Privacy Policy

Thank you for your interest in our internet website.

We place great value on the protection of your data and privacy. Here we inform you, the user, about the kinds of data, the extent and purpose of the data collection and the usage of personal data on this website by ourselves, the data controllers. With regard to the terminology used, e.g. „controller“ or „processor“, please refer to the definitions in Article 4 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Data Controller, Data Protection Officer

Responsible authority according to the Data Protection Laws, in particular the EU-General Data Protection Regulation, (GDPR) is:

Tim Reeves, Carolastr. 1A, D-04736 Waldheim

Email:

We do not have an appointed representative or data protection officer.

1. Data protection

We operate this website as private individuals. There is no business operation directly connected to this website. Files of official relevance (with personal data and legal retention periods, e.g. tax files) therefore do not arise. If you contact us in regard of any of the offers noted, but not directly bookable on the website, then a contract may arise by means of email or verbally, but this is then not a matter of this website.

Legal basis

Our privacy and data protection policy is based on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union. For German citizens and authorities it is extended by the new version of the Bundesdatenschutzgesetzes (BDSG). Both laws came into force on the 25. May 2018.

Which data is protected?

Article 4 GDPR and § 46 BDSG both define data to be protected as: any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person. This also includes IP addresses and content data such as comments on blog articles.

Your rights as data subject

By way of the above contact data you may exercise the following rights at any time:

  • Right to access:You may request, in accordance with Article 15 GDPR, disclosure of whether we have stored or process any data concerning your person. You have the right to receive copies of the data, and of any further pertinent information thereabaout.
  • Right to correction: In accordance with Article 16 GDPR you have the right to demand the completion of incomplete data concerning yourself, and / or the correction of any incorrect data about yourself.
  • Right to erasure: In accordance with Article 17 GDPR you can require that data about yourself is deleted without undue delay. Legal restrictions may however take precedence.
  • Right to restriction of data processing: according to Article 18 GDPR, inasmuch as the data concerned cannot be erased due to a legal restriction.
  • Right to objection: to the processing of your available data in accordance with Article 21 GDPR.
  • Right to revocation: You may revoke a given approval in accordance with Article 7 Section 3 GDPR with effect for the future.
  • Right to data portability: If you have agreed to the data processing or have entered into a contract with us, you may demand to receive the data concerning you that you have provided us with, in accordance with Article 20 GDPR, and to demand the transmission to another responsible party.
  • Right to complaint: You may approach the responsible authority with a complaint in accordance with Article 77 GDPR at any time. Your responsible authority varies according to your residence, workplace or the suspected infringement.

2. Personal data gathered by this website

Voluntary input by way of this website

Establishment of contact

Our contact form does not store data on the webserver – it sends us an email to the above address. Our exchange of emails contains personal data. This data will be used and recorded solely for the purpose of dealing with your concern or for the establishment of contact and the related technical administration. The legal basis for our processing of your data is our legitimate interest in dealing with your concern in accordance with Article 6 Section 1 Clause f GDPR. If the conclusion of a contract is at issue, a further legal basis for processing is Article 6 Section 1 Clause b GDPR. The data provided by you remains with us until you request its deletion, revoke your consent to the recording of the data, or the need for the data recording lapses. Mandatory legal provisions – especially retention periods – retain precedence.

Comments

At the end of most pages of this website you may find comments left by users, and the possibility to submit your own comments. Comments are not published automatically, instead they are published only after after we have assessed the content. We will delete or edit a comment if we find the content offensive, insulting, defamatory or otherwise objectionable. If we edit a comment, e.g. to remove expletives, we will note in a reply that we have done so.

To leave a comment, name and email are marked as mandatory fields; note that the email address is not published. We accept it if you want to comment anonymously – in this case please enter fictitious data (e.g. „Anonymous“ + „anonymous@anonymous.com“).

Comment text, name, email address and time of entry are recorded in the database of our website, and are visible for us as administrators. Your IP-Address is stored truncated, so that only a geographical area can be identified, but not your personal internet connection. If you enter your true email address, your previously stipulated privacy rights apply.

Comments which we reject we delete immediately. Published comments with their accompanying data are preserved for an indefinite period of time, until they are removed due to the request of the person who left the comment, due to a legal obligation or due to our own decision. With the removal we irrevocably delete all associated data.

Legal basis: The recording of your comments is based on your consent, in accordance with Article 6 Section 1 Clause a GDPR. You may revoke a consent previously given at any time. All it takes is an informal notification to us via email or the contact form. The legality of the previous data processing remains unaffected by the revocation.

Due to security concerns we have decided against using the Gravatar-Service, which involves calls to gravatar.com to get avatar pictures of commenters based on their email addresses.

Comment subscriptions

Wherever you can leave a comment, you can also subscribe to be notifed of further comments by email. You can select all comments on the article, or only answers to your own comment. Which comments your email has subscribed to is stored in the database of the website – but no further personal information is stored. To leave a comment, you must enter an email address anyway (fantasy allowed) – but to receive emails about new comments you must obviously enter your real email address.

