What this site knows about you, which is very little.
No cookies, no advertising, no tracking across sites and nothing loaded from other companies' servers. The details are below.
Last updated: October 13, 2026.
Who is responsible
The controller under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is Ali Vahidinasab, Lothringer Straße 17, 63450 Hanau, Germany. For anything on this page, write to ali@vahidinasab.com.
Visiting the site
The site runs on servers rented from Hetzner Online GmbH in Nuremberg, Germany. To send you a page, the server has to receive your IP address and the technical details your browser sends with every request. The site keeps no access log of visits and does not write your IP address to its database.
Your IP address is held in memory for up to a minute to limit how many requests one address can make to the forms and the page counter. That protects the site against abuse, which is a legitimate interest under Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.
Counting page views
When a page loads, your browser tells the site which page it was. The site adds one to a counter for that page and that day, and stores nothing else: no IP address, no browser details, no identifier, and nothing that links one visit to another. Your browser also sends the name of the site you came from; it is discarded. The counters cannot be traced back to a person.
If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, the visit is not counted at all.
Cookies and browser storage
The site sets no cookies for visitors. If you switch between the light and dark theme, your browser remembers the choice in its local storage under the name theme. It stays on your device and is never sent to the server. Because it only does what you asked for, it needs no consent (§ 25(2) TDDDG).
The owner's sign-in at /admin uses cookies. It is not linked from the site and is of no use to anyone else.
Newsletter
If you subscribe, the site stores your email address and the times you signed up and confirmed. You then get one email with a link, and you are only subscribed once you follow it. The basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR).
- A sign-up that is not confirmed is deleted after 30 days.
- You can withdraw your consent at any time, with the unsubscribe link in an email from the site or by writing to ali@vahidinasab.com. Withdrawing does not affect what happened before.
- Unsubscribing deletes your address. What remains is a SHA-256 hash of it and the date, as a record that the address was removed (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). The address cannot be read back from the hash. Ask and that record is deleted too.
Contact form and email
The form on the About page takes your name, your email address and your message. They are used to read and answer what you wrote (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR where you are asking about work, Art. 6(1)(f) otherwise).
- The message is forwarded to my mailbox by email.
- A copy stays in the site's database for 30 days, so a failed delivery can be recovered, and is then deleted automatically.
- The email in my mailbox is kept for as long as the conversation needs, and deleted afterwards unless the law requires me to keep it.
The same applies when you write to me by email directly.
Who receives your data
Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared for advertising. These companies process data on my behalf:
- Hetzner Online GmbH, Germany: the servers and the database, in Germany, and the encrypted backups, in Finland.
- Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL, Luxembourg (Amazon SES): sends the newsletter confirmation to your address, and the contact form's message to mine.
- Google Ireland Limited (Gmail): the mailbox that receives contact messages and email sent to me.
- Cloudflare, Inc., USA: answers the domain's DNS queries and routes email addressed to
ali@vahidinasab.comto that mailbox. Pages are not served through Cloudflare. - Cremer & Walther GbR (MediaMinds360), Germany: receives letters sent to the postal address above and forwards them to me.
Amazon, Google and Cloudflare belong to groups based in the United States, so data they handle may be processed there. Those transfers rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and, where it does not apply, on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.
Articles are drafted with the help of AI services (OpenAI and Tavily). They receive material about the articles only. Nothing about visitors, subscribers or contact messages is sent to them.
Backups
The database is backed up daily. Backups are encrypted and kept for about four weeks, so something deleted from the site is gone from the backups within that time.
Links to other sites
Articles link to other websites. Nothing is loaded from them while you read, and they learn nothing about you until you follow a link. From then on their own privacy policy applies.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you can:
- ask what data about you is stored, and get a copy (Art. 15, Art. 20),
- have it corrected (Art. 16) or deleted (Art. 17),
- have its use restricted (Art. 18),
- object to processing that rests on a legitimate interest, for reasons arising from your situation (Art. 21),
- withdraw a consent you gave, at any time (Art. 7(3)).
Write to ali@vahidinasab.com and I will answer within a month. You can also complain to a data protection supervisory authority, for example the one where you live or work (Art. 77).
You do not have to give any data to read the site. The newsletter needs an email address and the contact form needs a name, an address and a message; without them those two things cannot work. No decision about you is made automatically, and no profile is built.
Changes
This page is updated when the site changes what it does with data. The date at the top shows the latest version.