What we keep, and what we do not

Who is responsible

This site is run privately by the owner of Ankerstraat 23a, Nieuwpoort. If you want something explained, corrected or erased, the contact page reaches us directly.

What we keep

Only three things, and two of them only if you offer them.

• Your guestbook entry: the message, the name you chose to give (optional), the language you wrote in, the date, and your photo if you added one. We keep this because you asked us to put it on the wall, which is your consent.
• A message sent through the contact form: your name, your email address and what you wrote. It goes to a private mailbox so we can answer you, and nowhere else.
• Your IP address, held in memory for a few minutes to stop the guestbook being flooded. It is never written to our database and it disappears on its own.

What we deliberately do not do

This list matters more than the one above.

• No cookies. None at all. Your choice of light or dark is remembered by your own browser and never sent to us.
• No analytics, no tracking pixels, no third-party scripts, no advertising, no profiling.
• We never sell or share what you leave here, and we do not use photos to recognise faces.
• Location data is stripped out of every photo before it is stored, so a selfie cannot reveal where you were standing.

Photographs

A photo is the most personal thing this site can hold, so it is treated as such. It is stored privately, not on a public address, and nobody can see it until we have approved it. Until then it is not reachable, not merely hard to find.

Please only submit a photo of yourself, or of adults who are happy to appear. Do not photograph other people's children.

Who else touches it

We are a website, not a data centre, so a few companies handle this material on our behalf and on our instructions only.

• Vercel, which hosts the site and stores the photographs.
• Neon, which runs the database holding guestbook entries.
• Resend, which delivers messages from the contact form.
• Cloudflare, whose Turnstile check tells humans from bots.

Where it is processed

Some of these providers are based outside the European Economic Area, so your information may be processed outside it. Where that happens it relies on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

A guestbook is meant to accumulate, so entries stay until you ask us to remove them, or until the site itself closes. That is exactly why removal is one click and needs nobody's permission. Messages sent through the contact form stay in the mailbox for as long as the conversation is useful.

Removing your entry

When you sign the guestbook you are given a private link. Open it and your message and photo are erased immediately and permanently, with no request, no waiting and no explanation owed to anyone. If you have lost the link, ask us through the contact page and we will do it for you.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us to show you what we hold, correct it, erase it, limit what we do with it, object to it, or hand it to you in a portable form. Where we rely on your consent you can withdraw it at any time, and withdrawing it is as easy as giving it was.

• Ask us anything through the contact page and we will answer.
• If our answer does not satisfy you, you can complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority (Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit / Autorite de protection des donnees) at www.gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit.be.

Changes

If this notice changes, the date at the top changes with it. We will not quietly start collecting something new without saying so here.