The controller for the processing described here is:
fotone.net – sole proprietor: Simon Orendi
Konrad-Adenauer-Allee 35, 86150 Augsburg, Germany
E-mail: datenschutz@fotone.net
We have not appointed a data protection officer; we do not meet the statutory criteria that would require one. Simon Orendi answers data protection questions at the address given above.
The competent supervisory authority is the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision (Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht, BayLDA), Promenade 18, 91522 Ansbach, Germany.
This policy does not cover our customers' websites or the e-mails our customers send through rocketEM. The customer concerned is the controller for these and provides its own information; for recipients of such e-mails we have added Section 11.
Server logs. Every time a page is called up, our web server stores an entry containing the IP address, the time, the address requested, the referring page, the status code and details of the browser and operating system. We need these entries in order to deliver the pages, to find faults, to detect and fend off attacks, and to see how often our pages are called up and from where. With the IP address they contain an item of personal data; we do not combine them with other data and do not analyse them in order to recognise individual visitors. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in secure operation and in measuring reach (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).
How long an entry is kept depends on the server. On the server that runs rocketEM, the logs are rotated automatically and overwritten after a few days; an entry is kept longer only where it is needed to investigate a specific security incident. The hosting providers of the two websites keep the logs for twelve months: for www.fotone.net with the last block of the IP address removed, for rocketem.io with the full IP address. From these logs they produce access statistics showing country, region, browser and the pages called up, which we are able to view.
Cookies. We ourselves set only cookies that are necessary for operation — none for audience measurement and none for advertising. No consent under Section 25(1) TDDDG (the German act on data protection in telecommunications and digital services) is required for these; they are strictly necessary within the meaning of Section 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG. In addition, the provider of our form protection places entries of its own on your device once that protection is loaded. In detail:
PHPSESSID). It contains nothing but a random identifier for your session, no content, and expires when you close your browser. That identifier allows us to restore what you typed if sending the contact form fails, for example because a mandatory field is missing. For that purpose your name, company, e-mail address, subject and message are held briefly on our server and are deleted as soon as the form is displayed to you again.You can block or delete cookies in your browser. Without the cookies named above, signing in to rocketEM is technically impossible.
If you write to us by e-mail or through one of our forms, we process what you provide in order to answer your enquiry. The legal basis is the initiation or performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR), otherwise our legitimate interest in answering it (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). Where your details end up depends on the route you take:
We keep business correspondence for as long as it may serve as evidence of the business relationship. Commercial and business letters are subject to a statutory retention period of six years, and documents relating to invoices to one of ten years (Section 257 HGB, the German Commercial Code, and Section 147 AO, the German Fiscal Code).
To keep our forms from being misused by programs, we use Cloudflare Turnstile (Cloudflare, Inc., USA). Using technical characteristics — among them the IP address, browser properties and interaction behaviour — the service checks whether a request comes from a human being. It sets no cookies for advertising or tracking purposes and builds no user profiles.
We use Turnstile on the contact forms on www.fotone.net and rocketem.io and when signing in to the application. On the two websites the service is not loaded when the page is called up, but only when you scroll to the contact area. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in protection against misuse and spam (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). On transfers to the USA, see Section 7.
On the public forms our customers provide through rocketEM — sign-up, unsubscribe, preference centre — Turnstile runs through our Cloudflare account only where the customer concerned has selected the rocketEM bot protection in its settings. Instead, it can enter its own Cloudflare account there, or Friendly Captcha or Google reCAPTCHA, or choose a method that involves no third party. If it enters its own credentials, the check runs through its account with that provider: the data goes to the provider it has chosen, the contractual relationship is between it and that provider, and it is responsible for the transfer. Where a method without a third party is used, no transfer to third parties takes place.
Our customers create accounts in rocketEM for their staff. Registration by any visitor is not possible. We are the controller for these accounts. We process the name, the e-mail address, the password solely as a hash value that cannot be reversed, the two-factor sign-in settings, language and role, as well as the time and IP address of sign-ins and of security-relevant events.
