Privacy Policy

1. General 

This Privacy Policy applies to personal data collected by on our behalf of Heineken Ireland Limited though our website dedicated to our brand Heineken and other Heineken Ireland brands in Ireland, available at https://www.heineken.com/ie/en/home (the "Website") or through one of our Apps or social channels where we, HEINEKEN Ireland Sales Limited (Ladyswell Brewery, Cork) collect certain personal data. HEINEKEN Ireland Sales Limited (‘we’ or ‘us’) is the controller of the Personal Data collected and processed. We are part of the HEINEKEN Group. However, where processing is undertaken for the purpose of globally strategic reporting & insights and marketing activations, HEINEKEN International B.V. is considered to be a separate data controller of your Personal Data.

Please read this Privacy Policy carefully as it contains important information to help you understand our practices regarding any personal information that you give to us or that we collect otherwise in the context of the Website (“Personal Data”).

2. Are You the Legal Purchase Age

You must not provide us with your personal data if you are not of legal age to purchase alcohol in in Ireland or the country you reside in or the country in which you are accessing the website, our app or to enter one of our promotional competitions.

If we receive notice or believe that someone under the legal age has provided us with personal information, we will make a reasonable effort to remove such personal data from our records.

3. What Personal Data We Collect and How We Use your Personal Data

Personal Data is any information what can be used to identify, directly or indirectly, a specific individual.

You can use the majority of our Website without being required to provide any Personal Data to us. For certain services or activities you will need to provide Personal Data for us to be able to provide you the requested service or product or for you to participate in the activity.

Requested information on the Website marked with an asterisk is mandatory. If you do not provide the requested information, we will not be able to deliver the service or product to you or you cannot participate in the activity. In addition to information you are required to provide to us in order to participate in activities/campaigns, we collect certain information when you visit our Website.

Personal data we collect includes:

• Personal data you provide to us directly;
• Personal data we collect automatically; and
• Personal data we collect from third parties.

Personal Data you provide to us, includes the following:

• Contact details (such as name, address, phone number, email address) and demographic information (such as your date of birth, age or age range and gender).
• Online registration information (such as password and other authentication information).
• Payment information and personal details when you are making a purchase (such as you credit card details, banking details, billing and shipping information, phone number).
• As part of online questionnaires (such as responses to any customer satisfaction surveys or market research).
• When you enter a competition or take advantage of a promotion.
• When you attend any of our promotion events.
• When you contact us with an enquiry of ask us to provide you with information.
• When you register on one of our websites or mobile apps.
• When you leave reviews or comments on our site or one of our social pages.
• When you sign up for one or more of our loyalty programmes.
• Your marketing preference.
• Information provided when you communicate with us via social media sites, third party apps or similar technology.

• Participation in campaigns, prize draws, contests

If you take part in contests or events (including prize with purchase promotions (including giveaways, instant wins and online, mobile, social media and app entries), loyalty and reward schemes, activity challenge, sweepstake, scratch-card and raffle style promotions (including instant wins and online, mobile, social media and app entries); sampling and point of sales promotions and geo-targeted activities (including gamification and SMS) you consent to receiving marketing communications from us. We may use your personal data to send you targeted marketing communications through channels such as email, SMS, social media, mobile, in app and push notifications, and post about our products and services, and those of our subsidiaries, affiliates and parent companies, and their related businesses. This information will be retained by us for 24 months at which time we will contact you giving you the option to specially opt out of future marketing communication. You have the right to opt-out at any time from receipt of further marketing communications using the opt-out option.

