Legal
Privacy policy
This notice explains what herimap collects about you, why we hold it, and how you can see, correct or delete it. It describes the service as it works today.
Who we are
herimap is a map of privately owned historic houses in Europe. It is operated by the herimap team, who decide what personal data is collected here and why — in the language of the GDPR, the controller.
For anything in this notice, including a request to see, correct or delete your data, write to info@herimap.eu.
What we collect
If you create an account we store your email address, the name you choose to display, your language preference, and the roles you hold on the platform. We also record when the account was created and when you last signed in.
If you claim or manage a house we store what you enter about it: descriptions and translations, photographs you upload, events, and spaces you offer to visit or hire.
When you make a request through the platform — claiming a house, asking an owner for access, requesting a booking, or reserving a ticket — we store that request and what came of it.
You can request a booking or a ticket without an account. We then store the email address and phone number you give us, so the owner can reply and so you can prove the request was yours.
If you send us a bug report or an idea, we store what you write, any images you attach, your account, the time, and the version of the site you were using.
Cookies and local storage
Two cookies keep your sign-in working. One holds a random identifier for your signed-in session; the session itself, including any access tokens, stays on our server and never reaches your browser. The other protects forms against being submitted from another site.
Three more remember how you read the site: the language you last read it in, whether you chose the light or dark theme, and — on pages with a map — whether you chose the map or the satellite view. Each holds nothing but that one choice and is set per device, so the same account can read in Czech on one and English on another.
Your browser also keeps a few view preferences of its own, such as which calendar filters you last used in the owner tools. Those stay on your device and are never sent to us.
We use no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies, and no third-party tag manager.
Signing in with Google or Microsoft
You can sign in with a password, or with a Google or Microsoft account. If you choose one of those we ask that provider for three things only: a stable identifier for you, your name, and your email address. We use them to create your herimap account, or to connect the sign-in to an account you already have.
We do not request, receive or store access to your mail, contacts, files, calendar, or anything else held by Google or Microsoft. We do not use data obtained through them for advertising, and we neither sell it nor pass it to anyone else.
Signing in this way gives herimap no continuing access to that account. You can withdraw the connection at any time from your Google or Microsoft account settings.
Why we hold it, and on what basis
We hold your account and what you publish in order to provide the service you asked for — that is, to perform our agreement with you.
We hold records of requests and basic server logs because we have a legitimate interest in operating the platform, keeping it secure, and preventing abuse.
Where the law asks for your consent — for example before sending you something that is not a direct answer to something you did — we ask for it, and you can withdraw it at any time.
Who else is involved
We keep the number of third parties small and deliberately European. The platform runs on servers operated by Hetzner in Germany, which also store the photographs you upload. Encrypted backups are held by Scaleway in France and by Hetzner in Finland. Email is sent and received through Mailbox.org in Germany.
Two services help with places rather than people: Geoapify completes addresses you type, and openrouteservice works out routes you ask for. They receive the address text or the coordinates, not your identity.
Some things load directly in your browser, which means those services see your IP address: map tiles from OpenStreetMap, CARTO and Esri, and photographs from Wikimedia Commons on research pages.
Google and Microsoft are involved only if you choose to sign in with one of them.
Where your data is stored
In the European Union: the live database and uploaded media in Germany, backups in France and Finland. We do not transfer personal data outside the EU, except where you have chosen to sign in with Google or Microsoft, who operate globally under their own terms.
How long we keep it
Account data is kept until you delete your account. Deleting it clears your personal details and ends your sessions; where a record of a house or a transaction has to remain, it remains without your identity attached.
Sessions are removed 30 days after they end. Sign-in links sent by email expire after 7 days. Contact details given by visitors without an account are removed 90 days after the request they relate to is settled. Email received at our published address is removed after 180 days. Images sent in a message between people are removed after a year. Reports are kept until they are closed; a closed report and its images are deleted one year after it is closed.
Deleting something removes it from the live service straight away. Our encrypted backups are written on a schedule and are never edited in place, so a copy of what you deleted stays in them for as long as that copy is held: database snapshots expire on a fixed schedule, while copies of uploaded images are currently kept without one. We never restore a backup in order to bring deleted data back.
Your rights
You can download everything we hold about you, in a machine-readable form, from your account page — you do not have to ask us for it. The same page lets you delete your account.
You also have the right to have inaccurate data corrected, to object to processing we base on our legitimate interest, and to complain to your national data protection authority.
How we protect it
The site is served over HTTPS only. Sign-in tokens are held on the server rather than in your browser. The application reaches the database through an account that cannot alter its structure, and backups are encrypted.
Changes to this notice
When this notice changes in a way that matters we record the new version and ask you to acknowledge it the next time you sign in. Your account stores which version you accepted, and when.
This document is published in English, Czech, German, Spanish, French and Italian. Where the versions differ, the English text applies.