEA Limited (Salesforce), village 9, floor 26 Salesforce Tower, 110 Bishopsgate, London, UK, EC2N 4AY.
The personal data you share with us when subscribing to our marketing newsletter is also processed in the U.S. for the purposes of mailing the marketing newsletter and for marketing activities. We transmit that information to Salesforce.com EMEA Limited (Salesforce). We also use Salesforce Pardot software for the purposes stated above with regard to customer data. Thus, in cooperation with Salesforce.com we are better able to customize our communications by evaluating the specific interests of our customers. We believe that communications that specifically address our customers' interests also benefit the customers.
Please note that we will analyze your user behavior when we mail the marketing newsletter. For the purpose of this analysis, the e-mails that are sent contain web beacons or tracking pixels. For the analyses, we link the data transmitted via these tracking pixels with your e-mail address and a personalized ID. We use the information thus obtained to create a user profile so that we can tailor the marketing newsletter to your particular interests. We record when you read our marketing newsletters and which links you click on in order to infer your personal interests. We link this data to actions that you carry out on our website. If you do not want us to do this, you should cancel your subscription. Tracking of this nature will also not be possible if your email application default settings have disabled the display of images. In this case, you will not see the full content of the newsletter and may not be able to use all its features. If you display the images manually, the tracking referred to above will take place.
If you have subscribed to our marketing newsletter and we, as described above, analyze your user behavior, we will share the information collected in the process for marketing purposes with the companies named below, which are affiliated with us:
SMA Solar Technology AG, Sonnenallee 1, 34266 Niestetal, Germany, Tel.: +49 561 9522-0 / www.SMA.de / Info@SMA.de
SMA Altenso GmbH, Sonnenallee 1, 34266 Niestetal, Germany, Tel.: +49 561 9522-0 / www.sma-altenso.com / sunbelt@sma.de
coneva GmbH, Dingolfingerstraße 15, 81673 München, Germany, Tel.: +49 561 9522-0 / www.coneva.com / Info@coneva.com
SMA Solar Technology AG has a large number of subsidiaries around the world that market SMA AG products and perform the necessary service, such as SMA France S.A.S. or SMA Italia S.r.l. We share the data with these companies as well.
Your information is shared with these companies so we can put together in our newsletter the best possible offers for you – ones that you will find relevant and interesting. The companies named above will not use your personal information to contact you via other marketing channels (for example, phone calls). SMA Solar Technology AG has concluded agreements governing data processing on our behalf with these companies. Furthermore, because the data is shared only if you expressly consented to the provisions of this data protection declaration, and thus to this sharing of your information, during the process of subscribing to the newsletter, processing will be based on Art. 6 (1) letter a of the GDPR. Furthermore, our customers also benefit from our sharing of the collected data with our affiliated companies so they can receive customized information in line with their interests. The data processing is therefore also based on a legitimate interest under Art. 6 (1) letter f of the GDPR. This is especially true since customers can cancel the newsletter at any time. The information will be stored for as long as you are subscribed to the newsletter. If you unsubscribe, we will store data anonymously and purely for statistical purposes.
If you no longer wish to receive marketing newsletters from us, you can withdraw your given consent at any time with effect for the future or object to the further receipt of e-mails without any additional expenses besides the basic rates of notifying us. Just use the unsubscribe link included in every newsletter or send a message to us or our data protection officer.
The social media platforms also provide us with anonymous usage statistics (analytics services or page insights data) for our social media pages based on the activities and interactions of our followers (e.g., likes, sharing, comments, etc., number of followers, views of individual page section, reach of a post and statistics on followers by age, language, country of origin or interests) that help us to enter into contact with our followers and interested parties, understand the usage and reach of our posts, evaluate content, detect usage preferences and design our social media pages to be compatible with our target groups. We have neither influence on nor access to the creation and processing of the usage statistics and underlying data. The operator of the respective social media platform is solely responsible for this and we are not able to view the personal data of individual followers or users (for further information, see 2.2). This data processing is based on our above-mentioned justified interests (Art. 6 (1) letter f of the GDPR).