• Winning participation in campaigns, prize draws, contests

If you take part in contests or events (including prize with purchase promotions (including giveaways, instant wins and online, mobile, social media and app entries), loyalty and reward schemes, activity challenge, sweepstake, scratch-card and raffle style promotions (including instant wins and online, mobile, social media and app entries); sampling and point of sales promotions and geo-targeted activities (including gamification and SMS), depending on the campaign, prize draw or contest you will be asked for your name, email address, home address, telephone number and answers to open questions in order to ‘win’. If needed to send you the prizes per regular mail (e.g. as for tickets or products), we will also ask for your physical address or we may ask other specific details needed to award your prize to you. We need this information to process your participation and to be able to communicate with you about your prize or to send the prizes to you. All information in respect of delivering the prize to you will be retained by us for a maximum period of 6 months after the end of the contest. The information will not be used for other purposes if you have not explicitly been informed about these purposes and/or have been asked for prior consent.

• information when you contact us

If you visit our Website and have a question or other remark, you can submit our Contact Form. You will be asked to provide your name and email address and obviously information about your request. We will only use this information to respond to your question. We will register your requests, questions and our responses and other actions to handle your request. We will retain all information for 6 months after your question or complaint has been solved or the inquiry was closed.

• information about your visit to and use of our Website

We collect certain information when you visit our Website, such as your IP address, which web pages you visit, device category, browser, and type of internet browser, clicks and views, and your age. The information about your use of our Website and services enables us to build segments, which are groups of website visitors or customers with a number of common characteristics such as age group, gender or region. We will likely add you to one of our segments. Segments are used by us to customize the Website and to e.g. change the order of search results or where we place certain offers so you are more likely to see these. We may also use segments to show online advertisements that we think are relevant for you and to send you commercial messages.

We use this Personal Data as it is necessary in our legitimate interests to do so to promote our products and services to our consumers and website visitors, to enable us to attract more website visitors, to improve the sale of our products and services. We will retain the Personal Data for a maximum of 14 months.

• registration and creating an account on our Website

Before you make a purchase, you can create an account and provide us with a log-in name and password (which we need to process your account) and email address, first name/last name, phone number, billing address, birth date (which we will use to process your order or contact you in case of irregularities around your order). You can manage the information in your account yourself and view e.g. which purchases you have made earlier.

We will retain your account details for as long as you actively use your account. After a 2-year period of inactivity, we will delete your account. You can also request to remove your account via [email protected]. You can also opt to purchase our products as a ‘guest’. As a guest, we will save your order in our back end and create a unique customer ID which contains your contact details. If you then make another purchase, we are able to link this order to the same contact details. We do this to avoid duplication of data and to ensure we can fulfil your purchase order. You can also request to remove this data via [email protected]

• sending commercial messages:

We send you commercial messages in multiple ways. You can subscribe to receiving commercial messages (e.g. newsletter), in that case we will use the contact details (such as your email address, social media account or phone number) you have provided to send you our commercial messages. Furthermore, when you purchase a product from us, you will also automatically be added to our customer database and therefore you will receive commercial messages about similar products or services, unless you object to this processing of personal data at the time of your purchase. If you no longer wish to receive any commercial messages from us, you can unsubscribe at any time by using the unsubscribe function in each e-mail message (or read the paragraphs below for more information about how to do this).

In the case of an existing business relationship, it is in our legitimate interests to use Personal Data to send our existing customers information about our products. When we are legally required, we ask for prior consent to send you commercial messages. We will remove your contact details once you have opted-out of receiving commercial messages, unless this is also used and retained for other purposes listed in this Privacy Policy.

• personalized marketing

Information about your online searches and social media activity (such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook & Instagram) (clicks and views), your settings on our Website, your customer service requests and contact history can be combined by us. This information enables us to build a profile of your interests and to match this with your other online information (for example by using Facebook or Google Custom audience services or look-a-like services to the extent allowed under applicable law) in order for us to use different channels for relationship management and marketing of our products and services to you via e-mail, direct mail, social media, telephone or online advertising which may include personalising website marketing content and offers, in particular when we use data management platforms, so these are tailored to your preferences.

You can always opt-out of receiving our newsletter and object to our use of your Personal Data for direct marketing purposes.

