Privacy policy

English courtesy translation; the German Datenschutzerklärung is the legally binding version. This policy explains what personal data we process when you visit this website and use our online forms.

Controller

Visiting the website

When you visit the site, we handle your IP address, the time, the page requested, the referrer and your browser identifier to run the site securely and compile visitor statistics (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). We delete the server logs within 14 days.

Online forms (join, upgrade, cancel, funding request, contact)

When you use one of our forms, we process what you enter and, when you join or ask for a reimbursement, your bank details for the SEPA direct debit mandate or the transfer. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (membership or handling your request). The fields marked as required are the ones we need to handle your request or your membership; everything else is optional.

To prevent abuse and as a record of your submission, we also process your IP address and the time you submitted (Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR).

Form contents go to the board by email. On the web server we delete them after 180 days, bank details after 90 days at most.

We send these emails through a service provider in the EU; the board’s mailbox is hosted by a provider in Germany. Our data protection rules also apply to membership records.

Funding requests

We manage details from funding requests on a task board run by a service provider in the USA (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).

Donating by card

If you donate on our website by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, we send you to Stripe’s payment form, where you enter your payment details and your email address. Stripe processes the payment, emails you a receipt for it and sets its own cookies on its payment page, among other things to prevent fraud. Stripe passes us the amount, the time, your name and your email address, so we can book the donation and, if you wish, issue an official donation receipt for your tax return (Art. 6(1)(b) and (c) GDPR); we keep the booking records for eight years (Section 147 AO). To prevent abuse, we store a hash of your IP address for about an hour when you submit the donation form and when you return to our page (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Stripe also processes payment data as a controller in its own right; for that, Stripe’s privacy policy applies.

FichteGoesUK campaign: progress bar and donor wall

If you donate through the FichteGoesUK campaign page, you first fill in our donation form: the amount, the payment method (card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, or bank transfer) and your donor-wall choice. We store those entries on our server (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). For a card payment, the section “Donating by card” then applies; Stripe receives only the amount and a reference for your donation from us, not your name for the wall and not your message. For a bank transfer we show you a personal payment reference; the board recognises your transfer on the bank statement by it and confirms it. The page adds the donations received up into a running total; transfers made without the form are entered by the board with amount and date (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR: showing how far the campaign has come). We never publish your individual amount; it only goes into the total.

You decide in the form whether you appear on the donor wall: not at all (the default), anonymously, or under a name you type yourself, with an optional message. We store the name and the message only if you choose “Yes”, and with that choice you consent to the publication. Once your donation has arrived, the wall shows the name you typed or “Anonymous” and your message (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). Entries with a name or a message go up only after the board has approved them; for that, the name, message and date are emailed to vorstand@fichtefreunde.de. We check the form for spam when you submit it and store a hash of your IP address for about an hour for that (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). The donor wall is public and can be picked up by search engines.

You can withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future; an email to vorstand@fichtefreunde.de is enough, and we take your entry off the wall. If the board rejects an entry or you withdraw, we delete the name and the message from our server; the amount stays in the total. We delete the entries for a donation that does not arrive after 48 hours for card payments and after 30 days for bank transfers. The donor wall stays online until three months after the board closes the campaign; then we delete all data on the campaign’s donations on our server. The booking records are not affected (see “Donating by card”).

Cookies and browser storage

We use cookies and browser storage only where the site’s features technically need them (Section 25(2) No. 2 TDDDG).

Service providers and US transfers

These service providers receive personal data; they act on our behalf (Art. 28 GDPR):

Transfers to the US rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (Art. 45 GDPR) or on Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR); we’ll send you a copy on request. We delete encrypted backups within 90 days.

Your rights

You have the right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing and data portability (Arts. 15–18 and 20 GDPR); an email to vorstand@fichtefreunde.de is all it takes. You can also complain to the Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information.

Right to object

You can object to processing based on our legitimate interest (Art. 21 GDPR); an email is enough for that too.

Last updated

October 11, 2026