We also use these anonymous usage statistics to publish targeted interest-based advertisements on the social media platforms we use or to highlight our posts. We show interest-based advertisements or highlight posts on the social media platforms we use based on an analysis of the user's previous usage behavior made by the respective social media platform. We cannot view the personal data of individual users, combine them with the personal data we may have processed, or receive information on the identity of individual users to whom the interest-based advertisements are shown (for further information, see 2.2). This data processing is based on our above-mentioned justified interests (Art. 6 (1) letter f of the GDPR). If, as part of interest-based marketing, we carried out an "extended comparison" with the customer lists to be uploaded to the respective social media platform as an exception, we would only do this based on your consent to our doing so (Art. 6 (1) letter a of the GDPR).
We will process your personal data as long as this is required for the purposes listed above. In case of an objection to processing based on our justified interests (Art. 6 (1) letter f of the GDPR), we will delete personal data unless their further processing is permitted in accordance with the relevant regulations. We also delete personal data if we are obligated to do so for other regulatory reasons. In accordance with these general guidelines, as a rule we immediately delete personal data upon elimination of the legal basis if they are no longer required for the named purposes, or the named purposes become unnecessary and no other legal basis exists (e.g., retention periods in terms of commercial and fiscal law), otherwise upon elimination of the other legal basis.
As part of providing our social media pages, we work with service providers (e.g., IT service providers or advertising and content agencies, as well as personnel consultants that support us in creating our posts and providing and optimizing our social media pages). We have concluded a job processing agreement with the service providers whom we have commissioned to process personal data and agreed on suitable guarantees for the preservation of personal data protection. Further, we carefully choose our service providers. They process personal data solely for the purpose of fulfilling their tasks and they are contractually bound to our instructions. They have suitable technical and organizational measures for the protection of personal data and we verify these at regular intervals. The following service providers are involved in the provision of our social media pages:
Social Web Sherpas GmbH, Dresdner Straße 172c, 01705 Freital, Germany
Rabau:x media GmbH, Rupertstraße 26a, 22609 Hamburg, Germany
Apart from that, we transmit your personal data to third parties (e.g., solar power professionals, service partners, financing service providers, transport service providers) only if you have given us your consent to do so or this is absolutely necessary for the fulfillment of a contract with you or to preserve our justified interests (Art. 6 (1) letters a, b and/or f of the GDPR).
2.2 Processing of your personal data by the operator of the respective social media platform
The operator of the respective social media platform bears sole responsibility for the processing of personal data on the social media platform upon which we operate our social media pages. As a rule, they process your personal data from your visit to one of our social media pages regardless of whether you have a user account on the respective social media platform or are logged onto the respective social media platform, and they also use cookies and other storage and tracking technologies (some across multiple devices). You will find more information on the processing of your personal data by the operator of the respective social media platform in the information on data protection on the following websites of the respective social media platform:
Facebook data guidelines under https://www.facebook.com/policy,
Instagram data protection guidelines under https://help.instagram.com/519522125107875,
LinkedIn data protection guidelines under https://www.linkedin.com/legal/privacy-policy?trk=homepage-basic_footer-privacy-policy,
YouTube data protection declaration under https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=de&gl=de und
TikTok data protection declaration under https://www.tiktok.com/legal/privacy-policy-eea?lang=de&selection=true.
The social media platforms also provide us with anonymous usage statistics (page insights data) for our social media pages based on the activities and interactions of our followers (for more information, see 2.1). We have neither influence on nor access to the creation and processing of the usage statistics and underlying data. The operator of the respective social media platform is solely responsible for this and we are not able to view the personal data of individual followers or users. Sometimes the social media platforms additionally create personalized usage statistics themselves, for example, for in-house market research and marketing and other commercial and business-related purposes, during which they also process personal data outside the European Union. We do not have influence on or access to these data either. You will find more information on the processing of your personal data by the operator of the respective social media platform as part of creating and processing of usage statistics in the information on data protection on the following websites of the respective social media platform:
Facebook information on page insights data under https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms/information_about_page_insights_data,
Instagram insights under https://help.instagram.com/788388387972460?helpref=faq_content,
LinkedIn data protection guidelines (aggregated insights) under https://business.linkedin.com/de-de/sales-solutions/sales-insights,
YouTube insights under https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9002587?hl=en and https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=de und
TikTok insights under https://www.tiktok.com/creators/creator-portal/tiktok-content-strategy/understanding-your-analytics/.