We use this Personal Data as it is necessary in our legitimate interests to be able to promote our products and services to our customers and website visitors, to maintain the relevance of our brands and reputation and to grow business by serving consumers with advertising relating to our brands and to finance our Website (via online advertisements). We will ask for prior consent, when we are legally required (for example when we use data for ‘direct marketing’).

We will retain the Personal Data as specified under the relevant purposes for which the Personal Data has been collected (e.g. newsletters, account information, processing orders and payments). The Personal Data shall generally be deleted or anonymised 2 years after your last relevant activity on our Website, except where we are legally required to retain the Personal Data or where it is kept for any of the other purposes.

• maintenance and optimisation of our Website

Your Personal Data will also be used for maintenance and analysis of our Website to solve performance issues, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data, to improve the availability and user experience of the Website and to secure the Website against fraud. We log all use of our Website

Our use of your Personal Data for these purposes is necessary in our legitimate interests and the information will be retained for a maximum period of 14 months. The logs of the use of our Website will be deleted within 14 months after creation.

• participate in research activities

We may request you to participate in research activities such as: surveys, pilots, panels, focus groups, and other research activities. Depending on the research activity, we will collect different sets of Personal Data. You will always be informed prior to the research activity what Personal Data we will collect and for what purpose we will collect this Personal data.

Our use of your Personal Data for research activities is necessary in our legitimate interest to ensure we offer a good quality service and products and to further improve or based on your prior specific consent, depending on the type of research activity and which Personal Data we will collect from you. The Personal Data will be retained for a maximum period of 2 years.

• strategic reporting purposes, creating insights

The Personal Data collected by us is accessed and used by Heineken International B.V. to create aggregated strategic reports with insights which are used to identify opportunities globally and to improve our global brands, products and services.

Heineken International B.V. uses this information as it is in the legitimate interest of the HEINEKEN Group and all affiliates and subsidiaries to identify opportunities globally and to promote and improve our products and services to our customers and website visitors and to maintain the relevance of our brands and reputation. Your information will be retained for a maximum period of 6 years. We will ask for prior consent, when we are legally required (for example when we use data for ‘direct marketing’).

• Information about use of our Business-to-Business Eazle Website or App (‘BTB’)

When you download and install our BTB App Eazle, the information that we collect depends on your mobile device’s operating system and permissions. BTB needs to use certain features and data from your mobile device in order to function. For example, if you want to place an order we need to collect and link information from your web browser.

To learn more about the specific information collected by BTB, please check your device settings or review the permission information available on the particular platform (e.g. Google Play and the App Store) from which you downloaded the App.

If you are a user of our BTP please refer to the specific BTB Privacy Policy to find out how your personal data is processed while using the Eazle Website or App.

3. Purpose For Which Your Personal Data may be used

• Customer Service

We may use your personal data to provide specific services that you request from us, as well as to provide additional services that may be of interest to you. We will also use your personal data to process any orders you submit, to contact you in relation to any enquiries.

• Technical Maintenance

We use personal data for system administration purposes and to diagnose service or technology problems reported by our users or engineers, these types of problems may be associated with the IP addresses controlled by a specific web company or ISP.

• Marketing Communications

We may use your personal data to send you targeted marketing communications through channels such as email, SMS, social media, mobile, in-app and push notification, and post about our products and services, and those of our subsidiaries, affiliates, and parent companies, and any of their related businesses. This may also include using your date of birth to send you special offers around your birthday. You have the right to opt-out at any time from receipt of further marketing communications.

• Marketing and Data Analysis

We may use your personal data for marketing and data analysis, for example, to assess trends amongst our consumers and what people are saying about our products, to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of our marketing campaigns and promotions, and to analyse the number and types of visitors to our websites, purchasers of our products, and/or users of our apps (including the locations from which such visitors / users access our websites and apps). We often aggregate personal data for these purposes so that it no longer identifies any particular individual. We may also use the personal data of our customers to undertake data analysis (including third party service providers to perform such analysis) to determine whether our resellers are purchasing the relevant products from us and to ensure our e-commerce terms are being complied with.

