Short version: an email address to log you in, plus
whatever you choose to type and a log of changes made on the site. No
advertising, no tracking across other sites, and nothing sold. Anonymous page counts only. If you support the
site, Stripe takes the payment and we keep a short record of it; you do not need an account.
Other members who are signed in can find you in Discovery by your
name, unless you switch Discovery off. The
details are below.
Who is responsible
Kimchi Tours is run by Svidt (CVR 35104542) in
Denmark. Svidt decides what is kept here and why, which makes it the
data controller. Questions about your data:
privacy@kimchi.tours.
What's stored
Your email address: required, because it is
how you sign in. You get a code by email; there is no password.
The monthly newsletter: a switch in your
profile, off until you turn it on. While it is on, your email address
is used to send it to you. Turn it off in your profile at any time, or
write to hello@kimchi.tours
and it is done by hand.
Your tour: the events on it, the events you
have starred and the name you gave it, so it follows you between
devices.
Your own stops: if you add a stop the
catalogue does not have, its name, its dates, its place (a city from
our list and its country, never closer) and the link and note you give
it. It sits on your tour: your friends see it, and nobody else does.
A share link never carries
it. Deleting it deletes it, and it goes with your account.
Trips you plan together: a trip's name, its
stops and who is in it. You can invite only friends, and nobody is in a
trip until they press Join. Everyone in it sees and edits its stops,
and sees the names of everyone in it (an invitation shows the name and
who is in it, to decide), including your own stops that you put on it.
Nothing on the trip is shown to anybody outside it. Removing a friend
or blocking someone takes you out of every trip you share with them,
and a trip ends when its last member leaves.
Your name: required in your profile, because
everything social here is attributed to it. Your friends see it, and
other members see it where described below; no other member sees your
email. A name that was set to friends only, before names were always
shown in Discovery, stays so until you next change something in your
profile, and your profile says so.
Anything optional you fill in: current base,
countries visited, your socials (a handle on Instagram, TikTok,
YouTube, Facebook, X or LinkedIn, or a website), a line on what you do
with up to three fields from the catalogue's own, a short status
message for your friends. All of it can be left blank, and you can
clear it at any time. Your status message is for your friends only,
always: up to 80 characters, shown at the top of your Friends list and
on your member card with how long ago you posted it. Nobody else sees
it, and it is not public whatever your other lines say. We keep only
the latest one and when it was posted, and it goes with your account.
Each of the others is a line of your profile that says
who sees it: your friends, or Discovery (below), or where you have
chosen to be met as an organiser (below). The note to friends is gone.
What you wrote in the note is kept
for you alone, shown to nobody, and you can delete it in your profile.
Stamps in your passport: if you are stamped at a Kimchi Stamp booth, we keep which event, which
city, and the date. That is
a record of you having been somewhere in person, so it is treated as
the most sensitive thing here: only you and the Kimchi Tours desk can
see it, none of your friends sees it, and it is in no map. No total
names anyone: a holder sees how many stamps were pressed at the event,
a partner how many were pressed at its events for members who have
Discovery on, and a sponsor of the stamps is told how many were
pressed at the event. The book is not shared, listed or searchable. A
gold stamp is only ever issued in person, at a Kimchi
Stamp booth; an ink one is your own word that you were
there, given and taken back on the passport page. They are deleted
with your account, except that the desk's log keeps the line that a
gold stamp was pressed or taken back, with the event and your account
id (the desk's log, below). Your passport no
longer asks for the business you travel for or prints it; what you
filled in before is kept for you alone, shown to nobody, and deleted
with your account or when you ask.
Your travel journal: the journal is closed and
its page is gone, but if you opened it while it was there, what it
kept is still held: a page for each stamp, for each stop on your tour
once its dates had passed, and for each base you had had since you
opened it, along with whatever you wrote on its pages: notes, tips,
people's details, and the stickers you placed. It is yours alone. It is
not shown to anyone, not to your friends and not to the Kimchi Tours desk,
and there is no way to share it. It is deleted with your account, and
sooner if you write to
privacy@kimchi.tours and ask.
