Privacy

Who is responsible

Grätzleltern is run by one person: me, Jared Meek, Wien. I am responsible for your data.

Write to hallo@graetzleltern.at with any question about your data. The legal notice has the same details.

What I keep, and why

To give you the finder you signed up for (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)):

• Your account: your email address, your name, and how you sign in. Clerk keeps it for me (see below).
• What your household adds: your home’s address, your shortlist with its notes, statuses and contact log, and your settings.
• Travel times, worked out from your home to the places near it.

To keep the app secure and working (Art. 6(1)(f), my interest in a safe service): Clerk records each sign-in with its browser and IP address, and the app’s server writes errors to its log, which Fly.io keeps for 7 days.

You need an email address to have an account. Without your home address the app has nothing to measure from, so it asks for it first.

I use your data for nothing else: no advertising, no profiles, nothing sold, and no automated decisions about you.

Your household

A household shares one search. Everyone in it sees the home, the shortlist, the notes and the contact log, and can change them. The log shows who wrote each line. Other households see none of it.

Accounts join a household only when its members ask me to.

I am the only one with access to the app’s database and its backups. I look at your data only to keep the app running and fix problems, or when you ask me to.

Who else sees what

Each of these gets only what it needs for its part:

• Clerk (Clerk, Inc., USA) runs the sign-in and sends its emails. It keeps your account: your email address, name, how you sign in, and your sessions with their browser and IP address. Clerk does this for me as my processor. For the details you give to create and use your account, its data processing agreement also makes Clerk a controller in its own right, under Clerk’s privacy policy. Clerk’s servers sit behind Cloudflare, which also checks that a person, not a bot, is creating an account.
• Google, if you sign in with Google: Google learns that you are signing in here, and passes your name, email address and profile picture to Clerk.
• Fly.io (Fly.io, Inc., USA) hosts the app and its database on servers in Frankfurt. Every request passes through Fly.io on its way to the app, so it sees your IP address.
• The City of Vienna’s address service (data.wien.gv.at) gets the address you type, to suggest matches and to find the one you save. The app’s server asks it, so the city doesn’t learn who is asking.
• My own route planner, on my server in Vienna, works out the travel times from your home’s point on the map. No one else gets the point for this.
• OpenFreeMap (Hyperknot Software Kft., Hungary) sends your browser the map’s streets and names. Your browser asks for them directly, through Cloudflare, so both see your IP address and the part of the map you are looking at. OpenFreeMap sets no cookies and deletes its logs after 7 days. I use it to show you a map (Art. 6(1)(f)).
• Backblaze (Backblaze, Inc., USA) stores the off-site copy of my backups (see How long I keep it). It is encrypted on my server before it leaves, and Backblaze has no key.

The app’s typeface comes from the app’s own server, not from Google Fonts. The map’s Show my location button uses your browser’s location on your device only, and never sends it to the app.

Cookies

The app uses only the cookies it needs to work, so it doesn’t ask first. No analytics, no tracking, no advertising.

• lang: the language you picked on this device, kept for 400 days.
• Clerk’s cookies keep you signed in: __session and __client_uat on graetzleltern.at, and __client on clerk.graetzleltern.at, the longest for 400 days. Clerk also keeps its settings in your browser’s storage.
• Cloudflare’s __cf_bm and _cfuvid on Clerk’s addresses tell people from bots. The first lasts 30 minutes, the second until you close the browser.

Outside the EU

Clerk, Fly.io and Backblaze are US companies. Clerk keeps your account mainly in Google Cloud and Cloudflare data centres, which can be outside the EU. Your data goes to each on these terms:

• Clerk: the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, under which Clerk is certified, and the EU standard contractual clauses in its data processing agreement for when the Framework can’t be relied on.
• Fly.io: the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, under which Fly.io is certified. The app and its database stay in Frankfurt.
• Backblaze: the EU standard contractual clauses in its data processing agreement. What it stores is encrypted.

How long I keep it

As long as your account exists. You can delete it in Settings, or ask me to. The app then deletes your data at once, and Clerk deletes your account. If others are still in your household, the home, shortlist, notes and log stay with them, and the lines you wrote show “a former member” instead of your name. Only your account’s ID stays, until Clerk has deleted the account and for a day after, so that signing in can’t bring it back.

Backups keep data for longer:

• Every hour a copy of the database goes to my server in Vienna, and each night on to a second machine beside it. I keep the last 48 hourly copies and one a day for 60 days.
• Every night an encrypted copy of those goes to Backblaze (USA), where each copy is kept for 30 days.
• Fly.io keeps a daily snapshot of the database’s disk for 30 days.

So a deleted account is gone from every backup within 90 days. Backups exist only to restore the app after a failure; I don’t use them for anything else.

Your rights

You have the right to:

• see what I keep about you, and get a copy of it (in Settings, Download your data)
• get your data in a file you can take to another service (the same download)
• have it corrected (most of it you can change yourself)
• have it deleted (in Settings, Delete account)
• have its use restricted, or object to it.

Write to hallo@graetzleltern.at. I answer within a month.

You can also complain to the Austrian data protection authority, the Datenschutzbehörde: dsb.gv.at.

Changes

When I change how the app uses your data, I update this page and the date at the top.