• Authentication and Access Control

We may use your personal data to authenticate your access to our websites or apps and to determine which content to provide you and / or whether you should be granted access to certain content (for example checking your age or location to ensure you are of Legal Purchase Age in the jurisdiction where you are located). We may also use your personal data to verify your identity when responding to any requests to exercise your rights under applicable law.

• To Comply with Legal Obligations and / or protect against legal claims or liability

We may use your Personal Data to comply with our legal obligations protect us against legal claims, or to detect, protect, or defend us/or other third parties against error, negligence, breach of contract, theft, fraud, or other illegal or harmful activity, to comply with our audit and security requirements, or to audit compliance with our corporate policies, procedures, legal, or contractual obligations.

• Customer Service

We will use your Personal Data to provide specific services that you request from us, as well as to provide additional services that may be of interest. We will also use your personal data to process any orders you submit, to contact you in relation to any enquiries, orders or matters relating to your account and to maintain your accounts and manage transactions such as credit card payments for any products that you order from us or our agents, or for the fulfilment of such transactions (e.g. delivery) or to answer any questions you may have. We may also use your personal data to notify you about changes to our services, our terms and conditions or this Privacy and Cookie Notice.

4. How We Share Your Personal Data

As member of a global business, we share Personal Data and information we have acquired via ‘cookies’ with Heineken International B.V. for reasons as strategic reporting and for creating insights and marketing activation as further described under 2. in this Policy. We will only share such Personal Data and cookie data when we are allowed to do so by law. This means that we will ask for prior consent, if this should be the lawful basis (for example when we share cookie data). When we are allowed to rely on our legitimate interest, we will do so. This is the case when we create aggregated marketing insights or segments. 

We may need to share Personal Data with third parties to help us provide services and products to you and to run our Website. These third parties are:

• HEINEKEN group companies for the purpose of storing Personal Data processed via the Website, due to shared IT systems
• service providers where this is needed to provide us with a service and to provide data analytics services
• service providers that help us organize campaigns and promotions
• first and third party advertising companies
• media agencies for marketing purposes and research purposes
• social media providers
• HEINEKEN group companies in the event of any reorganization, merger, sale, joint venture, assignment, transfer or other disposition of all or any portion of our business, assets or stock (including in connection with any bankruptcy or similar proceedings)
• in case HEINEKEN sells all or some of the assets or shares of a HEINEKEN group company to which Personal Data was transferred to a third party, your Personal Data may be provided to this third party.

These parties may be located in the European Union or other countries in the European Economic Area or elsewhere in the world.  When Personal Data is stored by us outside the EEA we will ensure an adequate level of protection of the transferred Data. We require service providers to use appropriate measures to protect the confidentiality and security of the Personal Data.

We may also need to provide Personal Data to law enforcement bodies in order to comply with any legal obligation or court order.

5. Legal Basis for Processing of Personal Data

We will only process your personal data where we have a legal basis to do so. The legal basis will depend on the purposes for which we have collected and use your personal data. In almost every case the legal basis will be one of the following:

• Consent

We rely on consent for targeted marketing communications. We may advertise our products, services, and events through a variety of different channels and rely on your consent to do so. As part of this, we may work with advertising partners. These partners have their own privacy policies and consent mechanisms for their customers, in addition to Heineken Ireland’s controls. You can withdraw your consent at any time, including by clicking “unsubscribe” link included in any marketing communications we send you or by entering your email in the box provided on our website.

• Our Legitimate Business Interests

Where it is necessary for us to understand our customers, promote our services and operate effectively as a multinational beverage company, provided in each case that this is done in a legitimate way where they are not outweighed by your privacy and other rights. For example, we will rely on this legal basis when we conduct certain market analysis to understand our consumers in sufficient detail so we can create new products and improve the profile of our brands.