Tours you follow by code: the older mechanism,
no longer handed out. Authors are shown a number and never a name.
A friend is different and is described just below: it is not
anonymous, in either direction.
Friends: a friendship goes both ways, and
each of you sees the same things of the other. From your invite link, which works for
7 days, whoever opens it is asked to accept, and accepting makes you friends: holding your code
is your consent. From Discovery it is a request:
they see your name and membership number, and nothing else until they
accept. Declining sends you no message. A friend always sees every
line of your profile, whether it is set to Friends Only or All Members: your
name, what you do, your fields, your base, the countries you have
visited and your socials, as far as you have filled them in; and your
tour, always, while Discovery is on. Your
membership number goes with your name; it never changes, which is how
somebody knows a renamed account is still you. Hiding a friend changes
only what you see, and they are not told. Removing one ends it for
both of you. Your requests are yours alone. So is your list of friends,
with one exception: on your member card, described below, a friend sees
the friends the two of you have in common, people they already know.
A member who can see you in Discovery sees only how many friends the
two of you have in common: a number, never who. No other member sees
any of it. The Kimchi Tours desk sees one overview of it: a map with
each member as a dot at their base, marked with their membership
number, and a line between every two friends. It shows no names.
The desk's log: the Kimchi Tours desk keeps a
log of what is done on it, so that a mistake can be traced and abuse
answered. It covers, for example, a mute, a removal from the Travel map
or a ban, a closed report, a stamp pressed or taken back, a partner
added or removed, and every change to the catalogue. Each line has the
time, what was done, what it was done to, the id of the account that
did it and sometimes a detail, such as an event's name or the reason the
desk wrote. The log holds no email address of its own: a barred address
appears in it only as a code made from the address, and the desk can
see the address behind an account id only while that account exists.
Saving your tour changes the count shown on an event; that used to add
lines under your account id, and no longer does. The lines already
written stay.
Only the desk reads the log. When an account is deleted its lines stay,
and the id on them then belongs to nobody. Nothing removes old lines
automatically.
The desk's member list: the Kimchi Tours desk
can look a member up by email address, membership number or part of a
name, and page through every member, and each row shows the address,
name, membership number, base, join date, the organisers the member
belongs to and any sanction.
Who else sees it
Enable Discovery, the switch at the top of
your profile, is on for every account, and everything in
this section is while it is on. Switch it off and the site is yours
alone: nobody sees you anywhere, not in Discovery, on a map, on a
member card, in a friend's list or on a trip you share, and you are
counted in no number, how many people are going included, except
that a stamp pressed for you still counts in the number pressed at its
event (Stamps, above). Your
friendships, requests and trips are kept, paused, and come back as they
were when you switch it on again. While it is off you see no maps and
nothing of other members either. The Kimchi Tours desk's overview,
described above, is the desk's own and does not change with it.
Your email: no other member, ever. Your friends: what is
described above. While Discovery is on you are in Discovery,
the list of members, under your name: your name is always shown there,
and of the other lines of your profile only those you set to
All Members. Discovery means other members who are signed in and
have Discovery on themselves, never somebody who is not signed in. A
new account's name, what you do and your fields are in Discovery from
the moment you continue past the welcome, and every other line is for
friends; skip the welcome and you join it with your name alone once
you add a name in your profile. You change any line in your profile. Your name is also seen by a member you send a request
to. Beyond that:
The World map shows every member with a base
and Discovery on as a small grey dot near their city, to members who
are signed in with Discovery on. It
carries no name, no membership number and nothing that says who, and
it is drawn at the city, never closer: the place comes from our list
of cities, never from the words you typed, and a city we do not know
puts the dot on your country. A city with one member shows one dot.
The countries you have visited join a count of their own: a number
per country, never a name.
