Privacy Policy

By accessing the website or the app on iOS or Android, data is collected by us, which is passed to us by your device (eg. your browser). The processing of this data on Locationscout takes place for the purpose, to enable the use of the services (connection, retrieval of data), for system security, for technical administration and optimization of our services. The data we collect can be separated into two types: Data provided by you and data, that is automatically gathered by us to provide and optimize our services.

Personal data provided by you

Registration
If you sign up to our platform to use more than the basic services we offer to anonymous users, we require certain personal information. We do this to be able to communicate with you and to provide our services in a secure and user oriented way. Therefore we collect only a very limited amount of data from you like your name, the email address, the country you are from and your personal password so that you are able to login to Locationscout. We are saving the email address and your name for the purpose of the communication with you. The country is required to personalize the feed of our homescreen.

Profile
Based on the data we collected during the sign up process, we created a user profile for you, which can be used to share your own photos from spots around the world or to bookmark spots so that you can save and find them later again. The user profile can be edited by you, so that you can individualize it by adding details about your gender, the hometown you are coming from, a description about you, a profile photo and by adding links to your website and/or social media profiles. You can even set a "displayed name", which will override the standard (first name + last name) and show this name in your profile in case you prefer to show only your first name or an artist's name. All this information about you is optional and you have the right to edit, update, access and delete your personal information if you are terminating your registration on Locationscout.

Automatic data

View Counter [website + app]
Locationscout is counting the views on profiles, spots, country-, theme- and location-pages. To count every view only once, we are anonymously saving the pages you visited within a cookie. This data isn't stored on our servers and it's only used to count the correct amount of views on these pages. The profile counter is shown to you in your profile to give you a feeling on how often somebody else saw your profile or one of the spots/photos you shared. We don't save which profile you viewed. Any other anonymous counter is used internally to calculate the relevance of each page, for example used to order the search results based on pages that are viewed more often than others.

Profile [website + app]
If you registered for our services, we additionally save the time of your last activity and your IP address for security reasons. IP addresses are used to transport data from sender to the intended recipient. Similar to the mailing address on an envelope data packets are provided with an IP address that clearly identifies the recipient.

Plausible Analytics [website + app]
We use Plausible Analytics to track overall trends in the usage of our platform. Plausible Analytics collects only aggregated information, which does not allow us to identify any visitor. No cookies are used and no personal data — not even an IP address or browser user agent — is stored. For more information, please visit the Plausible Analytics Data Policy.

Google Maps [website + app]
This platform uses Google Maps to display geographical information within locations and countries in a visual way. By using Google Maps as an embedded service within Locationscout, Google is gathering data about the API users and the usage itself. You can find more information about this in the privacy statement of Google: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en

Apple Maps [website + app]
This platform uses Apple Maps to display geographical information within spots, locations and countries in a visual way. By using Apple Maps as an embedded service within Locationscout, Apple is gathering data about the API users and the usage itself. You can find more information about this in the privacy statement of Apple: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

YouTube [website only]
This website uses YouTube plugins on very few pages to display additional video content. YouTube is provided by Google Inc. ("Google"). As soon as you visit a page with an embedded video player, a connection to the YouTube servers needs to be established to load the data. Within this process, the YouTube-server gets information about which page you visited and if you are logged in with your YouTube-account, you are enabling YouTube to match your web usage behavior to your YouTube-account. You can prevent this by logging out of your YouTube-account.
You can find more information about this in the privacy statement of Google: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en

Vimeo [website only]
This website uses Vimeo plugins in the Learn Section to display video content. Vimeo is provided by Vimeo.com, Inc. 555 West 18th Street, New York 10011 ("Vimeo"). For embedded videos, all third-party and 'non-essential' cookies have been removed from the Vimeo player. Any remaining cookies are characterized as 'essential' for the operation of the streaming video player. As soon as you want to watch a video, a page with an embedded video player is opened and a connection to the Vimeo servers needs to be established to load the data. Within this process, the Vimeo-server gets information about the video you requested and your player settings. Besides that, anonymous data is collected to give us some insights about which embedded videos are watched the most or how far they are being watched. This helps us to improve our video content for you.
You can find more information about this in the privacy statement of Vimeo https://vimeo.com/privacy and their Cookie Policy https://vimeo.com/cookie_policy

