Privacy policy

1The data controller

The controller responsible for ViFerm is:

• Ionuț Negoiță
• Germany
• Email: support@viferm.org

This policy applies to the viferm.org site, to the ViFerm web app and to the messages connected with the service. Write to us at the address above for any request under this document; we reply within the period laid down by law, as a rule within one month at the most.

2The roles regarding the data

ViFerm is the controller for the data needed to administer accounts, to keep the service secure, for support communications and for the optional analysis of usage.

If you enter into ViFerm data about other people — the vet, a technician, a supplier or a buyer — you decide why you enter it. You are responsible for having a legal basis for it and for informing those persons, where the law requires it. ViFerm processes it only in order to provide you with the features you ask for, under the conditions of the processing agreement in the Terms.

Enter only the data you need. Avoid data in excess and do not enter sensitive identifiers — a buyer's national identification number, for instance — if you do not need them and have no clear basis.

3What data we process

The account and authentication. Your name, your email address, the language you want the app in and whether you receive notifications by email. The password is kept only as a hash, from which it cannot be reconstructed. If you sign in with Google, in place of the password we keep the identifier Google gives us for your account. Also here: the authentication session and, briefly, the hash of the password reset code.

Your Google profile picture is not kept and not shown. The bar at the top holds the initials of your name, drawn by the app. That way, your browser asks nothing of Google's servers while you are signed in.

The farm and its activity. The farm name, the owner's name, the phone number, the holding number, the country, the gestation length and the other settings — the currency, the weight thresholds, the body condition scale, the language. If you fill them in, the vet's name and phone number. The country and the time zone are taken from the clock of the owner's browser, so that the due dates are worked out on their time.

On top of them, everything you record about the animals: their identity, heats, services, pregnancy checks, pregnancies, calvings, weanings, weighings, body condition scores, health, treatments with their doses, vaccinations, sales, costs, tasks — and the log of the changes made by the farm's people.

Animal data is not, in itself, personal data. It does, however, say economic things about your farm, so we keep it with the same care.

The files and content you upload. The photos of the animals, the Excel or CSV files brought in for import, the farm's documents as PDFs or as photos, and everything you have written in them.

The photos are re-encoded on upload, and the data hidden in them — including the GPS coordinates the phone puts into every photograph — is removed. A PDF and an import file are kept as they came and may carry data written by you, so upload only what you need.

Other people's data, written by you in the records. The app has dozens of places where you can note who did something: the technician who inseminated, the vet who prescribed a treatment, who assisted at a calving, the supplier the medicine came from. Likewise the buyers: name, contact person, phone number, address and tax number. The roles regarding them are set out above.

Communication and support. When you use “Have a question?” or write to us by email, we process the message, your contact details and the technical information needed to sort it out — the page you wrote from, the kind of browser and of device.

Technical and security data. Every request reaches us with the IP address of your connection, the time and the page requested; the internet does not work otherwise. The app uses it for the moment in order to limit repeated requests and does not write it into any record. The web server notes it in its technical log, kept for at most 11 days. Technical errors belong here as well; they show us what broke.

The analysis of usage, only with your consent. If you accept the analytics cookies, we process:

• the pages and screens opened, the moment and how long the screen stayed open in front of you;
• the kind of device, the browser and the operating system;
• the language the screen was shown to you in and whether you opened ViFerm from the app placed on your home screen;
• the country, approximated from the device's time zone, as a two-letter code;
• the name of the site you came from to the public pages, never its full address;
• a random number for the browser, so that you are not counted more than once.

A screen is counted only when it is actually on your screen: not while it sits hidden in a background tab, and not when the browser preloads it without your opening it. The clock stops when you switch tab, lock the phone or close the app, and a screen is counted for at most 30 minutes; a longer break starts a new sitting.

These statistics do not include the content of the records, the names or ear tags of the animals, the text written by you, your IP address or any precise location. From your screen address we cut out the identifiers: what remains is the kind of record, not the animal.

4The purposes and the legal bases

The data required for the account and for the farm features must be provided for the service to be usable. The optional fields and the analysis of usage may be refused without losing access to the main features.

5Where we get the data from

• directly from you;
• from the other people with access to the same farm;
• from Google, if you choose to sign in with Google;
• from the browser or device, for the technical features and — only with your consent — for the analysis;
• from the files and documents uploaded to the farm.

6Who else sees the data

Access is limited to the providers the service needs in order to run. None of them receives the farm data in order to do something of its own with it.

