Privacy Policy

 

  1. INTRODUCTION

Welcome to our privacy policy for the Botika E-Shop (“Botika””).

Botika is an online store owned and operated by Alfred Gera & Sons Ltd (C 120) situated at 10, Triq il-Masġar Qormi, Malta (“AGS”; “we”; “us” or “our”). It can be accessed through our website, http://www.botika.mt (the “Site”).

The purpose of this Policy is to outline how we will process your personal data when you:

  • visit and use Botika via the Site (regardless of where you access it from);
  • register an account with us (your “Account”); and
  • place an order for any of the products offered for sale on Botika.

This includes any data that you may provide for and in relation to our newsletters, updates, events and other marketing and promotional communications.

This Policy also informs you about: (i) how we will handle and look after your personal data, (ii) our obligations regarding processing your personal data responsibly and securely, (iii) your data protection rights as a data subject, and (iv) how the law protects you. It should be read together with our IP Address and Cookie Policy which is available here.

 

  1. IMPORTANT INFORMATION AND WHO WE ARE

We are a controller of your personal data. We process your data in an appropriate and lawful manner, in accordance with the Maltese Data Protection Act (Chapter 586 of the Laws of Malta) (the “Act”), including its subsidiary legislation, and the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) (the “Regulation” or the “GDPR”), each as may be amended, supplemented, or replaced from time to time.

This Policy aims to inform you on how we (AGSL) will collect and process your personal data in connection with Botika. It informs you about the items of personal data which we will collect about you and describes how we will handle it. It also tells you about (i) our obligations regarding processing your personal data, (ii) your data protection rights as a data subject and (iii) how the law protects you.

Neither the Site, nor our online shop, Botika, are intended for minors (generally, individuals under the age of 18 years). We do not knowingly collect personal data relating to minors.

It is important that you read this Policy together with any other privacy notice or privacy policy which we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal data about you so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data.

 

Controller

Alfred Gera & Sons Ltd, as defined above, is the operator of Botika and controller of your personal data.

If you have any questions or requests, including any requests to exercise your legal rights as a data subject, please contact us using the details set out below.

 

Contact Details

Email address:                          privacy@botika.mt

Postal address:                         Alfred Gera & Sons Ltd., 10, Triq il-Masġar, Qormi; QRM3217, Malta

 

You have the right to lodge a complaint at any time to a competent supervisory authority on data protection matters, such as the supervisory authority based in the place of your habitual residence or your place of work. In the case of Malta, this is the Office of the Information and Data Protection Commissioner (the “IDPC”) (https://idpc.org.mt). We would, however, appreciate the opportunity to deal with your concerns before you approach the supervisory authority, so please do contact us in the first instance.

Please use the words ‘Data Protection Matter’ in the subject line.

 

Your Duty to Inform Us of Changes

It is imperative that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current at all times. Otherwise, this will hinder our ability to maintain your account or provide you with the products and/or services which you have requested from us (amongst other potential issues).

Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us.

 

Third-Party Links

Our store, Botika, may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy notices, statements, or policies.

We encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit.

 

  1. PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data). During your relationship with us (including during the account registration stage), we may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together:

  • Identity Data includes your first name, last name, address, title, gender, age confirmation (i.e., written/online statement confirming that you are 18-years of age or older), username or similar identifier and other account details (including password).
  • Contact Data includes your billing address, shipping / delivery address, email address and contact number (telephone and/or mobile).
  • Transaction Data includes Contact Data and details about your payments (including payment history) and your orders (including your order history).
  • Usage Data includes information about how you use our Site and Botika.
  • Communication Data includes any information received from you when you make an enquiry, complaint, or return, such as in relation to any products purchased through Botika. 
  • Marketing Data includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences.

 

Sensitive Personal Data

We do not knowingly collect special categories of personal data (or sensitive personal data). Should we receive sensitive personal data about you, we will only process it where there is a legitimate reason to do so and, in all cases, in accordance with our obligations at law and under appropriate safeguards.

 

  1. HOW DO WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

  • Where we need to perform the contract, we are about to enter into or have entered into with you (e.g. the fulfilment / performance of your orders and maintenance of your account).
  • Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.
  • Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.

 

Purposes for which we will Use your Personal Data

We have set out below, in a table format, a description of all the ways we plan to use your personal data, and which of the legal basis we rely on to do so. We have also identified what our legitimate interests are where appropriate. We may process your personal data for more than one lawful ground depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your data.