The legal basis is the performance of the contract with the customer concerned (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR) and, for the security logs, our legitimate interest in protecting the accounts (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). We keep security events for 90 days. If an account is deleted, we remove the associated data within 30 days.
rocketEM contains features that suggest or rework texts, subject lines and layouts with the help of a language model. When a user calls up such a feature, we transmit the content that user has entered to Anthropic PBC in the USA and receive the result back. Without such a call, nothing is transmitted.
Personal data held in rocketEM, such as recipient lists and analytics data, is not transmitted. Placeholders for personal salutations are not replaced until the e-mail is sent, that is, after the language model has done its work. The legal basis is the performance of the contract with the customer (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR). The customer can switch the feature off at any time in the settings of its account; no transfer takes place after that. On transfers to the USA, see Section 7.
We do not run our services on our own equipment, but in service providers' data centres. With those service providers that process data on our behalf we have data processing agreements under Article 28 GDPR.
Fonts. The fonts used on our pages are loaded through bunny.net (BunnyWay d.o.o., Slovenia). In doing so your browser transmits its IP address to the service so that the font can be delivered.
Transfers to the USA. Two services process data outside the European Union, and both are described above: Cloudflare (Section 4.1) and Anthropic (Section 6). For Cloudflare we base the transfer on the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and, in addition, on standard contractual clauses; for Anthropic on standard contractual clauses under Article 46(2)(c) GDPR. We have documented the bases for these transfers and the supplementary measures and will produce them on request.
We store personal data only for as long as the purpose concerned requires or a statutory obligation prescribes. In detail:
Response data relating to our customers' e-mails — opens and clicks with IP address and client identifier — is anonymised automatically once the period set by the customer concerned has elapsed; the statistical figures are retained without any personal reference.
To read our pages you do not have to tell us anything.
In our contact forms, name, e-mail address and message are mandatory fields; company and subject are optional. Without the mandatory fields the form cannot be submitted.
For a contract we need the company, the address, a contact person and the invoicing address, and for direct debit also the bank details. Without this information the contract cannot be concluded or invoiced.
You have the following rights against us and can exercise them without giving reasons and free of charge.
An informal message to datenschutz@fotone.net is enough, or by post to the address in Section 1. We reply without undue delay and within one month at the latest; where a matter is exceptionally complex, that period is extended by up to two further months, and we will tell you so, with the reasons, within the first month. Where there are reasonable doubts about your identity, we will ask for additional information.
Right to lodge a complaint (Article 77 GDPR): irrespective of the above, you can at any time lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, in particular in the Member State of your residence, your place of work or of the alleged infringement. The authority competent for us is the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision (BayLDA), Promenade 18, 91522 Ansbach, Germany.
We do not take automated decisions within the meaning of Article 22 GDPR, and we do not carry out profiling.
With rocketEM we provide business customers with software they use to design and send e-mails to their own contacts: newsletters as well as transactional e-mails, automatically triggered messages and automations. The controller for such an e-mail is solely the sender named in it, not fotone.net. In that respect we act as a processor under Article 28 GDPR and exclusively on our customer's instructions; the basis is a data processing agreement in each case.
Please therefore address any matter concerning such an e-mail to its sender — in particular access, rectification, erasure, restriction and objection. If a request reaches us that can be attributed to a customer, we forward it to that customer without undue delay and tell you who the controller is.
On our customers' behalf we process in particular: recipients' address data, records of consent given including the time and IP address of the confirmation in the double opt-in procedure, attributes supplied by the customer for forming recipient groups, the content of the e-mails sent and data on sending and on responses. Whether the e-mails contain a tracking pixel and links carrying an identifier for measuring success, and on what legal basis this happens, is decided by the customer concerned.
Each customer's recipient data is held in its own database, separate from other customers, on servers in Germany and France.
The version published here at the time is the one that applies.
Last updated: 28 September 2026
This is a translation of the German original. In the event of any discrepancy, the German version at www.fotone.net/datenschutz prevails.