Global Instagram Channel @bayerofficial, Bayer AG

[#Data Privacy Statement#]

This Instagram social media channel (hereinafter the “Social Media Channel“) is provided by Bayer AG (hereinafter “us” or “we”). For further information regarding the provider of the Website, 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 (Art. 6(1)(b) General Data Protection Regulation).

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 may contact you for clarification purposes. Subsequently, we have to notify the competent health authorities of the issues reported by you. In this context, your information may be forwarded in pseudonymized form, i.e. no information by which you may be directly identified will be passed on. We may also have to forward these pseudonymized notifications to our group companies and cooperation partners, to the extent these are likewise obliged to notify their respectively competent health authorities. 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 with regard to 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 (Art. 6(1)(f) General Data Protection Regulation). 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 analyze 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.

Social Media Listening

We conduct so called social media listening. Social media listening is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand on social media channels. We use social media listening services exclusively on publicly accessible content to

Perform keyword searches across social media channels,
View the volume of conversation whenever users interact with our brand,
View visual analytic displays of conversation trends over a specified time range,
Search, filter and analyze conversation streams and
Monitor publicly available opinions, statements or other interactions on social media channels from certain individuals or entities that are important for us and our business (so called thought leaders).

We use the insights we receive from social media listening to

Better understand sentiment, intent, mood and market trends as well as to better understand our customers’ or other stakeholders’ needs and thereby improve our services and products and
Identify 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 safety or quality of our products.

We perform social media listening on the legal basis of the statutory permission which allows a processing that is necessary for pursuing a legitimate interest, namely the above-described purposes on what we use the insights of social media listening for (Art. 6(1)(f) General Data Protection Regulation).

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).

This includes in particular also:

Sprinklr Inc. (registered office 30 W 21st St, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10010 USA), which supports a comprehensive customer experience management platform.

Unicepta GmbH (Widenmayerstraße 16, 80538 Munich, Germany) which provides data-driven insights and analytics in the form of quarterly or bi-annual performance reports.

Essence MediaCom (registered office 1-3, 1st Avenue Kings Cross, London N1C 4AG, UK) which provides integrated media planning and buying solutions across digital platforms.

Paradowski Creative, 349 Marshall Ave. Ste. 300, St. Louis, MO 63119, USA, which creates content and provides community management support.

Celine Renee – Social Media Management (Subbelrather Straße 184, 50823 Köln) which supports content creation, community management support, reporting and performance reports.

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.

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 outside the EEA

Your personal data may be transferred to countries outside the European Economic Area, including such for which the European Commission has not issued an adequacy decision. If no adequacy decision exists for the respective country, we will ensure an adequate level of protection for your personal data by concluding so-called standard contractual clauses - adopted by the European Commission - with the recipient (to obtain a copy, please refer to the contact details below), or we will ask for your explicit consent to the transfer.

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 statement of the platform provider of this Social Media Channel.

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 are able to 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 defense of legal claims;
Right to data portability;
Right to file a complaint with a data protection authority;
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 make use of our contact form or contact our company data protection officer at the following address:

Data Privacy Officer
Bayer AG
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Allee 1
51373 Leverkusen, Germany

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: April 09, 2025