Privacy notice

1. Who is responsible

WLOUNGE UG (haftungsbeschränkt) Haus Cumberland Kurfürstendamm 194 10707 Berlin Germany

Managing Director: Mali M. Baum. For anything about your data, write to techawardsteam@wlounge.de or info@wlounge.de.

2. What we process

• Account data: name, email address, password (stored only as a hash), and, if you sign in with LinkedIn, the name, email address and profile picture LinkedIn shares with us.
• Application data: your answers, including company and business information, team members and their roles, the categories you enter, your pitch deck, the contact person’s name and email, drafts, the time of submission, and when you accepted the Terms of participation.
• Juror data: name, email address, title, short bio, photo, organisation and its logo, chosen categories, assigned entries, scores and comments, and gala attendance.
• Finalist data: RSVP answers, the representative’s name, position, email and phone number, a plus-one’s name and email, the company’s LinkedIn page, and gala tickets.
• Email logs: recipient, type of message, time and delivery status of the emails we send you.
• Technical data: IP address, browser and device information, and times of requests, in server, security and error logs and in your sign-in sessions; a record of actions taken in the app (for example who submitted or changed an entry).
• Error reports: technical details of errors in the app and in your browser (error message, page, browser and device type). They contain no names or email addresses.
• Anonymous usage statistics: pages viewed, clicks and page load times, without cookies or any identifier stored on your device. Visits are counted with a code computed on PostHog’s servers from your IP address and browser, which changes daily and from which you cannot be identified.
• Usage data and session recordings, only with your consent: pages viewed and interactions in the app, and recordings of your sessions (clicks, scrolling and what the page shows, never what you type), with a pseudonymous identifier.

If you name team members or other people in an application, please let them know about this notice.

3. Why we process it, and on what legal basis

• Running the competition: accounts, applications, judging, selecting and informing finalists and winners, the gala and its tickets, and the emails that go with them. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (your participation, as a startup or as a juror). Data about other people named in an application: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in evaluating the entry.
• Anonymous usage statistics, to see which pages and steps work and which don’t. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in improving the app; nothing is stored on or read from your device beyond what your browser sends with every request.
• Product analytics and session recordings, to understand in detail how the app is used and improve it. Legal basis: your consent, Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR and § 25(1) TDDDG.
• Security, abuse prevention and error monitoring: protecting accounts, limiting repeated requests, keeping a record of changes to entries, and detecting and fixing errors on our servers and in your browser. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in a secure, working app and a fair competition.
• Legal obligations, such as record-keeping under commercial and tax law or requests from authorities. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR.

You need to provide the data the application form asks for to take part; without it, we cannot evaluate your entry. We do not make decisions based solely on automated processing: entries are read and scored by people.

4. Who sees your data

• The WLOUNGE Tech Awards team sees what it needs to run the competition.
• Jurors see the answers and pitch deck of the entries assigned to them. They do not see the contact details you give for your entry.
• The public: for finalists and winners, the company name, logo and a short description; for jurors, the profile they provide (name, title, photo, organisation). These may appear on the Tech Awards pages, at the gala, in press material and on social media.

We use these service providers. Those acting on our behalf are bound by data processing agreements (Art. 28 GDPR):

• Railway (Railway Corporation, USA): hosting, database and file storage, in its EU West region.
• Resend (Plus Five Five, Inc., USA): sending emails.
• Sentry (Functional Software, Inc., USA): error monitoring on our servers and in your browser, stored in its EU region. It uses no cookies or other storage on your device, records no sessions, does not store your IP address, and receives no names or email addresses.
• PostHog (PostHog, Inc., USA): anonymous usage statistics, and, only after you consent, product analytics and session recordings; stored in its EU cloud. IP addresses are not stored.
• LinkedIn (LinkedIn Ireland Unlimited Company): only if you choose to sign in with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is responsible for its own processing under its privacy policy.
• Eventbrite: gala tickets. Eventbrite processes ticket data under its own privacy policy.

Some of these providers are based in the USA or may access data from there. Where data is transferred outside the EU and EEA, it is protected by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework for certified providers or by the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 45 and 46 GDPR). We do not sell your data.

5. How long we keep it

• Unsubmitted drafts and their pitch decks are deleted 30 days after the application window closes.
• Submitted applications, their pitch decks, scores and juror data for an edition are kept to run and document that edition and are deleted no later than 24 months after its gala ceremony. Published results (finalist and winner names, logos and descriptions) may stay in the public record of the awards.
• Accounts are kept until you ask us to delete them.
• Email logs are kept for 12 months; server, security and error logs for up to 90 days; analytics data for up to 12 months; session recordings for 30 days.
• Data we must keep by law, for example under commercial and tax law, is kept for the period the law requires.

6. Cookies

When you first visit, a banner lets you accept all, reject all or manage your preferences per category. Only essential cookies are used until you choose otherwise.

You can change or withdraw your consent at any time under Cookie settings at the foot of every page. Withdrawing does not affect processing before it. Error reporting (Sentry) and anonymous usage statistics (PostHog without your consent) use no cookies or other storage on your device (sections 2 and 4); you can object to them under section 7.

7. Your rights

You have the right to access your data (Art. 15 GDPR), to have it corrected (Art. 16), deleted (Art. 17) or restricted (Art. 18), to receive it in a portable format (Art. 20), and to withdraw consent at any time with effect for the future (Art. 7(3)).

You may object at any time to processing based on our legitimate interests (Art. 21 GDPR), on grounds relating to your particular situation.

You can also complain to a data protection authority. Ours is the Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit, Alt-Moabit 59–61, 10555 Berlin, www.datenschutz-berlin.de.

8. Deleting your entry or data

You can delete an unsubmitted draft, with its pitch deck, yourself from your entry page (Your entry).

To delete a submitted application, your account or any other data, or to use any of your other rights, email techawardsteam@wlounge.de from the address linked to it. Deleting a submitted application withdraws it from the competition. We reply within one month.

9. Changes

We update this notice when the app or the law changes. The date at the top shows the current version.