You will find more information on the processing of your personal data by the operator of the respective social media platform as part of interest-based marketing and the setting options of your profile and your marketing preference in the information on the following websites of the respective social media platform:
Facebook under https://www.facebook.com/business/ads or https://www.facebook.com/adpreferences/ad_settings,
Instagram under https://business.instagram.com/advertising or https://help.instagram.com/478880589321969/?helpref=hc_fnav,
LinkedIn under https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/advertising-data,
YouTube under https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9002587?hl=en und
TikTok under https://support.tiktok.com/en/account-and-privacy/personalized-ads-and-data.
3 Third-country transmission of personal data
For the data processing purposes listed above, SMA also transmits your personal data to recipients that are headquartered outside the EU/EEA. In order to guarantee a suitable level of protection for your personal data, SMA limits transmission to countries that have an adequacy decision (see Art. 45 of the GDPR).
4 Your rights
You have the following rights:
Right of access: You have the right (Art. 15 of the GDPR) to obtain information about your personal data.
Right to rectification: You have the right (Art. 16 of the GDPR) to obtain the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning yourself and to have incomplete personal data completed.
Right to erasure: When one of the grounds laid out in Art. 17 of the GDPR applies, you have the right to demand the erasure of personal data concerning you. Accordingly, for example, you can demand that your data be deleted if it is no longer necessary for the purposes for which it was collected. You can also demand erasure if your data were processed based on your consent and you withdraw this consent.
Right to restriction of processing: You have the right to demand that the processing of your data be restricted if the conditions in Art. 18 of the GDPR are present. This is the case, for example, if you contest the correctness of your data. For the duration of the verification of the correctness of your data, you can demand the restriction of its processing.
Right to object: If processing is based on an interest justified for the most part, you have the right to object to the processing of your data. You also have the right to object to data processing for direct marketing purposes. This also applies to profiling in the context of direct marketing.
Right to data portability: If data processing is based on your consent or the fulfillment of a contract and is carried out using automated processing, you have the right to receive your data in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and to transmit it to other processors.
Right to revoke consent: If data processing is based on a declaration of consent, you have the right to revoke your consent at any time, free of charge, with future effect.
Right to complain: You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority (e.g., the Hesse Data Protection Authority) about the processing of your personal data.
With regard to data processing by SMA, you can assert the above rights against SMA at any time, free of charge. With regard to data processing by the operator of the respective social media platform, you can assert the above rights against the respective operator at any time, free of charge. For more information on exercising your rights, see the following Section 6.
5 Your personal contact
5.1 Personal contact for exercising your rights
Your main personal contact for exercising your rights is the operator of the respective social media platform, each of whom has the sole capability to access the required information or can provide the functionality of the respective platform and immediately take appropriate measures. You will find your personal contact for exercising your rights against the operator of the respective social media platform and further information in the information on data protection on the following websites of the respective social media platform:
Facebook data guidelines under https://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation,
Instagram data protection guidelines under https://help.instagram.com/519522125107875,
LinkedIn data protection guidelines under https://www.linkedin.com/legal/privacy-policy?trk=homepage-basic_footer-privacy-policy,
YouTube data protection declaration under https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=de&gl=de, and
TikTok privacy policy under https://www.tiktok.com/legal/privacy-policy-eea?lang=de.
To the extent that support from SMA is possible or necessary, we will of course support you and forward your request to them for exercising your rights against the operator of the respective social media platform, for example.
The personal contact for exercising your rights against SMA is our data protection officer. For the contact data, see below.
5.2 Data protection officer of SMA Solar Technology AG
As the contact person for data protection-related matters against SMA AG, our data protection officer is available to you:
Data protection officer of SMA Solar Technology AG
Sonnenallee 1, 32466 Niestetal, Germany
datenschutz@sma.de
Version: June 2025