Windrose
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Privacy Policy

Effective date: 13 November 2026 · Version 2.2

Windrose ("Windrose", "the Service", "we", "us") is a dashboard for visualising data from portable weather stations through their provider's API. This Privacy Policy explains what personal data we process, the purposes and legal bases for processing, who we share it with, how long we keep it, the safeguards we apply, and the rights you have. It is drafted to meet the requirements of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679, "GDPR") and reflects information-security practices aligned with the ISO/IEC 27001 framework.

1. Data Controller

The data controller responsible for your personal data is Windroses ("the Controller"). For any privacy request, or to contact the person responsible for data protection, write to support@windroses.world.

2. Personal Data We Process

We practise data minimisation and collect only what is needed to provide the Service.

  • Account identity — your email address, display name, and a one-way hashed password. If you sign in with Google, we instead receive a Google account identifier, your email address and, where available, your profile picture URL. We never receive or store your Google password.
  • Authentication & session — a strictly necessary session cookie (HttpOnly, Secure where served over HTTPS, SameSite=Lax) and an optional "remember me" token, used solely to keep you signed in and to protect your account.
  • Weather-station configuration — the provider API credentials you supply (API key and secret), station identifiers, and the station's geographic location (latitude, longitude, city, region, country, elevation, time zone) and selected driver type, used to retrieve and display your station's data.
  • Weather measurements — sensor readings (e.g. temperature, wind, rainfall, pressure) retrieved for your stations and cached on our servers to speed up the dashboard.
  • Billing — your subscription plan, status and renewal date, and the customer and subscription identifiers issued by our payment processor. Payment-card details are entered directly with the payment processor and are never received or stored by Windrose.
  • Notifications — if you enable push alerts, the push subscription endpoint and keys provided by your browser, your preferred language, and the alert conditions you configure.
  • AI assistant — the messages you send to the in-app assistant, the station weather data used to answer them, and aggregate usage counters. Please do not enter special categories of personal data (e.g. health, political or religious information) into the chat.
  • Cameras — if you connect a camera to a station: the photos it sends or that we fetch from its cloud (for example Ecowitt), the time each was taken, and what our recognition found in them (boxes around animals, people and vehicles, a species name and a confidence score). Photos may show people other than you. For an upload camera we keep its FTP user name with the password one-way hashed, or its HTTP upload token.
  • API access — any API keys you generate (stored with the secret hashed) and minimal request logs (timestamp, endpoint, key identifier) used for rate-limiting, billing and abuse prevention.
  • Technical & diagnostic data — limited server logs (such as IP address, timestamp and the request made) kept for security, troubleshooting and the proper operation of the Service.

We do not collect data for advertising, do not use third-party tracking or analytics tools, and do not sell your data.

3. Purposes and Legal Bases

  • Providing the Service (account, stations, dashboard, AI assistant, API, notifications you request) — performance of a contract, GDPR Art. 6(1)(b).
  • Billing and subscriptions — performance of a contract and compliance with legal accounting/tax obligations, GDPR Art. 6(1)(b) and 6(1)(c).
  • Push notifications — your consent, GDPR Art. 6(1)(a); you may withdraw it at any time by disabling notifications.
  • Security, fraud and abuse prevention, and service improvement — our legitimate interests, GDPR Art. 6(1)(f), balanced against your rights.

Cameras and the people they film. For the photos your camera takes, you decide what is filmed and who may see it, so you act as the controller and Windrose processes the photos on your behalf, only to provide the camera features (storage, animal recognition, blurring and the camera card). You are responsible for using the camera lawfully: point it at your own property, do not film public areas or your neighbours' property without a legal basis, and inform people where the law requires it (for example with a sign). If a person filmed by your camera contacts us, we will forward the request to you and help you answer it.

