Privacy Policy

South Africa: who is responsible

For orders with a delivery address in South Africa and for this shop (sonnenglas.net/za), the responsible party under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) is K2019188774 (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, trading as Sonnenglas South Africa Pty Ltd, 16 Viljoen Street, Unit 5G, Victoria Yards, 2094 Lorentzville, Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa. E-mail: info@sonnenglas.net · Phone: +27 10 500 2185. Sonnenglas GmbH (Germany) runs the website, order system and customer service on its behalf as operator.

Our Information Officer can be reached at info@sonnenglas.net.

Your rights under POPIA: you may ask whether we hold personal information about you and request a record of it, ask us to correct or delete it, and object to its processing — including, at any time, to direct marketing. Write to info@sonnenglas.net.

Processing outside South Africa: the services described below (for example Cloudflare and Stripe) process personal information outside South Africa, in particular in the European Union and the USA. We use them only where the recipient is bound by law, binding corporate rules or an agreement that provides an adequate level of protection, or where the transfer is necessary to perform your order (section 72 of POPIA).

Complaints: you may lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (South Africa): inforegulator.org.za.

The full policy follows. Where it refers to the GDPR, the corresponding rights under POPIA apply to you.

Privacy policy

This page explains which data we process when you visit sonnenglas.net, order from us or write to us. We built the site to get by with little data: no Google Analytics, no Tag Manager, no advertising pixels, no tracking cookies. That is why there is no cookie banner.

At a glance

Questions about data protection: info@sonnenglas.net.

Who is responsible

Sonnenglas GmbH
Marschstraße 94, 25704 Meldorf, Germany
E-mail: info@sonnenglas.net · Phone: +49 4851 96390 63

Orders with a delivery address in the USA are concluded by our US company: SNGLS US LLC, 3833 Powerline Road, Suite 601-I, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309, USA. For these orders SNGLS US LLC is the controller; Sonnenglas GmbH runs the website, order system and customer service on its behalf. You can reach both companies about data protection at info@sonnenglas.net.

We have not appointed a data protection officer; as a small company we are not required to (Section 38 BDSG).

Website and hosting: Cloudflare

The website and our own interface at sonnenglas.net/api run on Cloudflare (Cloudflare Pages and Workers). The provider is Cloudflare, Inc., 101 Townsend St., San Francisco, CA 94107, USA.

To deliver a page, Cloudflare processes technically necessary data: IP address, time, requested address, browser identifier and referrer. Cloudflare also uses it to fend off attacks and abuse. We only see aggregated numbers (for example page views per day and country), never individual visitors, and we do not use them for advertising.

Our interface also handles:

• Country suggestion in the "Let me know" form: from the country Cloudflare passes along, we suggest a country there. Nothing is stored, and we never redirect you automatically.
• Spam protection for forms, the logo preview and the interface for AI assistants: we count requests per IP address. The counter stays at Cloudflare for one hour and then expires. We do not use a CAPTCHA.
• Notices at the top of the page (for example about shipping times): only your region (de, at, ch, us, fr, en) is sent.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a secure, fast website (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Cloudflare acts on our behalf (Art. 28 GDPR) and is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Cloudflare privacy policy

Audience measurement without cookies

We want to know which pages are read and which buttons are used, so we can make the website better. For that we count — without cookies, without an identifier and without knowing who you are.

