privacy policy

Contents

• IN SHORT
• FIRST THINGS FIRST
• Responsibility for your private data
• Contact
• Using a contact form
• Downloading a free pdf
• Buying a Fine Art Print
• Supporting the easy town projects
• Payment methods – pay directly via bank transfer
• Payment methods – pay via PayPal
• Customer feedback
• Comments
• Cookies, tracking, profiling, Google, social media
• Embedding external content
• Statistics
• Hosting
• Sharing your data
• For how long is your data retained?
• Your rights
• How is your data protected?

IN SHORT

easy town projects have a no tracking and minimum data collection policy.

Whatever data is needed to process your communications, or your orders, will be solely used for those purposes, and your data will be deleted when our transactions are completed.

If you buy a limited edition, some additional points apply, and you’ll find them in the paragraphs below.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

How to buy a limited edition with the least data processing involved?

Use the option: pay directly via bank transfer.

If you want to avoid all third-party payment methods and automated data collection, you can transfer the sum of your purchases directly to the account: easy town books, Ellen Paschiller.

In that case, the only data transfer will be between your bank and the Ethik Bank, and between you and easy town books.

You name, address and email will be used solely to process your order.

Find out more about paying via bank transfer >>>

note: Ellen Paschiller uses the pen-name Charlie Alice Raya for all their work.

GENERAL POINTS

Responsibility for your private data

easy town books, Ellen Paschiller is responsible for the safety of your private data and for ensuring that this privacy policy as well as any actions regarding your private data comply with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).

easy town books, Ellen Paschiller
Meininger Straße 7, 10823 Berlin, Germany
ellenpaschiller@easy-town.org

Contact

If you have any questions or concerns about the safety of your personal data or about this privacy policy, you can send your questions or concerns to privacy@easy-town.org, or via post to:

easy town books, Ellen Paschiller
Meininger Straße 7, 10823 Berlin, Germany

Using a contact form

When you send an email via a contact form, only your email address is required to answer your message.

Your message(s) sent via a contact form will be stored on this website’s server for a maximum of 72h. This measure ensures that no message(s) get lost in a spam folder.

Your message will be transmitted via TLS.

Your email address will only be used to answer your message. After the correspondence is concluded, your email(s) and your data will be deleted within a week.

Concluded means that all the issues you presented in your message(s) have been addressed.

Email addresses will not be stored for future use or shared with third parties, unless there are legal reasons to do so.

Downloading a free pdf

All free downloads, such as the catalogue, can be downloaded without transmitting any data.

The statistics programmes WP Statistics and Statify only register that someone visited a download page but not whether a file has been downloaded. IP addresses are anonymised. Only the date, town, country, browser, referrer and number of hits are identified.

Buying a limited edition Fine Art Print

When you buy a limited edition Fine Art Print, your private data is exclusively used to

• answer your emails
• confirm your order
• identify your country for VAT payments
• process the payment via PayPal (data is temporarily stored on the website. This data will be deleted from the website within 48h after the payment has been confirmed.)
• or to process the payment via bank transfer (no data is stored on the website)
• keep you up to date about the progress of your order
• issue the Certificate of Authenticity with a reference to your order number
• issue the invoice with a reference to the Certificate of Authenticity
• send the Fine Art Print to your address

Once all transactions are completed, and the 30-days return period is over, most of your data and correspondence will be deleted.

This includes

• all your emails
• your email address
• confirmation messages by PayPal

All this data will be deleted within 50 days after sending the ordered Fine Art Print to you.

The following data can’t be deleted:

• the data on the account statement (PayPal)
• or the data on the account statement (Ethik Bank)
• and the data on the invoice.

The following data is not deleted automatically

• the reference to your order on the Certificate of Authenticity

A PDF copy of your invoice and a PDF copy of your Certificate of Authenticity will be kept on a secure hard drive.

The copy of your invoice will be kept at least for ten years, in accordance with the German tax law.

Usually both the invoice and the Certificate of Authenticity will be retained for up to 70 years to document a limited edition.

You can request an anonymised Certificate of Authenticity directly when you order, or you can ask any time later for an existing Certificate of Authenticity to be anonymised.

In a case involving an anonymised Certificate of Authenticity, the invoice will be deleted after the ten years required by the German tax law.

No part of your data will be shared with any third party, nor will it be analysed or used in any other way or form.

An exception to these rules can occur when legal actions due to a legal disagreement, copyright violations or fraud make the involvement of a third party necessary.

Supporting the easy town projects

It is up to you how much personal data you want to share when supporting the easy town projects.

When you do share personal data, you can indicate whether your data should be deleted within seven days after the reception of your data, or whether it should be kept for further cooperation.

Whenever financial transactions are involved, a copy of those transactions will be kept for tax purposes.

In no event will your personal data be shared with third parties unless legal actions are required.

PAYMENT METHODS

Pay directly via bank transfer

If you use the option pay directly via bank transfer, only a minimum of data will be processed.

• your email
• your full name and address

Your email is required to correspond with you concerning your order.

Your email will be deleted after all transactions are completed.

Your name and address are required for your invoice, for the shipment and to determine which VAT applies.

