Privacy policy

At Familou, we look after families — and that starts with your data. This policy explains simply what information we process, why, with whom, and what your rights are. The processing of your data is governed by the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (nFADP).

Data controller

The data controller is Andersen Lau (natural person), [TO BE COMPLETED — postal address], Switzerland. For any question about your data: [TO BE COMPLETED — contact email].

The data we process

We only collect what the village needs to work:

  • Account: your email address, a password (never stored in clear text), your language, your account status and your login dates.
  • Profile: your display name, and optionally first name, last name, country, gender, date of birth, a short bio, a photo, a job title, a website and links to your social networks — as far as you choose to fill them in.
  • Your children (if you introduce them): first name, last name, date of birth, gender, a few words, a photo. This information is encrypted and private by default.
  • Addresses and location: if you share an address (good addresses or the members’ map), we process the address, an optional phone number and geographic coordinates, according to the visibility you choose.
  • Your contributions: questions and answers on The Square, comments, ratings of good addresses, bookmarks, parents you follow and reports.
  • Private messages: the content of your messages, encrypted.
  • Subscription: when you subscribe, the information needed for payment (see “Who we share your data with”).
  • Technical data: IP address, browser type and connection logs, for security purposes.

Why we process this data

We use your data to: give you access to your account and the village’s services (The Square, Knowledge, the address book); personalise your feed; ensure security and prevent abuse; manage subscriptions and payments; send you the emails related to your account (welcome, verification, password reset, subscription); and comply with our legal obligations. In accordance with the nFADP, we process your data in good faith, proportionately and for these purposes only: on the basis of the service you request, your consent for sensitive information (such as your children’s), and our legitimate interest in securing the platform.

Your children and sensitive data

Information about your children and certain personal information (bio, date of birth) is encrypted and private by default. You decide, profile by profile and child by child, what may be visible. Even when you make a child visible, we never show their last name, exact date of birth or photo — only their first name, age, gender and the few words you have written.

Photos in the address book

If you create a professional page or suggest an address, you may upload photos to it. They are hosted in Switzerland, at Infomaniak, together with the rest of the site — unlike the images posted on The Square or in private messages, which go through an external host. We strip their metadata (place of capture, device) before storing them.

The photos on your professional page illustrate your listing only: they are never reused in our articles, nor added to the site’s media library. When you delete your account, they are erased, along with your listing. The photos of an address you suggest follow a different path: the listing belongs to the village, and those photos stay online after you leave — they show a place, not you. The rights you grant us over these photos are set out in our terms of use.

Cookies

Familou uses only strictly functional cookies, set by our own site:

  • Session (“session_…”): keeps you logged in during your visit (24 hours).
  • Stay signed in (“remember_…”): if you ask for it, recognises you for 30 days.
  • Language (“preferred_lang”): remembers your language (1 year).
  • An anti-CSRF token kept for the duration of your session, to secure forms.

We use no advertising cookies and no third-party audience-measurement tools (no Google Analytics, Matomo, etc.). That’s why you won’t see a “cookie” banner: there is nothing to consent to beyond these essential cookies.

Audience measurement

To understand which pages are useful to you, Familou measures its own traffic — without cookies, without a banner and without any third-party service. For each page viewed, we record: the page, the approximate country, the device, browser and operating-system family, the display language, the type of referral (search engine, external link, direct visit) and, where applicable, the referring site. Your IP address and your browser’s signature are never stored: they are only used, for a brief instant, to compute an anonymous technical identifier that tells visitors apart within a single day. The key that makes this computation possible is destroyed within 48 hours at the latest — after which no one, not even us, can link those visits to anyone, or recognise a visitor from one day to the next.

The country is derived from your IP address using a local copy of the DB-IP database (CC-BY licence): your address is never sent to any third party. Search terms typed on the site and clicks to the external websites listed in the address book are counted in aggregate, with no link to your account.

If you are signed in, your page views are, however, associated with your account for a maximum of 90 days. This log is only visible to administrators holding a dedicated permission, each of their consultations is itself logged, and it is immediately detached from your account if you delete it. After 90 days, raw browsing data is deleted for everyone: only anonymous totals remain (visits per day, most-read pages), containing no personal data.

Who we share your data with

We never sell your data and only share it with the providers needed to run the service:

  • Infomaniak (Switzerland) — hosting of the site, the database and email delivery.
  • Stripe — processing of subscription payments (card or TWINT). Payment takes place on Stripe’s secure servers; we never see or store your card number. We pass on your email and display name to set up the payment.
  • imgbb — hosting of the images you post on The Square or in private messages. These images are hosted outside Switzerland; we remove their metadata (location, device) before sending.
  • Swisstopo (GeoAdmin) — Swiss geolocation service: when you search for an address, the text you type is sent to this service to find the coordinates.

Some of these providers (notably imgbb) may process data outside Switzerland. We limit the information transmitted to what is strictly necessary.

Security

We protect your data with technical and organisational measures: encryption of sensitive information, passwords protected by a robust algorithm (Argon2id), HTTPS connection, secure cookies (HttpOnly, Secure), protection against request forgery and repeated login attempts, automatic logout of your other sessions when you change your password, and removal of image metadata. As no protection is absolute, we encourage you to choose a unique password and keep it confidential.

How long we keep your data

We keep your account and its content for as long as it is active. When you delete your account, your personal data is erased or anonymised. Content placed in the trash (contributions, media) is permanently deleted after 30 days. Technical logs needed for security are kept for up to 365 days, then automatically erased.

Your rights

In accordance with the nFADP, you have the right to access, rectify, erase and object to the processing of your data, and to receive your data (portability). You can exercise most of these rights directly from your member space:

  • Export my data: download a full copy of your data from the “My account” page.
  • Delete my account: erase your account from the “My account” page.
  • Edit your profile: correct or complete your information at any time.

You can also write to us at [TO BE COMPLETED — contact email]. If you believe that the processing of your data does not comply with the law, you have the right to contact the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC).

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time, either immediately or on a scheduled date (for example at the end of your subscription period) — this scheduled deletion remains cancellable until it is carried out. If you have posted content, it may be kept anonymously and attributed to “Deleted user”, so as not to break the discussions other parents took part in.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy to reflect changes to the service or the law. The date of the last update is shown at the top of this page.

Contact

A question about your data? Write to us via the contact page or at [TO BE COMPLETED — contact email]. See also our legal notice.