• Performance of a Contract with You

This would also apply where we need to take steps prior to entering into a contract with you. For example, where you have purchased a product from us and we need to use your contact details and payment information in order to process your order and send the product to you.

• Compliance with Law

Where we are subject to a legal obligation and need to use your personal data in order to comply with that obligation.

6. Security of Personal Data

We will take appropriate technical, physical, and organizational measures to protect the Personal Data collected through the Website from misuse or accidental, unlawful or unauthorized destruction, loss, alteration, disclosure, acquisition or access, that are consistent with applicable privacy and data security laws and regulations. However, no internet-based site can be 100% secure and we cannot be held responsible for unauthorised or unintended access that is beyond our control. Our Website may contain links to other websites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices, content or security used by such other websites, which shall not be governed by this Privacy Policy. We advise you to always carefully read the privacy policies on these other websites.

7. Retention of Your Personal Data

We will retain your Personal Data for as long as legally required or for as long as necessary to provide you with any requested services or for any of the other purposes listed in this Privacy Policy. The specific retention terms are listed in this Privacy Policy for each of the relevant purposes. We will take reasonable steps to destroy or de-identify Personal Data we hold if it is no longer needed for the purposes set out above or after the expiration of the defined retention term. Please note that where you unsubscribe from our marketing communications, we may keep a record of your contact details to ensure we do not send you further marketing communication in future.

Keeping your personal data up to date:

We want to ensure that Personal Data we hold is accurate and kept up to date. We need to do this both to comply with our obligations under data protection law, and for practical day to day management of our relationship with you. For these and other reasons related to administering your relationship with us, please notify us if any change in your information as soon as is practicable, so that records can be updated.

8. Cookies

A major part of the information referred to in this Privacy Policy is collected via our use of cookies and similar techniques. Cookies are small text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded and may be stored on your user device, e.g. your computer, smartphone or table. Techniques we use that may be similar to cookies are tracking pixels, Java scripts, tags and web beacons. These cookies and similar techniques are sometimes necessary to remember your account settings, language and country, but also enable us to measure and analyse your behaviour on our Website and for showing you personalised advertisements on our Website or on third party websites. Where required, you will be asked for consent to our use of cookies. To view more information on what cookies we use and how we use them please review our separate Cookie Policy, which is also available in the footer of this Website.

9. Social Media

You may choose to share information on our Website via social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. This means that the information you share, with name and preferences, shall be visible to visitors of your personal pages. We advise you to carefully read the privacy policies of the social media parties as these are applicable to the processing of your Personal Data by these parties.

10. Children's Privacy

The Website is not intended for use by individuals under the age of 18 We do not knowingly collect Personal Data from individuals under the age of 18.

11. Your Rights to Access, Rectification, Deletion, Restriction, Objection and Data Portability

You  have the right to request access to and deletion of your personal data, to request restricted processing or to stop processing or using your personal data for profiling, to receive an overview of the personal data that you have provided to us in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format. You also have the right to file a complaint with your local data protection authority at dataprivacy.ie – however we would request that if you have an issue that we can help with, you contact us directly at [email protected]. All your rights are subject to applicable data protection laws and other relevant laws and regulations, to the HEINEKEN Privacy Procedures and other HEINEKEN guidelines. However, you always have the right to object to our use of your Personal Data for direct marketing communications, and when you do so, we will accommodate your request.  Where you have provided consent to our use of your Personal Data, you have the right to withdraw your consent without this effecting the lawfulness of our use of this Data before your withdrawal. 

Please note that if you make use of (some of) your choices and rights, you may not be able to use, in whole or in part, our Website services anymore. 

12. Updates

We will keep this Privacy Policy under review and make updates from time to time. Any changes to this Privacy Policy will be posted on our Website page and to the extent reasonably possible, will be communicated to you. This privacy policy was last updated in February 2024.