4. Recipients and Processors

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only with the service providers below, who act as processors or independent controllers under contractual data-protection terms, and only to the extent necessary:

  • Sign-in with Google — identity verification, only if you choose to sign in with Google.
  • Payment processor — secure processing of subscriptions and payment-card data on our behalf, under PCI-DSS.
  • Third-party AI language-model provider — processes your chat messages and the related station data to generate the assistant's responses.
  • Weather-station provider (e.g. Davis WeatherLink) — the source of your station's data, contacted using the API credentials you provide.
  • Camera provider (e.g. Ecowitt) — the source of a cloud camera's photos, contacted using the same account as your station. Photos from upload cameras come straight to our servers. Animal and person recognition runs on our own servers with open-source models (MegaDetector and Google's SpeciesNet): photos are not sent to any outside AI service.
  • Weather forecast provider — receives your station's coordinates to return forecast and historical climate data.
  • Map-tile provider (OpenStreetMap / CARTO) — receives your IP address to load map tiles when you open the community map.
  • Web push services (operated by your browser/OS vendor) — receive the push endpoint to deliver notifications you enabled.
  • Hosting provider — operates the servers that run the Service, located in the European Economic Area (Germany).
  • Google Analytics (Google Ireland Ltd.) — audience statistics for the public website windroses.world, only if you accept analytics cookies there (see section 9). When you create an account or add a station, we also tell Google Analytics that this happened and which sign-in method or station brand was used, linked to the website visit only if you accepted those cookies. We never send your name, email address or account id.

5. International Transfers

Our primary infrastructure is hosted within the European Economic Area (EEA). Some processors (notably the AI language-model provider, the payment processor and Google, including Google Analytics) may process data outside the EEA. Where this occurs, transfers are protected by appropriate safeguards under GDPR Chapter V — typically the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and/or an adequacy decision. You may request a copy of the relevant safeguards using the contact above.

6. Retention

  • Account and station data — kept while your account is active and deleted (or anonymised) after account closure, unless longer retention is legally required.
  • Weather cache — retained on a rolling basis according to your plan's history window.
  • Camera photos — deleted with their recognition results 7 days after they were taken. Removing a camera or closing your account deletes its photos.
  • Billing records — retained for the period required by applicable accounting and tax law.
  • Push subscriptions — kept until you unsubscribe or the subscription expires.
  • Security and API logs — kept for a short period for security and diagnostics, then deleted.

7. Information Security

We apply technical and organisational measures aligned with the ISO/IEC 27001 framework, including: encryption of data in transit (TLS); one-way hashing of passwords and API-key secrets; access controls and the principle of least privilege; HttpOnly/Secure/SameSite session cookies; rate-limiting and abuse monitoring; regular patching and backups; and contractual data-protection commitments with our processors. Each upload camera has its own credentials and is confined to its own folder, which it cannot read back. Plain FTP stays available for older cameras but is not encrypted: use FTPS, SFTP or HTTPS where your camera supports it. A camera is private by default; if you show it publicly, people the recogniser finds can be blurred in the copy others see (an option per camera). Deleting your account cascades to your stations, cached data, push subscriptions, alerts and camera photos. No method of transmission or storage is fully secure; we work continuously to protect your data and to detect and address incidents.

8. Automated Decision-Making

We do not carry out automated decision-making or profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects on you. Plan-based feature limits are contractual settings, not profiling. Camera recognition detects that a person is present, only to blur them; it does not identify anyone and uses no facial recognition.

9. Cookies

The app (app.windroses.world) uses only strictly necessary cookies (the session and "remember me" tokens) and stores your interface preferences (such as theme and language) locally in your browser. These need no consent.

The website (windroses.world) uses Google Analytics cookies (_ga, _ga_*, kept up to 2 years) to count visits and see which pages and sources work, only if you accept them in the cookie banner. Until you do, Google Analytics is not loaded at all. IP addresses are not stored by Google Analytics 4, and advertising features are off. Your choice is kept in your browser's local storage for 6 months, after which we ask again. You can change it at any time with Cookie settings at the bottom of every page of the website; withdrawing consent deletes the analytics cookies already set. The legal basis is your consent (GDPR art. 6(1)(a), ePrivacy art. 5(3)). We use no advertising or profiling cookies.

10. Your Rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict or object to the processing of your personal data, the right to data portability, and the right to withdraw consent at any time without affecting prior processing. To exercise any right, contact support@windroses.world; we respond within one month. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data-protection supervisory authority.

11. Children

The Service is not directed to children below the age of digital consent in their country (16 in most of the EU). We do not knowingly collect their data; if you believe a child has provided us data, contact us and we will delete it.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. Material changes will be posted on this page with a new effective date. Continued use of the Service after an update constitutes acknowledgement of the revised Policy.