Privacy Notice
This tells you what WhenStars does with your personal data, why, and what you can make us do about it. It describes the app as it actually works today. Where something is not yet built, it says so rather than describing an intention.
Who is responsible
COMPANYA s.r.o., registered IČO 51 816 237, IČ DPH SK2120802222, Obchodný register Mestského súdu Bratislava III, oddiel Sro, vložka č. 129873/B, at Pod Vachmajstrom 13973/13, 831 01 Bratislava, Slovakia, is the data controller. That means we decide what is collected and why, and we are the ones you complain to.
For anything about your data, write to hello@whenstars.com. We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer, because the scale of processing here does not require one under Article 37.
Two ways to have an account
With an email address. You choose an email and a password. The email is your login and how you reset a forgotten password.
Without one (the Android app). You can start without giving any email or password. We create an account that has neither. The app signs you back in with a long random restore key that it keeps on your phone and never shows; we keep only a one-way hash of it, which cannot be turned back into the key, and it stops working a year after its last use. The app's copy is stored in the app's own settings on the phone, and Android includes those settings in your phone's backup to your Google account if you have backup turned on; that backup is between you and Google, and we never see it. The app also shows you your WhenStars code in Account. That is your account's reference number, not a password: nobody can sign in with it, and it is how support finds your account if you write to us. You can add an email to this account later, and when you do, the restore key is no longer needed.
On the website without an account, nothing is sent about you at all: the chart you type stays in your browser, and the website shows the general sky until you sign in.
What we collect, and why
Everything below is either something you typed or something the service cannot work without. There is no advertising, no profiling for advertising, and no tracking of you across other sites.
| What | Why we have it | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address, if you give one | It is your login. It is also how we confirm the account is yours and how you reset a forgotten password. | Performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b) |
| Your password, if you set one | Stored only as an Argon2id hash. We cannot read it, and nobody here can tell you what it is. | Performance of a contract |
| Your WhenStars code (the account's reference number), and a hash of the app's restore key, for an account without an email | The code lets support find your account. The restore key lets the app reconnect you after your sign-in expires or the phone is replaced. We cannot read the key from the hash. | Performance of a contract |
| Birth date, birth time, birth place and its coordinates | This is the entire purpose of the app. Without the exact moment and place there is no chart to compute. | Performance of a contract |
| Where you are now: the city you set, and its coordinates | Sunrise and sunset, and therefore every planetary hour in the app, depend on where you are standing rather than where you were born. The coordinates are sent with each request that computes a day, a moment or an explanation, because the answer is different in another place. What we save on the chart is rounded to about 11 km, the size of a town, not a street. | Performance of a contract |
| The name you give a chart, and your home time zone | To label your charts, and to decide which calendar day "today" is for you. | Performance of a contract |
| Your display and planning preferences | So a choice follows you to your other devices. Today that is the colour theme older app versions let you pick. The account can also hold the areas you pin, your waking hours and whether you want an hourly notice, but the current app keeps those on your phone and does not send them. | Performance of a contract |
| Session records: a hash of the session token, when it was last used, and when it expires | To keep you signed in. | Performance of a contract |
| Records of what you agreed to: which version of the Terms and of this notice, its fingerprint, the time, and one-way hashes of your IP address and browser identification | To be able to show what you were told and what you accepted, and when. We store hashes, not the address itself. | Legitimate interest in being able to show what was agreed and when, Art. 6(1)(f); for the product-news choice, the duty to be able to show consent, Art. 7(1) with Art. 6(1)(c) |
| Purchase records: amount, currency, item, date and the store's reference for the payment | Nothing is for sale now. Between August and 7 September 2026 a few purchases were made through Google Play, and tax law requires us to keep their records. | Legal obligation, Art. 6(1)(c) |
| A one-way hash of your email in the free-trial ledger | Written when an email address is confirmed. While the app is free it decides nothing; it exists so that, if a free trial ever returns, deleting an account and signing up again cannot claim a second one. It cannot be turned back into an address or read out as a list of people. | Legitimate interest in not having a free trial abused |
| Error reports from the website | When a page fails, the website sends us what broke: the error text, the file and line, a few lines of the program's own call list, the app version and "web". Before anything is saved, email addresses, numbers of four or more digits, and the query and "name=value" parts of a web address are removed. They carry no IP address and no account or chart id, and nothing you type into a form is sent on purpose. The Android app sends none. | Legitimate interest in keeping the service working |
| Server logs kept by our web server | Operating the service and investigating faults and abuse. These contain IP addresses. | Legitimate interest in keeping the service running and defending it against attack |
| Support and administration actions taken on your account | So that "why did I lose access" has an answer. | Legitimate interest in accountable support and in being able to explain our own actions |
| Your product-news choice, if you make one | So that news email goes only to people who asked for it, and stops the moment they stop asking. Described fully at Product News by Email. | Consent, Art. 6(1)(a), optional and withdrawable at any time in settings |
To keep one caller from overloading the service, the server counts requests per IP address, or per account when you are signed in, for one minute in memory. Nothing of this is written down, and it is gone when the minute is. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in keeping the service available to everyone, Art. 6(1)(f).
