Privacy information

To provide a voluntary social-discovery tool that helps participating colleagues discover shared connections to places and learn more about one another.

Data is never used for performance management, HR decisions, attendance monitoring, profiling, marketing or advertising. Insights are simple, deterministic counts — no AI is used.

Taking part is entirely voluntary and there is no disadvantage in not participating. No profiles are created or imported for anyone. We rely on your consent (Regulation (EU) 2018/1725), which is recorded separately for each purpose together with the date and the version of this notice:

• Account access: “I agree to the processing of my work email address and authentication data so that I can access Our Places. I have read the privacy information.”
• Profile publication: “I choose to participate in Our Places and agree to the processing and display of the profile and place information I have voluntarily provided. I understand that I can edit or delete it at any time.”

You can withdraw either consent at any time by unpublishing your profile or deleting your account.

• Everyone who signs in: work email address, account identifiers, consent records, sign-in/session data and last sign-in time.
• If you publish a profile: display name, unit, sector/team, the places you choose to add (grew up, lived, studied, family connection) and, optionally, your Belgian home base as a postal code and locality.
• Created/updated timestamps needed to run the service.

We never ask for nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, an exact address, family members’ identities or precise coordinates of where you live. Places are stored as canonical city records (name, region, country, representative coordinates). Belgian home bases use a representative point for the postal-code area only. Nationality or origin is never derived from places.

• Only signed-in colleagues with an authorised work email can see the production map and profiles.
• Published profiles show your display name, sector/team and places. Your email address is never shown to anyone.
• Discover-only accounts are not visible to other users at all.
• The public demo contains synthetic, fictional data only — never real profiles.

• Vercel — application hosting. Compute is configured for the Frankfurt region (fra1). Vercel also operates a global edge network, so requests may be routed through other locations.
• Neon — PostgreSQL database, hosted in AWS Europe Central 1 (Frankfurt).
• Brevo — delivery of one-time sign-in emails. Only your email address and the message are shared; tracking is not used.
• OpenFreeMap — map tiles are loaded directly by your browser, so the tile servers see your IP address, as with any website that displays a map.
• Photon (komoot) — place search. Searches are sent via our server, so your IP address is not shared; only the text you type is.

Processing is not guaranteed to take place exclusively in Frankfurt. See the providers’ own privacy information for details: vercel.com/legal/privacy-policy, neon.com/privacy-policy, brevo.com/legal/privacypolicy, openfreemap.org, komoot.com/privacy.

Our Places uses a single, strictly necessary cookie (__Host-op_session) to keep you signed in securely. It is http-only, secure and expires after 30 days of inactivity. There are no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies, so no cookie banner is needed.

• Accounts with no successful sign-in for 365 consecutive days are deleted automatically, together with all profile and place data.
• One-time sign-in links expire after 20 minutes. Unused links — including details entered before confirming an email — are deleted within a day.
• Sessions end when you sign out or after 30 days of inactivity.

• Edit your name, sector, places and home base at any time from “My profile”.
• Unpublish your profile to disappear from the map and people list while keeping access.
• Delete your account with one action — no administrator is involved and removal is immediate.
• You may also contact stefan@happer.at with questions, and you have the right to lodge a complaint with the European Data Protection Supervisor (edps.europa.eu).

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, tiles by OpenFreeMap / OpenMapTiles. Belgian postal codes from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).