Privacy policy

Controller

The controller for processing on guideus.dev is Umut Serifler, GuideUs, Weichselstrasse 29, 10247 Berlin, Germany, email: umut@umuts.dev (see the imprint).

This policy covers customers who create an account and write guides (hosts and office customers, "customers") and the people who read those guides ("readers").

Where office customers put personal data into their guides, for example the names and contact details of contact persons, GuideUs processes it on the customer's behalf under Art. 28 GDPR, and the customer is the controller for it. The basis is the data processing agreement. How roles are split for hosts' content is [zu bestätigen].

Customer data

Account: email address, display name, sign-in method (email and password, or a Google account) and an identifier from the sign-in service. GuideUs never receives or stores your password; only the sign-in service Firebase Authentication holds it.

Guides: text, photos, voice recordings, the address of the property or site, opening hours, places, floor plans, announcements and named contact persons, as you enter them.

Billing: customer and subscription identifiers at the payment providers, payment status and invoices; for office customers also company name, address and VAT ID. Card and bank details never reach GuideUs. We also store your AI usage per month, records of cancellations and records of acceptance of the data processing agreement.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (contract), and Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR for statutory retention duties.

Service providers

Google Cloud (Google Cloud EMEA Ltd., Ireland): runs the website in Belgium, which produces server logs with IP addresses. Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR; for the logs, (f) (secure operation).

Supabase: database and file storage (photos, voice recordings, logos) in Frankfurt am Main. Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.

Firebase Authentication (Google): sign-in and account identity. Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR. Place of processing [zu bestätigen].

Gemini (Google): AI drafts and translations, only when you start them in the studio. Your content, including photos and voice recordings, is then sent to Google and processed outside the EU. Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR. The transfer basis, and whether the content is used for training: [zu bestätigen].

Google Places: looking up places you add to a guide; only your search words are sent. Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.

Stripe (Stripe Payments Europe Ltd., Ireland): payments and invoices for office plans, and card payments for hosting plans. Art. 6(1)(b) and (c) GDPR. Stripe is itself the controller for payment data.

RevenueCat (USA): manages hosting subscriptions; not used for office customers. Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.

Grafana Labs (data centre in Germany): technical monitoring to find faults. It records requests to every page (path, time, status, duration); on the sign-in pages and in the studio also errors, load times and session data including the IP address. Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (legitimate interest in a stable service). Retention [zu bestätigen].

Resend: sending emails, currently cancellation confirmations. Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR. Place of processing [zu bestätigen].

Cloudflare only manages our domain name; the website's traffic does not pass through it.

Where a provider processes data outside the EEA, the transfer relies on an adequacy decision (Art. 45 GDPR) or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46 GDPR). The basis for each provider is [zu bestätigen].

Retention

We keep account and guide data for as long as your account exists.

What you delete (a guide, a section, your account) is hidden everywhere at once and can be restored for 90 days. After that, our daily automatic deletion removes it from the service; we delete it by hand earlier if you ask us to, or if an automatic run fails. The deletion keeps an encrypted copy that only we can decrypt, solely to undo a deletion made by mistake, for 30 more days; after that the copy is permanently destroyed, and if you ask us to, we destroy it sooner [zu bestätigen].

We keep invoices for the statutory period (up to 10 years under § 147 AO and § 257 HGB) [zu bestätigen]. Server logs at Google Cloud are deleted after 30 days [zu bestätigen].

Your rights

You have the right of access (Art. 15 GDPR), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction of processing (Art. 18), data portability (Art. 20) and to object to processing based on legitimate interests (Art. 21).

You may complain to a data protection supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR), for example the Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information.

No automated decision-making within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR takes place.

Readers of guides

Readers never pay, never create an account and never sign in. Reading a guide never calls an AI.

Open guides (addresses under /g/ and /d/, and our customers' own domains) set no cookies, store nothing in the browser and use no tracking. No browser monitoring runs on reader pages.

We count views per guide, section, language and day, without any identifier of the reader. As with any website, Google Cloud keeps server logs and Grafana keeps technical records (page, time, status, duration); whether these include the IP address is [zu bestätigen]. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.

Passcode-protected office guides (/p/): after a valid access code is entered, we set one strictly necessary cookie whose name starts with gu_pg_. It holds only the guide's number, the number of the code used and an expiry date, is sealed against changes and lasts at most 30 days, or until the code expires.

To stop codes being guessed, we count attempts per IP address. What we store is not the IP address but a hash made with a secret key. Counters unused for more than one hour are deleted by a scheduled run once a day [zu bestätigen]. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.

If you tap the map on a place, your device loads the map directly from Google Maps, and Google receives your IP address. Without that tap no map is loaded.

The customer who publishes a guide is responsible for its content, including any people named in it.

Cookies

On the sign-in pages and in the studio we use strictly necessary cookies: for signing in, the open account, the chosen language and, at sign-up, the chosen product line. Google's sign-in service stores data in the browser for this. The legal basis is § 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG.

When a visit arrives through one of our advertising links with a campaign tag, we store that tag in a cookie to see which link led to a sign-up. Whether this cookie is strictly necessary is [zu bestätigen].

On reader pages there is only the access cookie for protected guides described above. We set no cookies for advertising or analytics, and so show no consent banner.

Contact

Please send questions about data protection and requests about your rights to umut@umuts.dev.

We have not appointed a data protection officer because there is no obligation to [zu bestätigen].