Which of this you have to give us: a birth date, time and place are needed to compute a chart, because the chart is a calculation over exactly those facts. If you do not provide them, we cannot provide the service; there is no penalty beyond that. An email address and a password are needed only if you want an account that signs in with them; the Android app works without either. The name you give a chart is yours to choose freely, and everything else in the table arises from using the service rather than from being asked.
What stays on your device
Some of what the app does never leaves your phone or browser, and we never receive it:
- A copy of your chart and your settings, so the app opens quickly and works when the network does not. On the website without an account, this is the only copy.
- Events you add, your waking hours, and notes you write in the app.
- Your phone's calendar, if you turn on "Phone events". The app then needs Android's calendar permission, reads your events and draws them beside the hours, on the phone. They are not sent to us, not stored by us and not kept by the app after it draws them.
- The hour notification. The app works out the current hour and shows it in a notification on the phone. Nothing is sent to show it.
- Your restore key, described above.
Deleting the app, or clearing its data, removes what the app kept; your phone's calendar is its own and stays as it is.
Cookies
We do not use cookies for tracking. Exactly one cookie exists: a first-party session cookie that holds your sign-in, set when you sign in or when the app starts an account without an email, readable by nobody but this site and not by any script in your browser. It lives for 30 days or until you sign out, whichever is sooner. It is strictly necessary for the service to work at all, which is why no banner asks you to consent to it. No analytics package is loaded. No third-party script runs on our pages.
Because we do not track anyone across other sites, we do not respond to browser "Do Not Track" signals: the service behaves identically with or without one. No third party collects information about your activity over time and across other websites through this service; the only third party your browser ever contacts is OpenStreetMap, described below, and only when you open the map.
No automated decisions are made about you
Readings are computed automatically from chart mathematics, but WhenStars makes no automated decision with legal or similarly significant effect on you in the sense of Article 22.
A note about what a birth chart is
Your birth data is not, in the wording of Article 9, a special category of personal data. It is not health data, and it is not a statement of religion. We are conscious that an argument could be made that using an astrology service says something about a person's philosophical outlook, so we treat this data with the care that argument would demand whether or not it is required: it is stored in the European Union, it is never sold, never shared for advertising, and never used to build a profile of you for anyone else's purpose.
Who else sees your data
Three companies process data on our behalf or receive it as a consequence of how the app works. There are no others.
- DigitalOcean hosts the service. Your data is stored on a server in Frankfurt, Germany, inside the European Union.
- Brevo (Sendinblue SAS, France) sends our email: account confirmation and password resets. They receive your email address and the contents of those messages.
- The OpenStreetMap Foundation serves the map. This one is different and you should understand it: when you open the map to pick a birthplace or the city you are in now, your browser talks to OpenStreetMap directly, so their servers see your IP address and which part of the map you are looking at. We never send them your birth data, but the area you browse can obviously suggest where you were born or where you are. If you would rather not, you can type a place name instead: the place-name search runs entirely on our own server from a database bundled with the app, and nothing leaves.
Every third party that processes personal data on our behalf is bound by a data processing agreement to protect it to the same standard this notice describes, as the GDPR requires of processors and as the app stores require of us.
Google, separately, runs Google Play, from which you install the Android app. When purchases were possible, Google processed them under its own privacy policy; the app still asks Google Play, on your phone, whether an old purchase is waiting to be completed, and Google answers under that same policy. Your phone's backup to your Google account, if you use it, is likewise between you and Google.
We do not sell your personal data. We have never sold it. We do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Everything we hold about you came directly from you.
Where your data goes
Your data is stored in the European Union. Where a provider may reach it from outside the European Economic Area, the GDPR requires a safeguard. These are the ones each provider names in its own data processing agreement:
- DigitalOcean is a company based in the United States, and your data is stored in Frankfurt. Its agreement says that if it processes the data of people in the EEA in a country the European Commission has not found adequate, it relies on its certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, which the Commission has recognised as providing adequate protection for certified US companies. If that framework is declared invalid or its certification lapses, the Commission's standard contractual clauses apply instead.
- Brevo is in France. Its agreement says that some of its own providers and group companies are outside the EEA, in the United States and in India, and that it protects the data with the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework where it applies and with the Commission's standard contractual clauses and extra measures.