Your member card opens from your name. Anyone
who can already see your name in a list can open it: your friends,
anybody with a request between you, and other members while you are
both in Discovery. It shows a face drawn in their browser from your
account id (never your email, and nothing is uploaded or sent), your
name and membership number, and then each line of your profile: what
you do, your fields, your base with the date you set it (their browser
also works out how far it is from their own base), the countries you
have visited and your socials. A friend sees every line; anybody else
sees only the lines you set to All Members. A friend also sees the friends
you have in common and the events you have in common; nobody else
does, and nobody but a friend sees your tour.
On that same map, your friends see a dot on
your city, with your name, when you last changed it and your socials
if you added any. It is the same line they already read beside your
name in their list. Nobody else sees it, and removing a friend, by either
of you, removes it for them.
Other members whose paths cross yours are told
only how many members cross theirs, as one number: never who, so not
your name or membership number, and not which event, which city or
which days, or the tour itself. You are counted only while you are both
in Discovery, and "based where the other is going" counts only a
base set to All Members. Discovery lists you with your name and the lines
you set to All Members, and members can search it by your base and what
you do only while those lines are set to All Members. A friend sees the
crossing itself, the
event, the city and the days, whatever your switches say, but only
where your plans meet theirs, never the rest of your tour. The map
also counts, for anyone who allows it, how many members will be in a
city the week they are: a number, never a name.
If you work with an organiser whose events carry a
partner tag, you can switch on Show me as an organiser. It starts
off, and only people the Kimchi Tours desk has linked to that
organiser (or who accepted an invitation from anyone on its team with
desk access) are offered it. While it is
on, members who are signed in can find you from that organiser's events,
and in Discovery by its name, and ask to be friends: they see your name,
membership number and the organiser's tag. Nothing else is opened by it:
what you do, your fields, base and countries keep their own settings,
and your tour stays with your friends. The
organiser's own profile, which its partners fill in on their desk (a
logo, a line about it and up to four socials), is shown to anyone who
opens its partner tag, signed in or not: it is about the organiser, not
about you.
A share link hands someone the catalogue's events on your
tour as it is now (Copy link), never your own stops: it carries no name and does not update.
Older follow-code links, no longer handed out, still show your tour as
you edit it until you stop sharing.
An invite link is your traveller code in a
URL. Anyone holding it can accept it, and accepting makes the two of
you friends. While it works, anyone holding it sees your display name
on the invite, signed in or not; a signed-in member also sees your
face. You each see every line of the other's profile and the other's
tour, always, while Discovery is on. Either of you can undo it at
any time. A link works for 7 days and then stops working; the next
one you copy carries a new code.
Suggesting an event sends what you typed,
along with your email if you are signed in.
Reporting a problem with the site sends what
you wrote, the page you were on (never the codes in the address bar),
the size of your window, the map tab you had open, your browser's name
and your account, so it can be found and answered.
If you delete your account, the report stays without your name.
An address barred from signing up after abuse
is kept with the reason, so it stays barred, and nothing else about it.
Write to us to have it lifted.
Blocking and reporting a member: a block is
kept as a pair of accounts, yours and theirs, so that it holds; the
person is not told. A report adds the reason you picked and the note
you wrote, up to 500 characters, and is read by the Kimchi Tours desk;
it blocks the person too, and they are not told who reported them. If
the desk mutes an account (no suggestions), takes it off the Travel map
and out of friendships, or bans it from signing in, it keeps that
level, the reason it wrote and the date, with the account, until it
lifts it. Blocks and reports go when either account is deleted, and
the level the desk set goes with its account.
Who processes it
The site runs on Vercel (hosting) and
Supabase (database and sign-in). Resend sends the email:
your sign-in codes and, if you turn it on, the newsletter, so it sees
your address and what it sends you. They process this data to run the
service and for nothing else. Like any host, Vercel and Supabase see
the network address of each request and keep ordinary server logs.
Vercel serves pages from servers around the world, and several of the
companies named in this section are based outside the EU, so data about
you can be handled outside it. Map outlines come from Natural
Earth.