Duration of data storage

The criteria for the duration of data storage differ for the various types of data. Please refer to the relevant sections and the paragraph „business-related processing“ below.

Tracking

Tracking in this context means recording activities of a specific user, e.g. how a user navigates through a website, what she/he downloads or buys, and when she/he revisits the website. When large, centralised services such as Google Analytics are used for this purpose, the possibility for the service provider to track a particular persons activities across many websites arises.

We find this kind of tracking excessive and disrespectful – although it legally counts as a „legitimate interest“ of the website provider in accordance with the GDPR.

We practice „tracking“ in accordance with our own standpoint: We use the WordPress plugin WP Statistics for logging and analysing page visits, configured (a) to not set any cookies, and (b) to store the IP addresses requesting the pages anonymised (truncated). In this way no personally identifiable information is stored. Thus an „Opt-Out“ or „Opt-In“ for tracking would be meaningless – we only track the visits, not the visitors. Due to this decision multiple visits of the same visitor cannot be definitely recognised – we find your right to privacy more important.

Webserver Logs

To repel so called hacker attacks and to respond to fraudulent access, the software which answers website data requests („webserver“) logs its actions in protocol files („log files“). This infrastructure is a part of web hosting, located at a deeper level than the website itself. The storing of data in these files occurs in accordance with Article 6 Section 1 clause f. GDPR, based on our legitimate interest concerning the reliable functioning of the website.

The log files contain the following information for every access:

  • Your IP-address (see below)
  • Date and time of the access
  • The web address of the visited page (“URL”)
  • The type of the webservers response (“HTTP status code”)
  • The amount of data sent in bytes
  • The web address visited immediately previously (“Referer”)*
  • The browser and the client operating system used (“User Agent”)*

*Provided you have not suppressed these values via browser settings or browser plugin.

This website is hosted on a self-managed server, which uses a software package „fail2ban“ to protect the server against attacks. To do so, fail2ban requires the complete IP-addresses of requests in the webserver logs. As fail2ban only processes recent log entries, the log files of the previous day are deleted daily after midnight, since their purpose has then lapsed. No further analysis of the protocol data occurs.

Providing your personal data to others

We do not pass on any personal data to third parties for processing, nor for any other reason. Accordingly no transfer of personal data to third countries occurs.

External contract data processor

We (see above), as data controllers for this website, are allowed to commission the processing of your personal data by third parties on our behalf, and subject to requirements. This is regulated in Article 28 GDPR, which terms such a third party the “processor”.

We have not engaged any external data processor for our website.

3. Further topics

Cookies

A cookie is a small package of data originating from a website, which your browser deposits on your computer on behalf of that website. Every time your browser requests a particular web page, it sends any cookies (name and content), which originated from that pages website, along with the request. Cookies may contain many sorts of information, e.g. choice of viewing language, shopping cart contents, or a requirement not to be tracked. A cookie may be valid only until the browser is closed, or for a specifiable period of time (e.g. 3 months, 1 year). Cookies which are to be deleted when the browser is closed, effectively temporary information, are termed „Session-Cookies“. Cookies set by the website of a page being viewed are called first-party cookies. The most problematical types of cookie from the viewpoint of data privacy are, however, so called third-party cookies. These are not set by the website visited, but by another website which the page visited has called in the background. The most widely known example of this is Google Analytics, but there are many others.

Cookies from the security plugin WP Cerber

This website uses the excellent plugin WP Cerber to protect it against hacking and spam. In order to perform its task thoroughly, WP Cerber needs to set between 2 to 6 cookies, for the sole purpose of securing the website by detecting and mitigating malicious activity. All these cookies have randomly generated names and contain randomly generated values. No personal or sensitive data is stored in the cookies. These are domain cookies valid for 1 day – your browser will automatically delete them after 24 hours.

Here you can see which cookies have been set by WP Cerber:

  • EbGPykmLC-
  • FcBRpGP

Cookie from the plugin Simple Comment Editing

This cookie is only set after you submit a comment. It is a domain cookie and remains valid only for 5 minutes – the time in which you are allowed to edit your comment. After the 5 minutes your browser will delete it automatically. The cookie contains randomly generated data used to identify the session; it does not contain any data which could be matched to you as a person.

Encryption of the data exchanged between browser and webserver

For security and privacy, this website forces all data exchanged between the webserver and your browser to be encrypted. This is particularly relevant where you enter personal data, e.g. the contact form or comment form. The technique used is known as TLS, which stands for Transport Layer Security; earlier versions of the encryption protocoll were known as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). You can recognise an encrypted connection by the lock symbol at the left end of the browser address bar, and the web address starting with „https://“. The encryption ensures that any data you enter to the website cannot be read and decoded by others.

Privacy policy changes

We may update our privacy policy from time to time, to (a) ensure that it matches new legal requirements, and (b) to cover changes made to the technologies used by the website. For future visits the only valid version of the privacy policy is the one online at that time.