Social Privacy Statement
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Privacy Statement
This Social Media Channel is provided by Bayer (Proprietary) Limited | 0210 | South Africa (hereinafter „us “or „we “). For further information regarding the provider of the Social Media Channel, please refer to our imprint.
Handling of personal data
In the following we wish to provide you with information on how we handle your personal data when you use our Social Media Channel. Unless otherwise indicated in the following chapters, the legal basis for the handling of your personal data results from the fact that such handling is required to make available the functionalities of the Social Media Channel requested by you (Section 11(1)(a) of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013, “POPIA”). Where we process your personal data on the basis of your consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time. In certain instances, we may also process your personal data where such processing is necessary for pursuing the legitimate interests of a responsible party or a third party to whom the information is supplied, provided that such processing does not prejudice your rights and freedoms (Section 11(1)(f) of POPIA)
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Using our Social Media Channel
Using comment, message or chat functions
You can contact us directly via the comment-, message- or chat-functions available on our Social Media Channel. The information provided by you in this context will exclusively be processed for purposes of responding to you, unless other purposes are indicated in this Privacy Statement.
Information on side effects and quality complaints
This Social Media Channel is not intended or designed for communications regarding undesired side effects, lack of therapeutic effect, medication errors, grey market products/counterfeit medicine, incorrect or off-label use, quality complaints and/or other issues regarding the safeness or quality of Bayer products. If you wish to report side effects or make a quality complaint, please contact your health care professional (e.g. physician or your pharmacist), your local health authority, or use our website for the report of undesirable side effects.
If you nevertheless report to us undesirable side effects or other issues regarding the safeness or quality of Bayer products, we will be legally bound to deal with your communication and may have to contact you for clarification purposes. Subsequently, we must notify the competent health authorities of the issues reported by you. In this context, your information may be forwarded in pseudonymised form, i.e. no information by which you may be directly identified will be passed on. We may also have to forward these pseudonymised notifications to our group companies and cooperation partners, including those located outside the Republic of South Africa, to the extent these are likewise obliged to notify their respectively competent health authorities. Any such transfers will be subject to the safeguards required under Section 72 of POPIA. For more information on data protection and notification of side effects, please consult our pharmacovigilance data privacy policy.
Using a like-button function
Anyone who clicks the "Like"-button sends information to the platform provider, who again provides us with aggregated information about the average age structure, place of residence, gender, language and activity of all users who used the like-button function regarding our Social Media Channel. At no time do we receive information on individuals. For more details on the data the platform provider collects in this regard, please consult the below referenced privacy statement of the platform provider.
Social Media Management Tool
We use a social media management tool to administrate our account and manage the content we share on our Social Media Channel as well as our visitors’ engagement with us. Our processing of your personal data through the social media management tool is based on our legitimate interest in understanding and improving our engagement with visitors to our Social Media Channel (Section 11(1)(f) of POPIA). For this purpose, any of your engagements with our Social Media Channel (e.g. comments, likes, posts, messages) will be transferred and stored in our social media management tool.
The social media management tool allows us to analyse the overall engagement of our visitors with our Social Media Channel to e.g.
- Determine most active visitors
- Determine sentiment via automated and manual scoring.
- Identify and profile brand advocates and key influencers.
- Filter messages to identify and delete spam.
We keep a record of your engagement with us for as long as you keep regularly engaging with us. We delete your record of engagement if you have not engaged with us for more than 2 years.
Recipients of personal data
Commissioned processing
For the processing of your personal data we will to some extent use specialized service contractors that process your data on our behalf (e.g. for IT-Support or cloud services).
Such service contractors are carefully selected and regularly monitored by us. Based on respective data processing agreements, they will only process personal data in accordance with our instructions.
Affiliates
We may share your personal data with our affiliates from the Bayer Group, where necessary for the purposes described above. Where your personal data is transferred to affiliates located outside the Republic of South Africa, we will ensure that such transfers comply with Section 72 of POPIA, including by ensuring that the recipient is subject to a law, binding corporate rules or a binding agreement which provides an adequate level of protection that is substantially similar to the conditions for the lawful processing of personal information as set out in POPIA.
Authorities and state institutions
We may share your personal data with law enforcement agencies or other authorities and state institutions if legally required or necessary for the purposes described above.
External lawyers
In order to support legal decisions and to pursue or defend against legal claims, we may share your personal data with external lawyers.
Prospective buyers in the context of Mergers & Acquisitions
We may share your personal data with a prospective buyer in case of an acquisition, merger or any other type of corporate or asset transition involving a change of ownership or control concerning us or our services.