Vercel also counts page views and performance
timings for us: first-party, no cookies, no tracking across
other sites, and nothing tied to your account.
The sign-in library comes from our own host. Only if
that fails does your browser fetch the same file from jsDelivr,
a public content network, which then sees your network address too.
Stripe takes the payment when you support the
site. It is a controller of its own for what it collects on its
payment page: your card, your name and the billing details it asks
for, and a company's VAT number, under
Stripe's privacy policy.
We never see a card number. Stripe tells our payment function that a
payment happened, with a customer number and your email address; the
address is turned into the fingerprint described below and is not
stored by us.
The sign-in window runs and the support form run a bot check from
Cloudflare (Turnstile), so that nobody can use the code emails
to flood an inbox or use the support form to test stolen cards. It runs only when you open that window, out of
sight unless something looks wrong, when a Cloudflare box appears under
the email field for you to tick.It runs only when you open the sign-in window or start to fill in the support form, out of
sight unless something looks wrong, when a Cloudflare box appears for you to tick. It tells us nothing
about you beyond passing or failing. What Cloudflare itself collects is in
their Turnstile Privacy Addendum.
"Use my location" sends your coordinates
elsewhere, and only when you press it: your browser
asks your permission, then they go to OpenStreetMap to be
turned into a city name. They're rounded to about a kilometre first,
they aren't stored, and nothing is sent if you don't use the button.
If you support the site
What we keep about a supporter: a keyed
fingerprint of your email address (a one-way code made with a secret
key we hold, never the address itself), your Stripe customer number,
the name and link you chose for your plate, the date and amount of
each payment, and whether a monthly or yearly subscription is running.
A company's name, website and logo are kept as well. We keep it to
show your plate, to lower or remove it when a payment is refunded or
stopped, to count supporters, and to keep our accounts. A fingerprint
is not anonymous: with your address someone could check that it
matches, so it is handled as personal data. The name and link you
chose also travel with the payment in Stripe.
What is public: on the wall of people, the name
on your plate, the plate you reached, your link once we have looked at
it, and a MONTHLY mark with the number of months while monthly support
runs. A company is not on that wall. It stands in the sponsors section
of the support page, with its name, its tier, and its logo and link once
we have looked at them. Never your email, and never the exact amount of
a gift: a plate shows the range you reached. A company's tier is a fixed
yearly price, listed on the support page, so a tier does show what the
company pays. The page also shows open figures: how many
supporters and payments there are, and totals rounded down that appear
only once at least five supporters stand behind them. Rounding makes a
single gift hard to read off a total; it does not make that
impossible.
Taking a plate down: write to
hello@kimchi.tours, the address
on the support page, or to
privacy@kimchi.tours, and
your name, link and logo come off the wall as soon as we have read it.
What you gave stays in the count and the totals, without a name. If you
give monthly or yearly, stop the support as well, from Stripe's
customer portal or by writing to us: once it has stopped we can erase
your name and link from our record, apart from the backups, and a
later payment does not put them back.
Nothing else is added: supporting brings no
advertising and no tracking across other sites, and the support page
runs no page counts.
If you are a partner
Your access: when you are given partner access
by the Kimchi Tours desk, or you accept an invitation from someone on
the organiser's team with desk access, we keep which organiser you
speak for, whether you have desk access or the tag only, and when it
was given. An invitation you have not answered is kept until you
accept or decline it or the team withdraws it, with the access offered
and who sent it, and it goes with either account. Anyone on an
organiser's team with desk access can invite friends to it, four people
at most, invitations counted, each either shown with the organiser's tag
or given its desk too; a friend joins only when they accept, and can
leave at any time. The others on the team read your name and membership
number only if you are their friend or have Discovery on. You sign in
with your own email address, like any member.