Please contact us at privacy@botika.mt if you need details about the specific legal ground which we are relying on to process your personal data (where more than one ground has been set out in the table below).

 

Purpose/Activity

Type of Data

Lawful Basis for Processing (including Basis of Legitimate Interest)

 

Account Registration

To open and register your account with us (and send you confirmation of this, together with any account credentials)

 

 

 

 

(a) Identity;

 

(b) Contact.

 

 

 

 

Performance of a contract with you.

Account Maintenance and Relationship Management

 

(a) To enable us to manage our relationship with you in an efficient and effective manner;

(b) To keep our records up to date, including in relation to your account and orders;

(c) To deliver, and to ensure that you have received, your orders purchased from our shop, Botika

(d) To maintain records of our products and services provided to you and our interactions with you;

 (e) To perform material control and ensure that you have been provided with the best possible treatment or service from us;

(f) To respond to any queries or complaints we may receive from you and to seek to resolve these;

(g) To provide you with customer support and assistance;

 

(h) To manage disputes;

 

(i) To notify you of any changes to our terms or policies or the Site.

 

 

 

 

(a) Identity;

 

(b) Contact;

 

(c) Transaction;

 

(d) Usage;

 

(e) Communication.

 

 

 

 

 

(a) Performance of a contract with you;

 

(b) Necessary for our legitimate interests (including to help you get the best out of our Botika and your account, for ‘customer care’, to study how clients use our Site, to assess our operations and the quality of our service, to develop them and grow our business.

 

 Legal Requirements

(i) For legal, tax and accounting purposes (e.g. reporting to tax authorities, and accounting record requirements).

(ii) To keep a record of your orders and payments made by you.

(iii) Screen orders for potential fraud.

 

 

 

 

(a) Identity;

 

(b) Contact;

 

(c) Transaction;

 

(d) Communication.

 

 

 

 

(a) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation;

(b) Necessary for our legitimate interests (fraud detection / prevention / reporting).

Operational Needs

To administer and protect our business carried out through Botika, including Site (including data analysis, system maintenance, support, safety and security testing, troubleshooting, reporting and hosting of data).

 

(a) Identity;

 

(b) Contact;

 

(c) Transaction;

 

(d) Usage;

 

(e) Communication.

 

 

Necessary for our legitimate interests (for running and administering our business and organisation, network security)

 

 

Marketing

(a)To deliver marketing to you and measure or understand the effectiveness of the marketing which we serve to you;

 

(b) To develop and carry out marketing activities;

 

(c) For statistical research and analysis so that we can monitor and improve our products and services, or develop new ones;

 

(d) To use data analytics to improve our products, services, marketing, customer relationships and the ‘experience’ when using Botika.

 

 

 

(a) Identity;

 

(b) Contact;

 

(c) Transaction;

 

(d) Usage;

 

(e) Communication;

 

(f) Marketing.

 

 

 

Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our Site, to develop our customer base, to grow our business and to inform our marketing strategy).

Legal Claims and Enforcement

To permit AGSL to exercise its rights or pursue any remedies available to it (including debt recovery) and to limit any losses which we may sustain.

 

 

(a) Identity;

 

(b) Contact;

 

(c) Transaction;

 

(d) Usage;

 

(e) Communication.

 

 

Necessary to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

 

 

 

MARKETING

You may receive marketing communications from us (which may consist of newsletters, industry updates, mailshots, publications, promotional materials and/or information about our events) where:

  • you have an ongoing customer relationship with us (e.g., a registered account), OR
  • (in the absence of a relationship), you consent to receiving such marketing communications;

AND

  • provided you have not unsubscribed to receiving marketing from us (see your right to object below).

 

THIRD-PARTY MARKETING

We will get your express opt-in consent before we share your personal data with any third parties (including any associated or affiliated entities) for marketing purposes.

 

  1. SHARING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We may need to share your personal data with third parties for the purpose set out above.

Information we may share to other parties:

  • external third parties involving in the running of Botika:
  • Regulators, law enforcement agencies and other authorities (where required);
  • Professional advisor/s including but not limited to consultants, lawyers and auditors;
  • Suppliers and external agencies that we engage to process information on our or your behalf, including to provide you with the information and/or material that you have requested;
  • Third parties to whom we may choose to sell, transfer, or merge parts of our business or our assets (successors in title). Alternatively, we may seek to acquire other businesses or merge with them. If a change happens to our business, then the new owners may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this Policy.

 

We may also disclose your data if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data to comply with any legal obligation, judgment or under an order from a court, tribunal or authority.

