Privacy Policy
At Ecobilda, we are committed to protecting your privacy and personal data. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, store, and protect your information when you use our platform. We comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other applicable data protection laws.
We collect several types of information to provide and improve our services:
Account Information
When you create an account, we collect your first and last name, email address, date of birth, profile photo (optional), spoken languages, bio/description, country of residence, and skills. If you register via Google OAuth, we receive your name, email, and profile picture from Google.
Project and Activity Data
We collect project descriptions, photos, locations (address and coordinates), availability dates, participation requests and their status, messages exchanged between users, reviews and ratings, reports and flagged content, and saved searches and favorites.
Technical Data
We automatically collect your IP address, browser type and version, device information, pages visited and time spent on each page, referring website, and cookies and similar technologies (see Cookies section).
We use the collected data for the following purposes:
- To create and manage your account and authenticate your identity.
- To connect volunteers with project hosts and facilitate participation requests.
- To enable communication between users after a participation request is accepted.
- To send transactional notifications (participation updates, new messages, review reminders).
- To maintain platform security, prevent fraud, and enforce our Terms of Service.
- To improve and optimize our platform, features, and user experience.
We process your personal data based on: (a) your consent, provided when you create an account and accept our terms; (b) the performance of a contract, as processing is necessary to provide our services; (c) our legitimate interests, such as platform security, fraud prevention, and service improvement; (d) legal obligations, when we are required to process data to comply with applicable laws.
We may share your data in the following limited circumstances:
- With other users: Your public profile information, project details, and reviews are visible to other platform users. Messages are shared only with conversation participants.
- With service providers: We use third-party services for hosting (Hetzner), email delivery, map services (Mapbox), and authentication (Google OAuth). These providers process data only on our behalf and under strict contractual obligations.
- For legal reasons: We may disclose data if required by law, court order, or government request, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Ecobilda or its users.
We never sell your personal data to third parties for advertising or marketing purposes.
Ecobilda uses essential cookies required for the platform to function (authentication tokens, session management, language preferences). We do not use advertising or tracking cookies. No consent banner is required for strictly necessary cookies under GDPR.
We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your personal data, including encrypted data transmission (HTTPS/TLS), secure password hashing, JWT-based authentication with token expiration, access controls and role-based permissions, and regular security reviews. While we strive to protect your data, no method of transmission over the internet is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
We retain your personal data for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide our services. If you delete your account, we will remove your personal data within 30 days, except where retention is required by law or necessary for legitimate business purposes (such as resolving disputes or enforcing our agreements). Messages in conversations may be anonymized rather than deleted to preserve the integrity of the other participant's records. Reviews may be retained in anonymized form.
Deleting your account: you can delete your account at any time from Settings > Danger zone. Erased right away: your name, email address, password, photo, bio, date of birth, address, skills, languages, alerts, favourites and notifications; your open applications and upcoming builds are cancelled and your projects hidden. Kept in anonymized form, shown as "Deleted user": your messages (for the people you wrote to), the reviews you wrote or received, your completed builds and their build stories, and reports. Copies in our backups are erased within 30 days.
Under the GDPR, you have the following rights regarding your personal data:
- Right of access: You can request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
- Right to rectification: You can update or correct your data through your profile settings or by contacting us.
- Right to erasure: You can request the deletion of your account and personal data.
- Right to data portability: You can request your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
- Right to restriction: You can request that we limit how we process your data in certain circumstances.
- Right to object: You can object to data processing based on our legitimate interests.
To exercise any of these rights, please contact us at contact@ecobilda.com. We will respond to your request within 30 days. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.
Ecobilda is not intended for children under 18 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 18. If we become aware that we have collected personal data from a child under 18 without parental consent, we will take steps to delete that information promptly.
Your data is stored on servers located in the European Union (Hetzner, Germany). If data needs to be transferred outside the EU/EEA, we ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place, such as Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission.
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of significant changes via email or through a prominent notice on the platform. Your continued use of Ecobilda after changes are posted constitutes your acceptance of the updated policy. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.
If you have questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us at contact@ecobilda.com.