We do not sell or rent data, we do not use advertising networks, we have no analytics tools belonging to other companies — neither Google Analytics nor any other — and we do not give farm data to third parties for their commercial purposes. The measurement described above is done by us, on our server, and goes nowhere.

While you move around the app, your browser asks nothing of any third party. No fonts, no scripts, no images: they all come from the ViFerm server. The only two moments when your browser speaks to anyone else are pressing “Continue with Google” and switching on the notifications on your phone — both started by you, both written above.

7Transfers outside the European Economic Area

Global providers — in particular Google and the services connected with the domain or with email — may process data in the United States or in other countries outside the European Economic Area.

Where data reaches a certified organisation in the United States, the transfer is based on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. In the other cases, appropriate safeguards apply, such as the standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission. You can ask at support@viferm.org for further information and a copy of the safeguards that apply.

8Cookies, local storage and analysis

ViFerm uses essential cookies and technologies — for authentication, the chosen farm, the language, security and working offline — and analytics cookies, only with your consent.

You can accept, refuse or change your choice at any time, from Cookie settings at the foot of the public pages or from Account → Cookies and privacy once signed in. Withdrawing consent stops future processing and does not affect the lawfulness of what went before. ViFerm works in full with the essential technologies alone.

The complete list, with purposes and durations, is in the Cookie policy, linked at the head of the page.

9How long we keep data

When you delete your account, the farm and everything belonging to it is deleted from the app and cannot be restored — animals, records, photos, documents, log, the files brought in for import. The backups may still contain the data for at most 14 days and are used only to restore the whole service after a failure, not to restore a deleted account.

What remains, without name and without address, are the counters about the way the app was used, for the periods in the table, plus one line with how far you got: whether you set up a farm and how many animals you had. That line has no period, because it can no longer lead back to you — the account, the name and the address no longer exist anywhere, and there is nothing in it but figures.

The messages sent through “Have a question?” remain as well, with the name and the address they came from, so that we can reply even after the account no longer exists; if you want those to go too, write to us before deleting the account.

Data may be kept longer where this is necessary for a legal obligation, for sorting out a security incident or for defending a legal claim. After the period it is deleted.

10Your rights

Under the conditions laid down by the GDPR, you have the right:

• to find out what data we hold about you and to receive a copy;
• to correct inaccurate data;
• to ask for erasure;
• to ask for restriction of processing;
• to receive the data in a portable format;
• to object to processing based on legitimate interest;
• to withdraw your consent to the analysis at any time;
• to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

Many of them are done on the spot, without writing to us. The full backup downloads from Reports — the data in a readable file that works without ViFerm, the photos and documents in an archive. Correction is done in each record. The account is deleted from Account → Deleting the account. Emails are stopped from Account too, and the cookie choice from Cookies and privacy.

For the rest, write to us at support@viferm.org. We may ask for further information to make sure the request comes from you.

11The supervisory authority

The authority competent for the controller is:

• Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht (BayLDA)
• Promenade 18, 91522 Ansbach, Germany
• poststelle@lda.bayern.de
• https://www.lda.bayern.de

You may also lodge a complaint with the data protection authority of the European Union state in which you live, in which you work or in which you believe the infringement took place.

12How we keep data safe

Measures appropriate to the risk, without boasting — what we do:

• the connection to the app is encrypted;
• passwords are kept only as hashes, from which they cannot be reconstructed;
• access is limited by person, farm and role, and every query carries the farm within it — one farm's data cannot be read from another, neither the photos nor the documents;
• repeated sign-in attempts are limited;
• uploaded photos are re-encoded from scratch, so a file disguised as a photo cannot get through, and the data hidden in them is lost;
• the files brought in for import are not opened in the app and cannot be downloaded by anyone but us;
• daily backups, with a restore procedure;
• the changes on the farm are recorded in the log.

No system is perfectly secure. If a personal data breach occurs, we assess the risk and notify the competent authority and the persons affected, where the law requires it.

13Automated decisions and profiling

ViFerm does not take decisions based solely on automated processing which produce legal effects or similarly significant effects on you, and it does not build profiles for advertising.

The due dates, the alerts and the calculations in the app — gestation length, withdrawal periods, body condition score — are indicative and remain subject to your judgement and your vet's.

14Children

ViFerm is addressed to people who work on a farm. It is not addressed to children and we do not knowingly collect children's data through the creation of an account.

15Changes to this policy

We may update the policy when the service, the providers or the legal requirements change. The date and the version in force are written at the head of the page. For important changes we display a visible notice in the app and, if need be, ask for a new consent.

Corrections of form are not presented as a new contract and do not bring an email for every minor fix.