Privacy policy

CoolingSpots is deliberately built to collect as little data as possible: no accounts, no registration, no cookies and no user tracking. This policy describes what data is processed when you use it.

Controller

The controller responsible for data processing on this website is:

Benjamin Schäublin
Eichstrasse 1 8360 Eschlikon
Switzerland

[email protected]

Representative in the EU

In addition to us, a representative under Art. 27 GDPR is available as a point of contact in the European Economic Area, that is the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. You can also contact them with any question about your data.

VGS Datenschutzpartner GmbH
Am Kaiserkai 69 20457 Hamburg
Germany
[email protected]

No accounts, no tracking cookies

There is no registration and no login. We do not set any cookies for advertising or tracking purposes and do not build user profiles.

Location

If you use the location feature, your position is used only locally in your browser to centre the map. Your exact GPS coordinates are never stored or sent to us or to third parties. Place search runs entirely in your browser - your search term never leaves it. For the weather, only the approximate area (rounded to a grid of about 11 km, so not your exact location) goes to our own weather service; that service fetches the forecast from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute MET Norway, again with nothing but this rounded area. For the official heat warning, the map centre goes to our own warning service, rounded to a finer grid of about 2 km - finer because the official warning regions are smaller than 11 km and the warning would otherwise land in the wrong place.

Local storage

CoolingSpots remembers display settings in your browser such as your choice of language or notices you have dismissed, plus a short-lived weather cache and the places you confirmed this season, so that a second tap does not count twice. What is meant to stay sits in local storage (localStorage); what only applies for the moment sits in session storage (sessionStorage) and disappears with the tab. None of this has a personal reference and none of it leaves your device. One exception is a place suggestion you have started: so that it is not lost by accident, the draft stays in session storage, with everything you typed and with any name you chose to give. It too disappears with the tab, and it only reaches us if you press send; what happens to it then is described under "Place suggestions". You can delete all of it through your browser settings.

Email contact

Anyone who contacts us by email, for example to suggest a cool place or report an error, sends us their email address and the details in the message. We use this data only to handle the request, do not pass it on to third parties and delete it as soon as it is no longer needed. The mailbox is operated by Infomaniak in Switzerland.

Place suggestions

When you suggest a place, we store what you type into the form: the place, its type, your reasoning and any additional details. We do not ask for an address. If you voluntarily give a name or a pseudonym, it appears next to the place on the map until you write to us to have it removed. This information sits for twelve months on a server in the EU; after that only what has no personal reference is kept. Nothing is passed on unless the place appears on the map after our review. Please do not enter names or contact details in the free-text fields.

Photos with a suggestion

A photo reaches us already at the image step, not only when you send. It sits for 30 days on storage in the EU and is then deleted automatically, even if you never send the suggestion. The metadata holding the place where the photo was taken is removed by your browser before the upload. If we release the photo for the map, it stays there permanently; if it should disappear again, report it through the "Something wrong?" link on the info card of the place.

Aggregated click counting

The Route and Share buttons and the link from embedded maps pass through short internal redirects (/go/...). Only the total number of uses is counted - no cookies, no profiles, no link to individual people. The device location is neither collected nor transmitted. We count confirmations ("I was here - it is cool") in the same way. We only store how often a place was confirmed in a season and when it last happened - no user identifier, no location data, no link to individual people. A number is never shown, only a coarse level.

Hosting & delivery

When you access the site, the two providers listed below process technically necessary connection data, in particular your IP address, in server logs. Cloudflare, Inc. is based in the United States and delivers the site through its global network; for transfers to the United States, Cloudflare relies on the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. Both providers process this data on our behalf under a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR). Switzerland, where Infomaniak hosts the site, is covered by an adequacy decision of the European Commission.

• Infomaniak - Web hosting (Switzerland)
• Cloudflare - CDN, DDoS protection, TLS encryption and our own services for weather, heat warnings and place suggestions (United States, Data Privacy Framework)

External services

To display the map and weather, data from third parties is loaded. For technical reasons their servers see your IP address. The privacy terms of the respective providers apply:

• Cloudflare R2 - map background (tiles), United States, Data Privacy Framework
• EOX IT Services - satellite imagery, when you switch on the satellite view or pick a place outside Switzerland while suggesting a place (Austria)
• swisstopo - satellite and aerial imagery of places in Switzerland (Switzerland)
• IGN - aerial photos of places in France (France)
• Wikimedia Commons - image search in the photo step of a place suggestion (United States). Place photos are served from our own server, so Wikimedia does not see your IP address.

Our own service fetches the weather forecast from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway), using only the rounded area. MET Norway sees neither your IP address nor your location.

No analytics scripts, no tracking

No analytics or advertising script runs on this website. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no user profiles. No personal data is collected or shared for marketing purposes.

Legal bases

• Delivering the website, server logs, map background, weather, heat warnings, satellite imagery and place photos: our legitimate interest in a secure, working website (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
• Email contact: our legitimate interest in answering your request (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR); where it concerns a contract, such as a partner entry, taking steps towards or performing that contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).
• Place suggestions, including photos and an optional name: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). You can withdraw it at any time by email; this does not affect anything done before.

Retention

Infomaniak keeps the web server’s access and error logs for ten days; the logs of our services at Cloudflare are deleted after seven days. How long Cloudflare additionally keeps connection data for operating its network and defending against attacks is up to Cloudflare; details are in its privacy policy linked above. We keep place suggestions for twelve months and photos sent with them for 30 days, unless we publish them on the map. Emails are deleted once the request is dealt with and we no longer need them.

Your rights

You have the right to access your data, to rectification, erasure and restriction of processing, to data portability, and to object to processing based on our legitimate interest (Art. 15 to 21 GDPR). On the server we ourselves only store what you write into a place suggestion, so such a request usually concerns only that. Write to us at the email address given above.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, in particular in the EU country where you live or work or where the alleged infringement took place.

Last updated: September 2026