We may also disclose your data to enforce our contractual terms against you, or to protect our rights, property or safety, and that of other users of Botika or the Site. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection.

 

  1. DATA SECURITY

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. We also limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

 

  1. DATA RETENTION

Please note that we consider our customer relationship with you to be an ongoing and continuous relationship, until terminated.

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for (i.e. your account and its administration, including your orders) and, thereafter, for the purpose of satisfying any legal, accounting, tax and reporting requirements or obligations to which we may be subject and/or to the extent that we may also need to retain your personal data to be able to assert, exercise or defend possible future legal claims against or otherwise involving you. 

Generally, our retention of your data will exceed the period of five (5) years from the date of the termination of your relationship with us (which would typically arise from the closure/de-registration of your account). This retention period enables us to use the data in question for the possible filing, exercise or defence of legal claims (taking into account the timeframe of applicable statutes of limitation and prescriptive periods).

In certain cases though, we may need to retain some of your data for a period of up to ten (10) years in order to comply with applicable accounting and tax laws (this will primarily consist of your Transaction Data).

In some circumstances, you can ask us to delete your data. See below for further information.

Kindly contact us for further details about the retention periods that we apply.

 

  1. INTERNATIONAL TRANSFERS

We do not generally transfer your personal data to entities outside the European Economic Area (“EEA”) except as may be necessary to: (i) enable your use of Botika or as necessary to provide / fulfil your orders, (ii) fulfil our contractual obligations to you or exercise our contractual obligations against you, (iii) comply with our legal or regulatory obligations or (iv) assert, file or exercise a legal claim. Where we do need to transfer your personal data outside the EEA (whether for these stated purposes or any other purpose listed in Section 5 above), we will ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to that personal data by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards applies or is otherwise implemented:

  • We will only transfer your personal data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data by the European Commission.
  • In the absence of an adequacy decision, we will use standard contractual clauses that have been approved by the European Commission or other appropriate safeguard recognised under the GDPR.

 

  1. YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data.

  • Request access to your personal data.
  • Request correction of your personal data.
  • Request erasure of your personal data.
  • Object to processing of your personal data.
  • Request restriction of processing your personal data.
  • Request transfer of your personal data.
  • Right to withdraw consent.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us at privacy@botika.mt These rights are explained below.

 

No Fee usually required

You will not normally have to pay a fee to exercise your data subject rights.

However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in the above circumstances.

 

What we may need from you

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other data subject rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

 

Time limit to Respond

 We try to respond to all legitimate requests within the period of one month from receipt of the request.

Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

 

Your Legal Rights

 You have the right to:

 i. Request access to your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it. You may send an email to privacy@botika.mt requesting information as the personal data which we process.

 ii. Request correction or rectification of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected and/or updated, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us. As mentioned, it is in your interest to keep us informed of any changes or updates to your personal data.

iii. Request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete your personal data where: 

  • there is no good reason for us continuing to process it;
  • you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below);
  • we may have processed your information unlawfully; or
  • we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. 

Note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request. These may include instances where continued processing is necessary to be able to:

  • comply with a legal or regulatory obligation to which we are subject; or
  • establish, exercise or defence of legal claims.

iv. Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and you want to object to processing on this ground as you feel it impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes (see Marketing in Section 5 above).

In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which override your rights and freedoms.

v. Request restriction of processing of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios:

  • if you want us to establish the data's accuracy;
  • where our use of the data is unlawful, but you do not want us to erase it;
  • where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or
  • you have objected to our use of your data, but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.

vi. Request the transfer (data portability) of your personal data to you or to a third party. We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.

vii. Withdraw consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal data (which will not generally be the case). This will not however affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before your withdrawal. Any processing activities not based on your consent will remain unaffected.

 

Kindly note that none of these data subject rights are absolute or guaranteed and must generally be weighed against our own legal obligations and legitimate interests.

If a decision is taken to override your data subject request, you will be informed of this by our data protection team along with the reasons for our decision.

 

  1. CHANGES TO THIS NOTICE

We reserve the right to amend or revise this Notice in the future, particularly where we need to consider and cater for any (i) business developments and/or (ii) legal or regulatory developments to the issuance or trading of cryptocurrencies and virtual financial assets under applicable law.

Changes, revisions, and amendments to this Notice will be duly notified to you.

If you have any questions regarding this Notice, or if you would like to send us your comments, please contact us today or alternatively write to us using the details on our website.