Our own count. A small script sends a short message to our interface at Cloudflare (sonnenglas.net/api/beacon) when a page is opened and for a few actions. It contains only: the kind of message (page view, a click on a button such as "Add to cart" or a colour choice, roughly how far you scrolled — 25, 50, 75 or 100 % —, roughly how long the page was visible — under 10 seconds, up to 30 seconds, up to 2 minutes or longer —, "added to cart" with the product family, "cart opened", "went to checkout", "payment submitted" and "thank-you page reached" with its result — paid, pending or failed, without order number and without amount), the page address without additions, the domain of the page you came from, our region (de, at, ch …), your country according to Cloudflare, and whether you use a phone or a computer. If you search on the "All products" page, we count the search term (at most 40 characters) and whether there were results; terms with an "@" or with five or more digits in a row are not stored. We store no IP address, no browser identifier, no identifier for you, your device or your visit, and no exact time, only the hour. So single messages cannot be joined into a visit or linked to a person; we only see totals. The messages are kept at Cloudflare (Workers Analytics Engine) and deleted automatically after three months. Nothing is stored on your device for this. Without JavaScript, with a content blocker or if you block the message, nothing is counted — the website works just the same.

Error reports from your browser. If something goes wrong on a page — an error in our script, a request to our interface (for example cart, availability or payment) that gets no answer, or a payment Stripe declines —, the page sends a short report to sonnenglas.net/api/err so we can find and fix the error. It contains only: the kind of error, the page address without additions, our region, your country according to Cloudflare, whether you use a phone or a computer, the browser family (for example Safari or Chrome, without version), where the error happened (our script file or the name of the interface), the error text, the error code (for example "card declined"), the version of our website and the hour. Before storing, we remove from the error text e-mail addresses, numbers with five or more digits, everything after the question mark in links, and text in quotation marks; form entries are never sent. At most five reports are sent per page view. We store no IP address, no browser identifier and no identifier for you or your visit. The reports are kept at Cloudflare (Workers Analytics Engine, three months) and in the log of our interface at Cloudflare.

Cloudflare Web Analytics. In addition, every page loads a small script from Cloudflare (static.cloudflareinsights.com). It sends Cloudflare Web Analytics a short report: the page you opened, the page you came from, how fast the page loaded, your browser and operating system, and your country. Cloudflare sets no cookies for this and stores nothing on your device; to receive the report, Cloudflare processes your IP address. We only see aggregated numbers in the Cloudflare dashboard.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in understanding our website, finding and fixing errors on it and making it better (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). For sending the messages from your browser we rely on Section 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG, because we store or read nothing on your device that the page you opened does not need. You can object at any time: block the addresses sonnenglas.net/api/beacon, sonnenglas.net/api/err and static.cloudflareinsights.com (for example with a content blocker) or switch off JavaScript — or write to us at info@sonnenglas.net. Cloudflare acts on our behalf (Art. 28 GDPR), see above.

What is stored on your device

We only store on your device what the shop needs to work — with one exception: the Google click ID when you arrive from a Google ad (see below). None of it builds a profile of you. The entries stay in your browser; they reach us only when you do something, such as checking the cart or ordering.

For every entry except sg-attr, Section 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG applies: it is strictly necessary for the shop you are using. We store the Google click ID (sg-attr) without asking you first — based on our legitimate interest in measuring the success of our ads (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR); you can object as described under "Measuring Google ads". Further processing is based on Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (contract and pre-contract steps) and Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (legitimate interest in a working shop).

You can delete all entries in your browser at any time. Your cart will then be empty.

Orders and shipping

When you order, we need your name, delivery and billing address, e-mail address, the items you order and — if you give it — your phone number. Without these we cannot carry out the order. The data goes through our interface to xhosa, our own order system, where order, invoice and order confirmation are created. If you redeem an upgrade voucher, the serial number (or old order number) of your old SOMO goes along too; xhosa uses it to make sure each number works for one upgrade only and keeps it with the order. If you redeem a personal welcome voucher, the e-mail address you enter for it goes along with the voucher check already; xhosa uses it to make sure it is the address we sent the voucher to.

The carrier delivering your parcel (for example DHL or Swiss Post) receives your name and delivery address. We only pass on your e-mail address or phone number if the carrier needs it for delivery — for example for express and freight shipments or customs clearance. If you collect your order in Meldorf, none of this applies.

Legal basis: performance of the purchase contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). We keep invoices and accounting records as long as commercial and tax law require — in Germany up to ten years (Section 257 HGB, Section 147 AO; Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR).