Purchasing via PayPal

If you buy a Fine Art Print via PayPal, your data for the invoice will be processed on the website. This includes:

• full name
• full address
• email address

All personal data processed on this website will be deleted within 48h after the payment has been confirmed, and only a copy of your invoice will be saved offline.

As soon as you are redirected to PayPal, their privacy policy applies.

If you don’t have an account with PayPal, you can log in as a guest.

Once the payment is completed, PayPal will redirect you back to the website where the download link for your preliminary order confirmation will be displayed.

Two copies of your invoice will be saved on an external and password-protected hard drive (one copy for tax, one for VAT).

In accordance with German law, the invoices will be stored for ten years, at least.

Your data from the invoice will not be analysed, used or shared. It will merely be stored unless legal actions are required.

No unauthorised person has access to this data.

Customer feedback

Customer feedback is anonymised to protect the customer’s privacy.

You could argue that that makes the feedback less convincing, but if I wanted to fake feedbacks, ratings or comments, I could invent names too.

If you send a feedback or a rating your message or part of your message might be used on this website or any catalogue.

If your message is not in English, a translation might be used.

Your email and/or any other personal data will be deleted unless legal actions are required.

It’s not happening yet, but at some point a witness routine will be included. That means two other people will see the original statement/message/feedback/rating before it gets online and before the original is deleted. This is purely for credibility reasons.

Comments

You can send a comment or review via email.

Either will be anonymised on receipt, and your email and/or any other personal data will be deleted unless legal actions are required.

Cookies, tracking, profiling, analysing, Google, social media

This website doesn’t use third-party cookies. It doesn’t track, profile or analyse any data. This website doesn’t use any Google tools, ad providers or social media links.

If you buy a photo print, cookies will temporarily store the information about which print you chose.

The purpose of this cookie is to remember which article(s) you chose so that these article(s) can be displayed in your checkout table and in your invoice.

There is no tracking or analysing involved.

Saying all this, if you are logged into your Google, Facebook or a similar account, while visiting this website, those companies will collect data about your activities on this website, unless you have changed your privacy settings in your account in a way that doesn’t allow for tracking.

Embedded content from other websites

This website doesn’t use any embedded content from other websites unless it is from another easy town website.

Statistics

When you use this website to look at the photos or to select a photo print, some anonymised data will be collected by the two statistics programmes which run on this website: Statify and WPStatistics.

Statify doesn’t collect any personal data and only counts visits. It also deletes all data older than fourteen days automatically.

Statify collects the following anonymised data:

• hits per page / post
• top referrers

WPStatistics collects the following anonymised data:

• online users
• hits
• visitors
• pages / posts visited
• search engine referrals / search words
• agent / browser / platform / version
• referring sites
• country / city
• date
• anonymised IP

This means, your visits to this website are anonymous unless you purchase a Fine Art Print, or send an email.

Why use a statistics programme? Or two. Apart from monitoring and documenting the strange behaviour of some IP addresses (which usually belong to a pack of IPs used by one of the big tech giants, it’s also interesting and helpful to see which pages and posts get the most attention, and which countries have joined the readers of this website.

Data collected by WPStatistics is saved on this website and usually not older than a year. However some data is kept beyond a year to document above mentioned behaviour.

Hosting

This website is hosted by the Strato AG. Strato saves your IP-address in a log file when you visit this website.

Your IP-address will be kept for a maximum of seven days. This measure helps Strato to recognise and block attacks on the server.

In addition Strato keeps a statistic about the website. IPs are anonymised.

Strato is responsible for your data, and the Strato AG confirmed that it will treat your data in compliance with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).

Sharing your data

There are only three cases in which data will be shared:

a) If legal actions are required in one or more of the following cases:

• copyright violations
• legal disputes
• fraud
• harassment
• offence
• and any other case which might require legal actions,

b) if the tax authorities require to see the invoices

c) and if it is necessary to verify the sale of a limited edition Fine Art Print.

Other than that, there will be no sharing of data.

For how long is your data retained?

Messages and forms will be deleted as soon as our correspondence or your purchase is completed. Usually within seven days.

Two copies of your invoice will be saved on an external hard drive for ten years in accordance with the German Tax Law.

One copy of the invoice and the Certificate of Authenticity will be retained for up to 70 years to document a limited edition unless you chose a anonymised Certificate of Authenticity.

Your rights

With your copy of the invoice and of the Certificate of Authenticity, you have copies of all the data that is stored when you purchase a Fine Art Print.

If you wish to view, correct, anonymise, object, limit, or transfer any of this data, please send your request to privacy@easy-town.org.

Due to legal obligations, your invoice cannot be deleted before ten years have passed.

How is your data protected?

This website uses TLS to ensure the safe transmission of your data. The use of https:// instead of http:// and the lock-symbol indicate that TLS is active.

All invoices and the Certificates of Authenticity are stored on an external and password-protected hard drive.

As the easy town projects grow, this will probably be reorganised over the next years to ensure the lasting safety of your data.

Download the privacy policy

The privacy policy is included in the Fine Art Print catalogue and in the Q & A download pdf.

However, the most up to date version of the privacy policy is always the one on this website.