Apple Search Ads [app only]
The iOS app uses Apple Search Ads to promote the app in the Apple App Store to the right audience. Apple Search Ads is provided by Apple Inc. ("Apple"). Apple Search Ads uses the Apple Advertising Identifier (IDFA) to track the performance of the ads and to attribute the downloads to the ads. The IDFA is a unique identifier for each iOS device and is used to track the user's behavior within the app store. This helps advertisers to deliver targeted ads to customer segments, which are groups of people with similar characteristics. Each segment must contain at least 5000 people, which ensures that no customer can be individually targeted. You can reset the IDFA in the settings of your iOS device or simply deny the permission request inside the app to prevent tracking by Apple Search Ads.
You can find more information about this in the privacy statement of Apple: https://searchads.apple.com/privacy

Meta Pixel (formerly known as Facebook Pixel) [app only]
The iOS and Android app uses Meta Platforms to promote the app on Facebook and Instagram to the right audience. Meta Platforms is provided by Meta Platforms, Inc. ("Meta"). This allows the behaviour of users to be tracked after they have been redirected to the app by clicking on a Facebook ad. This enables us to measure the effectiveness of Facebook adverts for statistical and market research purposes. The data collected in this way is anonymous to us, which means that we do not see the personal data of individual users. However, this data is stored and processed by Meta, which is why we are informing you of this based on our knowledge of the situation. Meta may link this information to your Facebook account and also use it for its own advertising purposes, in accordance with Facebook's Data Usage Policy. You may allow Meta and its partners to place adverts on and off Facebook. A cookie may also be stored on your device for these purposes.
You can find Meta's privacy policy here: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy/

Cookies

Locationscout uses essential cookies only - small files with configuration information. They help to identify individual settings and to realize special user functions. The cookies contain a unique number that has no meaning outside of our site. Through its use, the use of websites can be more enjoyable and user friendly for you. Locationscout doesn't process any personal data through the use of cookies. Locationscout does not use any tracking or marketing cookies.

Email

There are two different ways how we may receive your email address. The first way is by signing up for a user profile. The second way is when you signed up to our newsletter, which is independed from the user profile and described later within this section. Protecting your data from any third parties is extremely important for us. For this reason, your email address will never be shown in your profile and will only be visible to you. Some partners are able to contact you through a special contact form, which we implemented to protect your personal data, but to still enable these partners to contact you. This is for example the case, if the publisher we are cooperating with, wants to ask for your permission to publish your work in their monthly printed magazine. In this case you will receive an email from us and the third party won't be able to see your email address until you answer them. We are only providing this service to third parties if we think that contacting you might be benefitial for you. This protected contact form can not be used for advertising and is only used in very specific and approved cases.

In addition, we will send you notifications by email if, for example, another user has commented under a spot you have created or a comment you have written. These types of notifications can be disabled by you in the profile settings. However, there are emails that you can't unsubscribe from until you terminate your registration. This is the case for the benefitial emails from third parties we described in the paragraph above or for emails that are relevant for protecting your rights, which is the case when we want to share one of your uploaded photos via our social media profiles. In this case, you will receive an email from us with details about the image we want to share, so that you have the opportunity to contradict us. Your rights as a photographer are important for us (because we are photographers ourselves), so that's why we will never share any photo from you without naming you and - if possible and set in your profile - adding a link to your website or social media profile.

Detached from the system and notification emails, we are also using Sendinblue as a service provider to send a monthly newsletter with spot & article suggestions and for transactional mails that welcome you to the platform and give you some hints on where to get started. You can sign up for the newsletter during your registration process or by enabling it in your profile settings. If enabled, you will only be added to our newsletter list, which is secured by a double-opt-in. This means, that your mail address needs to be verified first in order to receive these mails from us. This secures that we won't send emails to anybody who doesn't want to receive them. In case you want to stop receiving this monthly email, you can unsubscribe without any reason by clicking on the unsubscribe link in the footer of each email or by disabling it in your profile settings. The same applies to the transactional mails since we hate spam as much as you do and we only want to send you valuable content that you want to receive.
You can learn more about Sendinblue's privacy policy here: https://www.sendinblue.com/legal/privacypolicy/