After your purchase you can tell us, voluntarily, who the order is for (and, if you like, briefly the occasion). We store the answer with your order and evaluate it only in aggregate, to improve what we offer. It goes to no advertising partners. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (our legitimate interest); kept as long as the order data.

Paying with Stripe

Payments are handled by Stripe. For orders outside the USA this is Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd., 1 Grand Canal Street Lower, Dublin 2, Ireland. Orders to the USA are charged by SNGLS US LLC through its own account with Stripe, Inc., 354 Oyster Point Blvd, South San Francisco, CA 94080, USA.

You enter your payment details directly with Stripe; we never see them. We only learn whether the payment worked, the payment method and what we need for invoices and refunds. Stripe automatically checks every payment for fraud risk. If Stripe declines a payment, write to us — a person will look at the order.

We only load Stripe's payment script (Stripe.js) when you need it: at checkout and — once there is something in your cart — for the express buttons in the cart. Stripe then sets cookies and processes device and connection data to prevent fraud. If you pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay or Link, the privacy terms of Apple, Google or Stripe also apply. Within its payment form, Stripe also embeds hCaptcha by Intuition Machines, Inc. (USA) for fraud protection and Google Maps (Places) for address suggestions while you type your address; both providers receive your IP address and information about your browser.

The payment methods we offer are listed under Prices, shipping and payment. If you choose PayPal, Klarna or — for delivery to the USA — Amazon Pay, Stripe passes the details needed for the payment (for example name, e-mail address, address and amount) to that provider, and you confirm the payment there. With TWINT, EPS, iDEAL and Bancontact you confirm the payment with your bank or in the TWINT app. These providers process the data as separate controllers, including for their own checks (for example against fraud); their privacy policies apply.

Legal basis: performance of the purchase contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and our legitimate interest in secure payments (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR); for the cookies Section 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG. Stripe is responsible itself for parts of payment processing (such as fraud checks and legal duties). Stripe, Inc. is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Stripe privacy policy

Measuring Google ads

We advertise on Google. Still, there is no Google script, pixel or cookie on our website. This is how we measure whether an ad led to a purchase:

1. When you click a Google ad, Google adds a click ID to the address (gclid, gbraid or wbraid).
2. We keep this click ID in session storage for your browser session (sg-attr) — no cookie; it is gone when you close the tab.
3. If you order in that session, the ID goes to xhosa with the order.
4. After the purchase, xhosa reports to Google Ads: click ID, order value, currency, time and our order number. We do not send your name, address or e-mail address.

The recipient is Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland; Google processes the report as a controller in its own right, also in the USA (Google is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework).

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in measuring the success of our ads (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). You can object at any time: close the tab before ordering, or write to info@sonnenglas.net — then we report nothing to Google for your order.

Forms and customer service

Our forms (contact, warranty, withdrawal, become a reseller, jobs, corporate gifts, back-in-stock notice) send your details to our interface. It accepts only the fields of that form. So that no request gets lost, we keep a copy in a database at Cloudflare (without your IP address, with one exception below) and then pass the request on:

We handle e-mails to us and contact-form requests in Sirportly, a helpdesk software. The provider is based in the United Kingdom, which has an EU adequacy decision.

We do not keep the help form on our help page in the form database: our interface passes your answers, your name, your e-mail address, the order number (if you give it) and the photos or videos you attach straight to Anansi, our own support system. Anansi opens a case for it in Sirportly and keeps the photos and videos so that only our support team can see them. To limit requests per connection, our interface counts requests per IP address (see above); your IP address is not passed to Anansi. If Anansi cannot be reached at that moment, we treat your text answers like a contact-form request; photos and videos are then not transferred. The legal basis is the same as for the other forms (see below).