- The OpenStreetMap Foundation is in the United Kingdom, which the European Commission has found to provide an adequate level of protection (renewed in December 2025). Only your IP address and the map area you look at reach it, as described above.
You can ask us at hello@whenstars.com for a copy of the safeguard that applies to any of them.
How long we keep it
- Your account and charts: until you delete them. Deletion is immediate and real, in the app or on the web at whenstars.com/delete-account, which also works for an account without an email if you quote your WhenStars code. The city you are in now is part of the chart and goes with it; setting a different city overwrites the previous one rather than adding to a history.
- Sessions: until they expire or you sign out.
- The restore key's hash: with the account; it stops working a year after its last use.
- Purchase records: kept for as long as tax law requires. When you delete your account the purchase is unlinked from you, so the amount, date and item survive for the accounts while nothing connects them to a person.
- The free-trial hash: kept indefinitely. It is a one-way hash and cannot be reversed, which is the only reason keeping it is proportionate.
- Records that you agreed to the terms: if you never paid us anything, they are erased with your account. If you ever made a purchase, a pseudonymised copy (a one-way hash in place of your identity, plus the document versions, their fingerprints and the times) is kept for three years after deletion, the limitation period for contract claims, because the law permits keeping what is needed to resolve a dispute about a purchase. After three years it deletes itself.
- Error reports from the website: in the server's system log for at most 30 days. They identify nobody, so deleting your account has nothing of yours to remove there.
- Server logs: the web server's access and error logs are kept for at most 14 days.
Your rights
If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you have the right to get a copy of your data, to have inaccurate data corrected, to have your data erased, to restrict or object to processing, and to receive your data in a portable form. You can exercise any of them by writing to hello@whenstars.com. We answer within one month. For an account without an email, quote your WhenStars code so we can find it; we cannot otherwise tell which account is yours.
Your right to object. Where this notice names our legitimate interest as the legal basis (the server logs, the rate limit, the error reports, the trial ledger, support records and the records of what you agreed to), you can object at any time, on grounds relating to your particular situation. We then stop, unless we can show compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests, rights and freedoms, or the data is needed to establish, exercise or defend legal claims. You can object to product news at any time, without giving a reason, and it stops.
Two of these deserve a straight answer rather than a formula:
- Correction. If a birth date or time is wrong, you have an unconditional right to have it corrected and we will correct it, free, as many times as it takes. An additional chart is a different matter, because a different birth moment is a different person rather than a correction. Additional charts are free at the moment, along with the rest of the app; if that ever changes, correcting a mistake stays free regardless.
- Portability. There is no self-service export button yet. Ask us and we will send you your data in a machine-readable file. Building the button is on the list.
On consent: exactly one thing here rests on your consent, and that is product news by email, which is optional, asked as its own unticked box, and withdrawable at any time in your settings or by the unsubscribe link such email carries; withdrawing is as easy as agreeing was and affects nothing else about your account. Everything else in this notice rests on the contract between us, on legal obligations, or on the legitimate interests named in the table, which is why the signup checkbox accepts the Terms of Use rather than "consenting" to this notice: a notice is something we owe you, not something you grant us.
You can complain to a supervisory authority: to the one where you live, where you work, or where you think the infringement happened. Our lead authority is the Slovak one, Úrad na ochranu osobných údajov Slovenskej republiky (Hraničná 12, 820 07 Bratislava, dataprotection.gov.sk), because the controller is a Slovak company; complaining to your own country's authority is every bit as valid.
If you are in California or another US state with a privacy law
You have the right to know what we collect, to get a copy, to have it corrected, and to have it deleted, and we will not treat you worse for asking. We do not sell or share personal information as those words are defined by the CCPA as amended, and we have not in the preceding twelve months. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for any purpose beyond providing the service. The categories we collect are identifiers, commercial information about the few past purchases, and internet activity in the limited form of server logs, all described above. Write to the same address to exercise any of it.
Children
WhenStars is not for children. You must be at least 16 to hold an account. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger, and if we learn that we have, we delete it.
Security
Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are hashed with Argon2id. Session tokens, restore keys, and the IP addresses and browser identifiers on consent records are stored only as hashes. Chart identifiers are random rather than sequential, so nobody can walk through them to find other people's birth data. Access to the production database is limited to the operator of the service.
No system is perfect. If you find a weakness, please tell us at hello@whenstars.com before telling anyone else, and we will fix it and credit you if you want that.
Changes
If we change this notice we publish a new version with a new number and date. Earlier versions stay available so you can see what you were told at the time. If a change is material, you will be asked to read it the next time you open the app or sign in.
Contact
COMPANYA s.r.o.
Pod Vachmajstrom 13973/13, 831 01 Bratislava, Slovakia
hello@whenstars.com