Hosting

Our website and images are hosted on DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure provider with data centers around the world to ensure high/fast availability via CDNs (content delivery networks) and failure safety for internationally operating platforms like Locationscout. All data and images are hosted in Frankfurt, Germany to fully implement the strict requirements of the German data protection authorities. DigitalOcean operates under the Privacy Shield Agreement (EU-US data protection shield), which means that the requirements of the Privacy Shield Agreement are similar to the data protection level of the European Union and that the data is treated accordingly. You can learn more about their Privacy Policy here.
Images are also backed up via S3 servers in Germany provided by Amazon Web Services to ensure high availability and failure safety. Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (their privacy policies may be found at https://aws.amazon.com/privacy/ and https://www.amazon.com/privacy respectively), which participates in the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield frameworks.
Additionally, this website uses Cloudflare as a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure fast loading times and high availability of the website. Cloudflare is provided by Cloudflare, Inc. ("Cloudflare"). Cloudflare may use cookies or other technologies to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. This cookie, if set, does not correspond to any user ID in the web application and does not store any personally identifiable information.
You can find more information about this in the privacy statement of Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/

Premium account

With the launch of the app for iOS and Android, Locationscout is offering premium subscriptions to finance our services. The payments for these monthly or annual subscriptions are processed via RevenueCat, making it possible to provide a seamless user experience to you where you can use your upgraded account on iOS, Android and the website without having to purchase the service for each device. Therefore RevenueCat is collecting the payment information, processing it and transferring it to Apple or Google to make the eventual purchase via the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Technically we are generating an individual and anonymous identifier for each user of the platform which is then used to recognize your user status to check if you are eligible to use the premium services. Besides that, we are storing your accounts nameUrl as a property in your RevenueCat transaction to make it easier for us to help you with payment issues. You can learn more about RevenueCat's privacy policy here: https://www.revenuecat.com/privacy

If you sign up for Premium directly on the website, we are currently using Stripe as our payment processor. Stripe uses and processes your complete payment information in accordance with Stripe's privacy policy. If you sign up for Premium as an in-app purchase via a mobile app store, please see Google's privacy policy and Apple's privacy policy for information about how they use and process your payment information.

Protection of personal data

Locationscout will have appropriate technical and organizational actions in place to safeguard your (personal) data against loss or any other form of unlawful processing. We are using SSL (HTTPS) to secure all communications between our servers and your web browser or the iOS / Android app. For your privacy and security your Locationscout account information is protected by an encrypted password. You can also prevent unauthorized access to your account by logging off once you have finished using a shared computer. Your personal data is not shared with any third party and only visible to employees who need personal information to perform a specific job (for example, our customer service who needs to contact you) are granted access to it. All of our employees are kept up to date on our privacy and security practices.

Disclosure of personal data

Locationscout doesn't pass your personal data to third parties in principle. Due to legal requirements, however, Locationscout could be legally obliged to, in exceptional cases, user data of visitors to our platform at outside bodies (eg. compensation to law enforcement agencies when suspected of having committed an offense or misuse of our platform). To the extent legally possible, we protect your information in strict accordance with the legal provisions against any third-party access otherwise.

Deletion / disabling of data

In the event that Locationscout stops the service, all personal data will be deleted. Excluded from the deletion is data in respect of which statutory retention periods are observed.
Alternatively, you can instruct the support team to delete your account. Once you delete your account, you will not be able to recover your personal data.

Consent / Withdrawal

Decisive for the use of your data, the applicable statutory provisions, in particular the federal data protection act and the telemedia act. Unless you make voluntary information, you grant Locationscout implied consent to storage of such personal data. Locationscout indicates that this consent is revocable at any time with effect for the future. The withdrawal of consent is either by email (can be found in the imprint) or by post to: "der-Webdesigner GmbH, Hospitalstr. 13a, 53567 Asbach, Germany"
On inquiry we will provide you the data we collected about you. Excluded from the deletion is data in respect of which statutory retention periods are observed. This data is locked by us.

Minimum Age

You must be 14 years or older to sign up and use Locationscout. For this reason, Locationscout does not specifically collect information about children. If we get informed that we have collected data from a child under the age of 13, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. We recommend that minors between the ages of 14 and 18 ask for permission from a legal guardian before using Locationscout.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

Locationscout may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time due to new features or laws. These changes will be notified through the services and/or on www.locationscout.net. In order to be as transparent as possible, this privacy policy contains a change log so that changes are even easier for you to recognise.