What you publish: an event you post goes live at
once for everyone, signed in or not, under the organiser's name and
partner tag, and so does the organiser's profile (a logo, a line about
it and up to four socials). Both are about the organiser, not about
you. The events are also copied into the offline copy of the catalogue
that the page loads first, which is kept on GitHub with the site's
code, and both into the backups below. The organiser's name and handle
can also appear in the site's own posts on X and Instagram, which go
out through Buffer. A partner sees how many members starred, saved or
put its events on a tour, and how many Kimchi Stamps were pressed at
them, never who.
What the desk keeps: the desk's log, above, names
the account behind each change you make. The desk can also keep
private notes on an organiser: a contact name and email, what was
agreed and how reliable we find it. Partners cannot read them. When you
add an event in a city the catalogue does not know yet, the desk asks
OpenStreetMap's Nominatim where it is, and the city and country go with
the request, from your browser, so OpenStreetMap also sees your network
address.
How long, and how to get rid of it
Your dataWhat you give us as a member is kept while the account exists. Sign out
offers to clear this browser's copy; that is local only and leaves the
account untouched.
A supporter's record of a payment, its date and
amount, is kept for as long as the bookkeeping rules require us to
keep accounting records, which in Denmark is five years after the end
of the financial year it belongs to. A name, a link or a logo is kept
only to show your plate, and goes when you ask, apart from the backups
below; the payment record stays without it.
What deleting an account removes: use the Delete
my account button in the sign-out window, or ask us, and your sign-in,
profile, tour, starred events, own stops, friends, requests, blocks,
your place in the trips you are in (a trip with others in it stays for
them), stamps, journal pages, partner access and any team invitation
you sent or were sent go, with any report you made or were named in.
It asks you to confirm twice and it cannot be undone. The only member
with desk access for an organiser cannot delete their account until
another member has desk access. The next
paragraphs say what it does not reach.
What stays: the desk's log lines, by account id,
among them the lines that a stamp was pressed or taken back at an
event. A suggestion you sent stays without your email address, and a
report about the site without your name. The events and the profile you
posted for an organiser are the organiser's and stay. If an issue of the
newsletter was sent to you, the list on our computer that stops one
going out twice still holds your address until you ask us to take it
out. A few closed copies, kept from past changes to the database so
that a change could be undone, may still hold account ids (who
followed whom before friendships, or what a switch was set to, for
example) and, for organisers the desk removed, contact notes; a deletion
does not reach them, and they stay until they are dropped by hand. The
companies named above keep their own logs under their own terms. And the
backups, next.
Backups: about once a day, every table the site
uses is copied as files to one computer of ours, and that folder is
synced to a cloud drive (Apple's iCloud Drive). The copies hold what
the tables hold, the desk's log and notes included and the addresses
that sit in them (on suggestions, on barred addresses and in organiser
contacts), but not the sign-in accounts: the sign-in service holds
those, and may keep backups of its own, for the period its plan sets.
The files are plain, so what the site keeps for you alone, such as
your passport and your journal, is in them in plain form. Each copy is
deleted when it is 30 days old, on the computer and in the cloud drive,
so an account you delete stays in the copies taken before you deleted
it for 30 days at most. The deleting happens after each backup that
works, so it waits if the computer is off or a backup fails. Apple's
iCloud Drive may keep a deleted file for up to 30 days more, in its own
recently-deleted folder.
To see what is held, correct it, or delete the account
and what is attached to it, email
privacy@kimchi.tours and it
will be done, apart from the backups and the other records named
above. A supporter can ask the same of the record
described above, at the same address; where the bookkeeping rules oblige us to keep a payment
record, that stays, and so do the backups, and nothing else does.
You can also complain to your data protection authority. In Denmark,
Datatilsynet.
Cookies
No tracking or advertising cookies. Your tour,
favourites, theme and sign-in session are kept in this browser's own
storage because the site does not work without them. Also kept there,
for convenience only: the email you last asked a code for, to fill the
box next time, and a few settings, such as which panels are open and
whether Discovery is on. Nothing there is used to follow you anywhere
else. Stripe's payment page, where
you pay, is Stripe's own and sets cookies under its own policy.
