Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible

The controller responsible for this website under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is Select Media GmbH, Wiener Strasse 134, 3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria, FN 356604 v.

For any question about your data, or to exercise your rights, write to office@selectmedia.at. We have not appointed a data protection officer, as the law does not require one for our activities.

2. At a glance

• No cookies are set by this website.
• Visits are counted with cookieless statistics that do not identify you or follow you across websites.
• The newsletter is sent only to people who have confirmed their subscription by e-mail.
• Advertising is counted as daily totals only; there is no personalised or behavioural advertising and no third-party advertising network.
• We do not sell personal data and we do not use it for automated decisions about you.

3. Visiting the website

3.1 Delivering the website and keeping it secure

When you open a page, your browser sends technical information that is needed to deliver it: your IP address, the page requested, the date and time, your browser and device type, and the page you came from. The website is delivered and protected by Cloudflare, Inc. (USA), which processes this information on our behalf to serve pages quickly and to defend the site against attacks and abuse. Technical logs are kept only briefly, generally a few days.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in operating a secure and reliable website (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

3.2 Cookies and storage on your device

This website does not set cookies. It stores one piece of information on your device, and only after you confirm that you are of legal age: a note in your browser's local storage (cj_age_verified) so that the age question is not shown on every page. It stays in your browser and is never sent to us. Because it is needed to show this website only to adults, it does not require consent. You can delete it at any time in your browser settings; the age question will then appear again.

3.3 Visitor statistics

To understand which articles are read, we use two statistics services that work without cookies and without identifying visitors: Cloudflare Web Analytics (Cloudflare, Inc., USA) and Plausible Analytics (Plausible Insights OÜ, Estonia, with servers in the EU). They record figures such as the pages visited, the website you came from, your country, the type of device and browser, and how fast the page loaded. They do not create a profile of you, do not follow you across websites, and do not store your IP address in a way that identifies you. We also count how often each article is read, as a simple total per article.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in understanding how our website is used and improving it (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

3.4 Advertising

Advertisements on this website are booked directly with us. Your browser picks which advertisement to show from the current bookings. We count how often an advertisement was visible and how often it was clicked, as daily totals per advertisement, placement, device type and country. No cookie, identifier or profile is used for this, and no advertising network is involved. When you click an advertisement you go to the advertiser's own website, where the advertiser's privacy policy applies; the link may carry a label telling the advertiser that the visit came from Cigar Journal, but no personal data about you.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in reporting reach to our advertisers (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

3.5 Protection against spam and automated abuse

The newsletter sign-up and unsubscribe forms are protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks technical signals from your browser, together with your IP address, to tell people from automated programs. It is loaded only when you use one of these forms. Your IP address is also used briefly to limit repeated submissions and is not stored with your subscription.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in protecting the forms and our subscribers from abuse (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

3.6 Search

When you use the search, your search words are used to find matching articles. They are not stored with any information about you.

3.7 Embedded videos, links and other websites

Some articles may contain a video from YouTube (in its privacy-enhanced mode) or Vimeo (with tracking switched off). When such a video player loads, your browser connects to that provider, which receives your IP address and technical information under its own privacy policy.

Links to our social media profiles, to our webshop at shop.cigarjournal.com, to our digital edition at digital.cigarjournal.com and to other websites take you to services with their own privacy policies. This policy covers only www.cigarjournal.com.

4. The newsletter

4.1 Subscribing

If you subscribe, we use your e-mail address to send you the Cigar Journal newsletter. The subscription is confirmed by e-mail (double opt-in): nothing is sent until you click the link in our confirmation e-mail. As proof of your consent we record when and where you subscribed, the version of the sign-up form and the version of this privacy policy that applied at the time. Subscriptions are managed with Brevo (Sendinblue SAS, France).

Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR), which you can withdraw at any time with effect for the future.

4.2 Sending and measuring the newsletter

The newsletter is sent through Elastic Email (Elastic Email Inc.). To learn what our readers find useful, we measure whether a newsletter was opened and which links were clicked, using a small image in the e-mail and links that pass through the sending service. This is part of the consent you give when subscribing. If you would rather not be measured, you can unsubscribe at any time, or display e-mails without loading images.

4.3 Unsubscribing

Every newsletter contains an unsubscribe link, and many e-mail programs also show an unsubscribe button. You can also use our unsubscribe page or write to us. After you unsubscribe we keep your e-mail address on a suppression list, only to make sure you are not sent the newsletter again (Art. 6(1)(c) and (f) GDPR).

4.4 How long we keep newsletter data

We keep your subscription data for as long as you are subscribed. After you unsubscribe, the record of your consent is kept for up to three years to prove that the newsletter was sent lawfully, and your address stays on the suppression list for as long as needed to honour your unsubscription.

5. Contacting us

If you write to us by e-mail, we use your message and contact details to answer you. We keep the correspondence for as long as needed to deal with your request and as required by law (Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR).

6. Webshop, subscriptions and the digital edition

Print and digital subscriptions and single issues are sold in our webshop at shop.cigarjournal.com, and the digital edition is available at digital.cigarjournal.com. These services have their own terms and privacy information, which apply when you use them.

7. Service providers and transfers outside the EU

We use the following service providers, which process data only on our instructions and under a data processing agreement:

• Cloudflare, Inc. (USA): delivery and security of the website, image storage, visitor statistics (Web Analytics) and spam protection (Turnstile).
• Neon, Inc. (USA), with servers in Frankfurt, Germany: the database of our publishing system.
• Plausible Insights OÜ (Estonia): visitor statistics.
• Brevo (Sendinblue SAS, France): newsletter subscriptions.
• Elastic Email Inc.: sending the newsletter.

Where a provider processes data outside the EU or the European Economic Area, the transfer is covered by an adequacy decision of the European Commission, such as the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, or by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. We may also disclose data where the law requires it or to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

8. Your rights

You have the right to:

• know what data we hold about you and receive a copy of it;
• have incorrect data corrected;
• have your data deleted or its processing restricted;
• receive data you gave us in a common machine-readable format;
• object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and at any time to the use of your data for direct marketing;
• withdraw your consent at any time, without affecting what was done before.

To use these rights, write to office@selectmedia.at. We reply within one month. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. In Austria this is the Datenschutzbehörde, Barichgasse 40–42, 1030 Vienna, dsb@dsb.gv.at, www.dsb.gv.at.

9. Adults only

This website covers tobacco products and is intended only for adults of legal smoking age in their country. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.

10. Security

All connections to this website are encrypted (HTTPS), access to our publishing system is limited to our staff, and our providers are chosen for their security standards.

11. Changes to this policy

We update this policy when our website or the law changes. The date at the top shows when it was last updated.