Privacy Policy
How Rescues handles personal data, why, for how long, and what you can ask us to do about it. Written to meet Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR) and the Bulgarian Personal Data Protection Act.
Contents
1. Who is responsible for your data
This policy explains how personal data is processed on Rescues, published at https://rescues.app, and what rights you have in relation to it.
Rescues is run as a free, non-commercial project. Its operator decides why and how the data described below is processed and is therefore the controller of that data. You can reach the operator at contact@rescues.app.
Processing at this scale does not require a data protection officer and none has been appointed. The address above reaches the person responsible.
We do not sell personal data, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not build profiles of you.
2. What we process
We process only what the service needs in order to work.
- Account: your email address, display name, a hash of your password (never the password itself), whether the address has been confirmed, your language and time zone, your role, and the versions of the Terms and of this policy you accepted.
- Google sign-in: if you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address, and profile picture URL from Google, together with the tokens that complete the sign-in.
- Avatar: if you upload a profile picture, the image file and its storage key.
- Animals in your care: name, species, sex, birth or found date, city, colour, breed, description, adoption status, health status (deworming, neutering, vaccinations, EU chip, test results), and whether the profile is published.
- Photographs: the image files and their thumbnails, together with dimensions, file size, file type, alt text, display order, moderation status, the result of the automated safety check (its status, categories, scores, and time), and, where content is flagged, a server-generated blurred preview.
- Care and reminders: care events, their dates, notes, recurrence, and completion, the individual occurrences generated from them, and the notifications produced, including whether each was sent and read.
- Settings: your reminder preferences and how many days ahead you want to be reminded.
- Suggestions: if you send feedback through the suggestions form, the message and the account that sent it.
- Moderation and requests: records of moderation decisions on your listings, including who made them and why, and any data-export or account-deletion request you submit.
- Technical data: the server and the reverse proxy in front of it record the IP address, time, requested address, response code, and browser identification of each request. Cloudflare Turnstile receives technical signals from your browser wherever a captcha is shown.
3. Why we process it, and on what legal basis
Every processing operation on Rescues rests on one of the following grounds.
- To create and run your account, keep your records, generate reminders, and send the email the service depends on — address confirmation, password reset, and the reminders you have switched on: performance of the agreement between us, Article 6(1)(b) GDPR.
- To publish a profile you have asked to publish, once a moderator has approved it: performance of the agreement, on your own request, Article 6(1)(b) GDPR.
- To keep the service secure and prevent abuse — captcha checks, server logs, request limits, suspension of abusive accounts: our legitimate interest in a service that works and is not abused, Article 6(1)(f) GDPR.
- To screen public-listing text and uploaded photographs for harmful content, protect the public directory and moderators from disturbing material, and keep an audit record of moderation decisions: our legitimate interest in operating a safe, accurate public directory and explaining a decision afterwards, Article 6(1)(f) GDPR.
- To keep encrypted backups so the service can be restored after a failure: our legitimate interest in the continuity of the service, Article 6(1)(f) GDPR.
- To answer your messages and handle your data requests: a legal obligation, Article 6(1)(c) GDPR, together with our legitimate interest.
- Where we ask for your consent — for example for optional email that is not needed to run the service: Article 6(1)(a) GDPR. You may withdraw consent at any time, without affecting processing carried out before you withdrew it.
4. What becomes public
Nothing you enter is public by default. A profile becomes visible only after you request publication and a moderator approves it.
- A published profile shows the animal's details, the approved photographs, and your display name and avatar, with a link to your public caregiver page.
- Your email address, and any telephone number or address you may share with us privately, are never published.
- Your display name is yours to choose. If you would rather not be identifiable, pick a display name that is not your full name and do not use a photograph of yourself as your avatar.
- Public pages can be read by anyone with the link, indexed by search engines, and shown as previews in chat apps and social networks.
- You can make a profile private again at any time. It disappears from the site immediately, but copies held by search engines, caches, or people who saved the page are outside our control.
5. Who else processes it
We use a small number of providers. Each acts on our instructions under a data processing agreement as required by Article 28 GDPR, and each receives only what it needs.
- Cloudflare R2 — stores uploaded photographs and avatars. Photographs of unpublished animals are served through short-lived signed links, never from a public address.
- Cloudflare Turnstile — the captcha on the registration, sign-in, password-reset, and suggestion forms. It receives technical signals from your browser in order to tell people from bots.
- Resend — sends the email described above, and relays any reply we send you from the contact address. It receives the recipient address and the contents of the message.
- Forward Email — receives mail sent to the contact address given in this policy and forwards it to a personal mailbox. It handles the message and any attachments, which will contain whatever personal data you chose to put in your request. The forwarding configuration is held encrypted, so the destination address is not exposed in public DNS.
- OpenAI — checks the text submitted for a public listing and every uploaded photograph through its Moderation API. It receives that content and returns safety categories and scores. We do not send account identifiers in that API request.
- Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google. What Google itself does with that sign-in is governed by Google's own privacy policy.
- Sentry — captures unhandled application errors so we can find and fix them quickly. It receives technical failure details (request path, error message, stack trace); email addresses, session cookies, and password-reset or verification tokens are stripped from that data before it leaves our server.
- Our hosting provider — runs the virtual server hosting the application and the PostgreSQL database, and holds the encrypted offsite copies of the backups.
We also disclose data where the law requires it, for example to a competent authority acting within its powers. Beyond that, your data is not passed to anyone.
6. Transfers outside the EEA
The application, the database, and the backups are held within the European Union.
Cloudflare, Resend, Forward Email, Google, and OpenAI may process data outside the European Economic Area, including in the United States.
Those transfers rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses and, where applicable, on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. Write to contact@rescues.app if you would like the details.
7. How long we keep it
We keep data only as long as the purpose it was collected for requires.
- Your account and everything linked to it: for as long as the account exists. Deleting the account deletes them.
- A deletion request is completed within 30 days of receipt, and we confirm when it is done.
- Photographs, their moderation results, and any blurred safety preview are deleted from storage with the record they belong to. Photographs uploaded for a rescue that was never created are swept from storage after a day.
- OpenAI retains API-service customer data for no more than 30 days under its applicable data-processing terms, except where it is legally required to retain it for longer.
- Sign-in sessions last up to 30 days. Address-confirmation and password-reset links expire within hours of being issued.
- Encrypted database backups are kept for 14 days and then deleted. Data you have deleted can therefore survive in a backup for up to 14 days.
- Server and reverse proxy logs, which contain IP addresses, are kept for a short operational period and then rotated away.
- Moderation records are kept for as long as the listing they concern exists, so that a decision can still be explained.
8. Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to:
- access — to be told whether we process your data and to receive a copy of it;
- rectification — to have inaccurate data corrected; most of it you can edit yourself in the app;
- erasure — to have your data deleted, subject to the backup period described above;
- restriction — to have processing limited while a dispute about it is being resolved;
- portability — to receive the data you gave us in a structured, machine-readable form;
- object — to object to processing that rests on our legitimate interests;
- withdraw consent, wherever processing rests on consent;
- not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing — we take none.
Settings → Data and account has buttons for a data export and for account deletion, each of which opens a request we then handle. You can also write to contact@rescues.app. We answer within one month; if a request is complex we may extend that by up to two further months and will tell you why. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Commission for Personal Data Protection, 2 Prof. Tsvetan Lazarov Blvd, 1592 Sofia, kzld@cpdp.bg, www.cpdp.bg, or take the matter to the competent court.
9. Cookies
Rescues sets only cookies that are strictly necessary for it to work. Bulgarian law exempts such cookies from the consent requirement, which is why you are not asked to accept a cookie banner.
- Sign-in session, cross-site request forgery protection, and the address to return to after sign-in: set by the authentication layer. They keep you signed in and protect the forms. The session cookie lasts up to 30 days, or until you sign out.
- Cloudflare Turnstile may set a short-lived cookie in order to run the captcha.
There are no analytics, advertising, or tracking cookies and no third-party tracking scripts. Should we ever add analytics, we will update this policy and ask for your consent first where consent is required. You can block or delete cookies in your browser, but the service will then be unable to keep you signed in.
10. How we protect it
The measures below are the ones we consider appropriate for a service of this size, as Article 32 GDPR requires.
- All traffic to the site is encrypted with TLS.
- Passwords are stored only as a salted hash. Nobody, ourselves included, can read them.
- Photographs of unpublished animals sit in private storage and are served through short-lived signed links.
- Administrative and moderation functions are restricted by role.
- Backups are encrypted before they are copied offsite.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever puts your rights at risk, we will notify the Commission for Personal Data Protection within 72 hours and tell you directly where the law requires it.
11. Children
The service is for adults: you must be at least 18 to hold an account. We do not knowingly process children's data. If you believe a child has created an account, write to contact@rescues.app and we will delete it.
12. Automated content screening
We use OpenAI's Moderation API to automatically screen public-listing text and every uploaded photograph for potentially harmful content. The check returns category flags and scores; we store those results with the content only for moderation and audit purposes.
A flag, or a check that does not complete, automatically prevents that specific listing or photograph from being approved for public display. For either case, moderators receive only a server-generated strongly blurred preview, not the original image. The check does not profile you, make an automated decision about your account, or suspend your account.
You can ask us to explain or review a moderation outcome by writing to contact@rescues.app. A review does not require us to publish content that breaches the safety rules in the Terms.
The automated check concerns content submitted to the service, not an assessment of you as a person.
13. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. Every version carries the version identifier shown at the top of this page, and the version you accepted is recorded against your account.
We announce material changes on the site and, where we hold a confirmed address for you, by email.
14. Contact
For any question about this policy, or to exercise any of the rights above, write to contact@rescues.app.