AI in customer service. Anansi handles e-mails to our customer service and requests from the help form with the help of AI language models: Gemini by Google sorts each case into a topic, Claude by Anthropic writes a draft reply. For this, the text of your message or your text answers from the form and — for e-mails only — up to five attached images go through our own AI gateway to OpenRouter, Inc. (USA). OpenRouter passes the request to an operator of the model concerned (Anthropic, Google or Amazon Web Services). Photos and videos from the help form go to no AI model; they stay on our server. Our AI gateway stores no content, and the providers may not use it to train their models. Anansi sends a short acknowledgement automatically. If Anansi is confident enough about a reply, it may send that automatically too; everything else is checked and answered by our team. Anansi closes obvious spam automatically. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in answering requests quickly and reliably (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR); for the transfer to the USA see “Recipients and transfers”.

Legal basis: handling your request or preparing or performing a contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR), otherwise our legitimate interest in answering you (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR); for withdrawals also our legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR).

We delete the copy in the form database six months after passing it on. We keep withdrawal declarations as evidence until the end of the third year after receipt. We delete job applications six months after the process ends unless you agree to a longer period. The receipt for a withdrawal or warranty registration that you see after sending is available via its link for 90 days. Anansi deletes photos, videos and your details from the help form twelve months after your case is closed; if it is reopened, the period starts again afterwards. They disappear from our backups within about three months after that. The case in Sirportly with your text answers stays like any other request to us.

Against spam we use a hidden field, a timing check and the per-IP counter described above. For newsletter sign-ups, reseller applications, back-in-stock notices and call-back, offer and support requests from the concierge we also pass your IP address to Indaba, so that Indaba can limit sign-ups per connection. Until Indaba has accepted the request, it is kept with the copy in our database, for at most seven days. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in fending off abuse (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Partner portal

When you sign in to the partner portal, we record what you do there so we can look after you well as a dealer and improve the portal: signing in and out; which portal pages you open and for how long (without the full web address); the products you view and the filters you use in the catalogue; your search terms with the number of results; products you add to or remove from the cart; the steps of ordering (cart, address, shipping, review), reorders and placed orders with the ordered items and quantities; notices when something did not work (for example a minimum quantity, a minimum order value, a missing company address or not available); invoices and delivery notes you download; your requests to our support and custom product requests; and technical errors (only the area and the error code, no content). With each entry we store the date and time, your user account, your company and your country and price level as a dealer — no IP address, no browser or device data. This shows us, for example, when you last signed in, when you last ordered and which products matter to you; our sales team gets in touch when an account has not been used for a while. We use no third-party analytics services, no recording of your session and no cookie of our own for this. The legal basis is the performance of our business relationship (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and our legitimate interest in looking after our dealers and improving the portal (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). We keep this data for 24 months and then delete it automatically; order and invoice records are kept as long as the law requires. You can object at any time: write to us at info@sonnenglas.net.

E-mails from us

Our systems send order confirmations, receipts and other e-mails through the delivery service Postmark (ActiveCampaign, LLC, USA). Postmark receives your e-mail address and the message content and acts on our behalf (Art. 28 GDPR).

Newsletter

For the newsletter we only need your e-mail address. It goes to Indaba, our own customer contact system. You first get an e-mail with a confirmation link; only after you click it do we send the newsletter (double opt-in). We store sign-up and confirmation with their time as evidence.

Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). You can withdraw it at any time — via the unsubscribe link in every issue or by e-mail to info@sonnenglas.net.

Back-in-stock notice

If a product is not available right now, you can sign up on its product page ("Let me know when it's available"). For this we process your e-mail address, the product's article number, the country you chose (or "Anywhere"), the region and language of the page and your IP address. The details go through our interface to Indaba, our own customer contact system. Indaba uses the IP address only to limit sign-ups per connection (see "Forms and customer service").

You first get an e-mail with a confirmation link; only after you click it is your entry on the list (double opt-in). As soon as the product is available, we write to you once. Every one of these e-mails has an unsubscribe link. This is not the newsletter — you sign up for that separately.

Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). You can withdraw it at any time — via the unsubscribe link or by e-mail to info@sonnenglas.net.

Logo preview for corporate gifts

On the corporate gifts page you can upload your logo and see how it looks on a jar. Before the first preview we ask for your e-mail address.

Logo, technique, scene and e-mail address go to SAM, our own image system. SAM sends the logo and a product photo to an AI image service that creates the preview, and has a second AI model check the result for misspellings in the logo. The requests run through OpenRouter, Inc. (USA); the images are created by models from OpenAI and Google. These services act on our behalf and may not use your images for their own purposes.

We delete logos and previews after 30 days. If you send the corporate gifts request, we attach your previews to your request in Indaba; they then stay as long as we work on the request.

Legal basis: pre-contractual steps (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). Please only upload logos you are allowed to use.

Sonnenglas concierge (chat)

On parts of our website we offer a chat assistant, the Sonnenglas concierge (the “Ask us” entry with the speech bubble at the top right of the navigation). It answers questions about our products, the shop and customer service (for example shipping, returns, warranty) from the content of this website and shows you suitable products. It only runs when you open it and type something.

For this we process your messages and the answers, the page you are on, the region and language of the page and a random session ID. These details go to our interface at Cloudflare and from there through our own AI access to the language model Claude by Anthropic. The requests run through OpenRouter, Inc. (USA); OpenRouter passes them on only to Anthropic, to no other provider. Our AI access stores neither your messages nor the answers. For each request it records only technical details without content: the name of our access, the model, the number of tokens, the cost, the time and a request ID. Our AI access does not delete these details; in our logging system they are kept for 360 days. The conversation stays in your browser until you close the tab. The concierge is part of our customer service. So that we can check the quality of the answers, we keep an anonymised copy of the conversation for 14 days. Beforehand we replace e-mail addresses, phone, order and serial numbers, addresses and names with placeholders; we do not store your IP address. If you add something to your cart after a chat, we note in this copy which product it was. If you hand the chat over to our customer service, the conversation history goes to our team with your request.

Please do not type personal data into the chat. If the concierge needs your e-mail address, your name, your company, your phone number or a serial number — for example for a back-in-stock notice, a corporate gifts request or a call back or an offer from our team — it shows you a small form. These details are not sent to the AI service. They stay in your browser until you send the request with one click; then they reach us as with the respective form (see "Forms and customer service" and "Back-in-stock notice"). We record a call-back or offer request, with the summary you see before sending, in Indaba, our customer contact system; we only use a phone number if you give one. With the request we also send the chat history — your messages and the concierge's answers with their time, at most the last 80 — so our team does not have to ask you twice. It is kept with the request in our form database and in Indaba, for our team only; we do not send it to you by e-mail. If you did type personal data into the chat, it is part of it. From the form the concierge only learns which fields you filled in; it sees the quantity and the country so it can help you further. Our interface only checks a serial number for its format. If you upload a logo in the chat, "Logo preview for corporate gifts" applies.

If it is about a problem with a product or an order, the concierge shows you a card with a prepared message to our support team. You check and edit it, enter your e-mail address and, if you like, your name, the order number or the serial number. Only when you click "Send to the team" do these details, the page you are using the chat on and your IP address (only to limit requests per connection) go through our interface to Indaba, our customer contact system. Indaba creates you as a contact there (or finds you by your e-mail address) and opens a support case; you get a reference (SG-…), and our team answers you by e-mail. Here, too, the chat history goes along (as described above), so you don't have to explain anything twice. This is no consent to marketing and no newsletter sign-up; the legal basis is handling your request (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR, for an order) or our legitimate interest in answering customer requests (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). If the transfer does not work, we store none of it; the concierge then offers you a prepared e-mail to our support address, which you send yourself from your e-mail program. We handle it like any e-mail to us (see "Forms and customer service").