Processing of personal data by the platform provider
Please note that the platform provider of this Social Media Channel will also process your personal data when you visit our Social Media Channel. For further information, please consult the privacy policy of LinkedIn , Facebook or Instagram.
Information regarding your rights
The following rights are in general available to you according to applicable data privacy laws:
- Right of information about your personal data stored by us.
- Right to request the correction, deletion or restricted processing of your personal data.
- Right to object to a processing based on legitimate interest or public interest, unless we can proof that compelling, warranted reasons superseding your interests, rights and freedom exist, or that such processing is done for purposes of the assertion, exercise or defence of legal claims.
- Right to data portability. (where applicable under the relevant data privacy law).
- Right to file a complaint with the Information Regulator of South Africa (the supervisory authority responsible for monitoring and enforcing compliance with POPIA).
- Where you have provided your consent to the processing of your personal data, you may at any time withdraw your consent with future effect. Such a withdrawal will not affect the lawfulness of the processing prior to the withdrawal.
Contact
For any questions you may have with respect to data privacy, or if you wish to exercise your rights, please send us a private message via the message function on our Social Media Channel or contact our company data protection officer at the following address:
Data Privacy Officer
Bayer (Pty) Ltd
P.O. Box 143, Isando
Bayer AG is designated as representative in the European Union for our non-European legal entities in accordance with Art. 27 GDPR. For any questions you may have with respect to data privacy, please write an email to za_data_privacy@bayer.com or contact our company data protection officer at the following address:
Netiquette
As Bayer is a company in a very sensitive and regulated industry, we have to follow some specific rules under which we have to operate in any kind of communication channel. Additionally, many of our medicines are used to treat serious medical conditions. Also prescription only contraceptives require thorough medical counselling before individual usage. That is why we take great care to avoid unmonitored or unverified medical advice being posted here. Therefore Bayer reserves the right to remove posts, comments, pictures or videos from our wall at our sole discretion, when they are not consistent with our guidelines or the regulatory rules of our industry. This might be not very Web 2.0 – but as a healthcare company, we have the responsibility to manage our social media channels appropriately in line with the existing regulations.
Please take a few minutes to read the information below for more details about why content may need to be removed from our page:
Talking about products
Statements from users on our social channels do not necessarily reflect our opinion. However, we still have to meet all the regulations that govern our industry, including the prohibition of promoting any prescription only drug to an audience that does not consist of healthcare professionals. That's why we will remove any post that references a pharmaceutical brand from any company including Bayer, no matter if it is positive or negative.
Talking about medical issues
The content available on our social media channels are for informational purposes only. The information is not intended to be a substitute for individual medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please always consult your doctor or healthcare specialist for individual medical advice.
Talking about tonality
As we respect all visitors of this page in return we ask that everyone treat each other with respect, even if we don't agree from time to time. However, Bayer does reserve the right to delete any posting at its sole discretion. We don't want to censor this page but there might be a situation in which we are required to remove your post. If you use disrespectful language, your post gets pulled (and it might get screened by the social platform’s [Facebook’s] profanity filter before being posted in the first place). In addition to vulgar language, we'll be screening the following:
Personal insults or degrading comments of any kind, disparaging comments about institutions, organizations or companies, sexist or racist comments, or hate propaganda, calls to violence of any kind, calls to join in demonstrations or rallies of any political orientation
Any violation of the rights of third parties, including in particular copyrights,
Posts and comments that do not relate to the messages under discussion or are off-topic
Offering goods or services, of either a commercial or private nature, or using this social channel as an advertising space
Spam, i.e. any form of automatically generated content or repeatedly posting the same comment.
Gross or repeated violations, may lead to the exclusion of any further messages from a user and the disabling of his or her account for this social page (where applicable).
In the spirit of this community, we ask that anyone participating in the conversation keep it friendly, respectful and relevant. The style of communication on this channel should be characterized by:
Treat every other user as you would like to be treated yourself
Everyone has the right to express their own opinion. Please respect this and not try to force your opinion on anyone else.
Respect the rights of others
We believe that Social Media offers a great opportunity for dialogue and learning about contraception. We look forward to sharing and discussing with you. Let's create a space to ex-change our ideas.
Amendment of this privacy statement
We may update our Privacy Statement from time to time. Updates of our Privacy Statement will be published on our Social Media Channel. Any amendments become effective upon publication on our Social Media Channel. We therefore recommend that you regularly visit the Social Media Channel to keep yourself informed on possible updates.
Declaration as of: 19-05-2026