Questions or comments about this privacy statement

If you have any questions or comments about this privacy statement or the processing of data by Locationscout, you can directly contact us by writing an email to

This privacy policy was last updated on Oktober 8, 2024.

Changelog

• October 8, 2024
  • The privacy policy is now also available in German to prepare for the upcoming German version of the app.
  • One sentence about notifications was removed because we are currently not sending any emails anymore if your spot became popular.
• June 4, 2024
  • This was a very difficult decision for me (Manuel), but I decided to add Apple Search Ads and Meta Tracking Pixel to our app to reach more users and grow our community. After 10 years of organic growth, I am convinced that this is the right step for us to get even more spots shared in various regions, which is something that is requested on an almost daily basis. The purpose of these services is to track the performance of our ads and to find the right audience who might benefit from this platform. We are not tracking any personal data with these services and we are not sharing any data with third parties.
    If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me at any time.
  • I also added a paragraph to hosting about using Cloudflare as a CDN to improve the performance of the website and to protect it from DDoS attacks. Cloudflare is a US company and therefore subject to the US laws, but they are committed to the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework and the Swiss-US Privacy Shield Framework, which means that they are obliged to protect the data of European users with the same standards as European companies.
    I am currently evaluating whether Cloudflare can not only deliver our images, but also scale them to the various formats required on the platform. This would allow us to reduce the amount of data transferred and improve the performance of the platform even further.
• November 12, 2022
  • We finally made the step towards a zero-cookie-tracking platform and the only cookies left are technical ones which help to improve your user experience.
  • Removed Google Analytics paragraph because we moved away from cookie based tracking to a privacy first alternative called Plausible which doesn't use cookies and collects non-personal aggregated information only, making it impossible to indentify any visitor.
  • Removed Google Adsense paragraph, because Adsense was replaced some time ago with our own user experience and privacy friendly ads.
  • Added a sentence to the view counter paragraph to clarify that the cookie only ensures to count correctly. Visiting a profile is anonymous and only a number is incremented.
• October 14, 2021
  • Updated the Email paragraph because we switched our newsletter from Mailchimp to Sendinblue, which is a European company located in Paris, attaching particular importance to the respect for the privacy of the users and of the confidentiality of their personal data via GDPR.
    We initially made this shift because Mailchimp simply became too expensive for us with more and more subscribers. Looking back, Sendinblue offers much better tools anyway to create a beautifully handcrafted newsletter and individual transactional mails for you while having equal or even higher standards to comply with the European GDPR.
• July 13, 2021
  • Updated the Premium paragraph because we added the possibility to subscribe to our Premium accounts via the website as well. Our current payment processor is Stripe, which is one of the biggest companies for digital payments on the web and therefore has the highest standards to protect data and offer secure payments. Besides that, Stripe committed to mitigating environmental impact and sustainability, which fits perfectly to our principles.
• May 9, 2021
  • Updated the Hosting paragraph because we moved all data and images to a data center of DigitalOcean in Frankfurt, Germany to keep fully implementing the strict requirements of the German data protection authorities. We decided to make this change to ensure high/fast availability and failure safety for Locationscout while scaling with a growing number of users around the world.
• November 1, 2020
  • The address of our company was updated because we moved within Asbach and our corporate form changed from "UG (haftungsbeschränkt)" to "GmbH".
• August 26, 2020
  • With the release of the app for iOS and Android, the updated privacy policy is now reflecting our new services offered by Locationscout by renaming "website" to "platform" since this privacy policy applies to both types of service, the website and the apps.
  • The section about a "contact form" in "Personal data provided by you" was removed since we are not offering any contact form anymore because communication with us is easier and more accountable via email.
  • Removed a paragraph about external font libraries (Google Web Fonts & FontAwesome) since we are now hosting these fonts ourselves to reduce the amount of external requests as much as possible to comply with our principle to gather and transfer as little user information as possible.
  • Updated the formatting with hints where "automatic data" is gathered ("website only" or "website + app") to make it easier to understand which automatic or 3rd party services are used on which device.
  • Added a section about our new "Premium account", which is currently only available via the iOS or Android app.
  • The address of our company was updated because we moved from Königswinter to Asbach.