So that nobody overloads the service, we count requests and costs per session and per IP address. For this we store the IP address only as a checksum, for at most two days.

Legal basis: answering your request and pre-contractual steps (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR); for the anonymised copy, our legitimate interest in checking the quality of the answers (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Requests through AI assistants

If you use an AI assistant of your own (for example a chat service on your device), it can use our interface for assistants to search products, ask for prices and shipping costs and give you a link to the cart or the payment page. Only you can pay, on the payment page.

If an assistant sends us a corporate gifts request or a back-in-stock notice on your behalf, we receive the same details as through our forms (e-mail address, name, company, quantity, message; or e-mail address, product and country) and process them for the same purpose and on the same legal basis — see the sections above. The assistant must ask for your consent first; we refuse requests without it. Logo previews an assistant asks for are processed by our image system like uploads on our page (see "Logo preview for corporate gifts").

Carts an assistant creates with us are stored without personal data, for at most 24 hours. What your assistant itself does with your data is governed by its provider's privacy policy.

Images, fonts and YouTube

Product images come from our own image server sam.sonnenglas.net, our fonts from our own server. We do not embed Google Fonts or Adobe Fonts.

Some older stories and our awards page contain YouTube videos. Opening such a page loads nothing from YouTube: you see a preview image from our server and a notice. Only when you click the video does your browser load it from YouTube (youtube-nocookie.com); without JavaScript the click opens the video on youtube.com. Google Ireland Limited then receives your IP address and browser details and may store data on your device, also in the USA. By clicking you consent to this (Section 25(1) TDDDG, Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR); without a click nothing happens. Google privacy policy

What we do not use

No Google Analytics, no Google Tag Manager, no pixels from Google, Meta, TikTok or others, no advertising or tracking cookies, no social media plugins, no live chat from another provider (our own concierge is described in "Sonnenglas concierge"), no CAPTCHA outside Stripe's payment form (see "Paying with Stripe"). Links to our profiles on Instagram, LinkedIn, X and YouTube are plain links — you only reach the provider when you click them.

Who else receives data

Our own systems (xhosa, Indaba, SAM, Anansi) run on servers of hosting providers in the EU that act on our behalf. Beyond that we only pass data to the parties named above, and to tax advisers and authorities where the law requires it — never to third parties for advertising, and we do not sell data.

Some providers are based in the USA or may process data there: Cloudflare, Stripe (for US orders and Link), Amazon Pay (only for deliveries to the USA), Intuition Machines (hCaptcha in Stripe's payment form), Google, Postmark, and OpenRouter with the image models of OpenAI and Google, the language models Claude by Anthropic and Gemini by Google, and Amazon Web Services as a possible operator of these models. We base these transfers on the adequacy decision for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where the recipient is certified, otherwise on EU standard contractual clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR).

How long we keep data

As long as we need it for the purpose — the specific periods are given in each section above. Then we delete it, unless the law requires longer retention (for example for invoices) or we need it to establish or defend legal claims.

Your rights

You have the right of access (Art. 15 GDPR), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction of processing (Art. 18) and data portability (Art. 20). You can withdraw any consent at any time with effect for the future (Art. 7(3)). Just write to info@sonnenglas.net — free of charge; we answer within one month.

Right to object (Art. 21 GDPR): where we process data based on our legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR), you can object at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation. You can object to marketing e-mails at any time without giving reasons.

You can also complain to a data protection supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR). Ours is the Unabhängiges Landeszentrum für Datenschutz Schleswig-Holstein (ULD), Holstenstraße 98, 24103 Kiel, Germany.

We make no automated decisions within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR. Stripe's automatic fraud check can decline a payment; you can then ask for a person to review it.

For customers in the USA

We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. "Do Not Track" signals from your browser change nothing, because we do not track you across websites anyway. You can request access, correction and deletion at info@sonnenglas.net.

Changes

If what the website does with data changes, we update this policy first. The version on this page applies.

Last updated: 7 November 2026