In plain terms
You send us documents that matter — birth certificates, diplomas, court decrees. We treat them accordingly. In summary:
- Your uploaded documents and the finished translations are permanently deleted 30 days after delivery, by an automated job, without you having to ask.
- The only analytics we use are Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity, and only if you agree to them — nothing is stored, sent or recorded about your visit until you accept, and you can withdraw at any time. We never profile you and we never sell your data. The one thing that reaches our Google Ads account, if you accept analytics, is that an order was paid and for how much — so we can see which of our own ads lead to orders, and nothing more.
- Your database, files and backups are hosted inside the EU — Frankfurt and Falkenstein, Germany.
- No card details ever reach us. Payment happens on Stripe’s own checkout page; we only learn the amount, the currency and that it succeeded.
The rest of this page is the detail behind those four points.
Controller
The controller responsible for your personal data under Art. 4 Nr. 7 GDPR is:
- Controller
- Deepak Sharma, trading as Trusted Lingo
- Address
- Käthchen-Paulus-Straße 2
60486 Frankfurt am Main
Germany - Data protection officer
- None appointed. Trusted Lingo is a sole proprietorship and does not meet the thresholds in Art. 37 GDPR or § 38 BDSG that would require one. Data protection enquiries reach the owner directly at the address above.
What we collect
We collect only what an order actually requires. Grouped by what it is for:
- Account details
- Your email address and password (stored only as a hash), or your Google account identifier if you sign in with Google. Optionally your name, phone number, the spelling of your name as it appears in your passport, a postal address, and your notification preferences.
- Order details
- The document type, language pair, delivery speed and quantity you chose; your name, email address and phone number; any billing or postal address you enter; any notes you add for the translator; and the order’s price, status and timestamps. You can order as a guest without an account, in which case we hold the same order details without an account attached.
- The documents you upload
- The files themselves, plus their filename, type and size. These are the most sensitive data we hold. Civil-status documents — birth, marriage and divorce certificates — can reveal information the GDPR treats as a special category under Art. 9, such as religious affiliation. We do not seek that information, we do not index or analyse it, and it is used for one purpose only: producing the translation you ordered.
- The finished translation
- The certified PDF produced for you, held so that you can download it, and deleted on the same 30-day schedule as your uploads.
- Messages about your order
- Messages exchanged between you and the assigned translator on the order, any files attached to them, and which messages have been read.
- Payment and invoice records
- The amount charged, the currency, the payment status, your name and email address, and the billing address you gave at checkout, held against an invoice number. We never receive or store your card number, expiry date or security code — those are entered on Stripe’s own payment page and never pass through our systems.
- Contact form messages
- Your name, email address and the message you send. These are forwarded to our support mailbox by email and are not stored in our database.
- Technical data
- Ordinary server logs generated when your browser makes a request, used to keep the service running and to investigate faults and abuse. When you submit the contact form, your IP address is held in memory for one minute to limit how often the form can be submitted; it is not written to disk and nothing longer-lived is kept.
- Withdrawal declarations
- If you withdraw from a contract using our online form, we store your name, email address, the order reference you entered, the time of receipt, your IP address and browser identifier, and our decision on it, including who made it, when, and any reason noted. We email you a confirmation of receipt.
Legal basis and purpose
Each category is processed on one of the following bases under Art. 6 Abs. 1 GDPR:
- Performing your contract — Art. 6 Abs. 1 lit. b
- Your account and order details, your uploaded documents, the finished translation, and messages about the order. Without these we cannot produce or deliver what you ordered.
- Legal obligation — Art. 6 Abs. 1 lit. c
- Invoice and order records, which German tax law requires us to retain (§ 147 AO, § 14b UStG). This obligation overrides a deletion request for these specific records — see Your rights. It also covers withdrawal declarations, which we must acknowledge and be able to prove (§ 356a BGB).
- Legitimate interests — Art. 6 Abs. 1 lit. f
- Server logs, and holding an IP address briefly to rate-limit the contact form. Our interest is keeping the service available and free of abuse; the data is minimal, short-lived and not used to identify or profile you.
- Your consent — Art. 6 Abs. 1 lit. a
- The newsletter, which is off by default and only sent if you turn it on; and the contact form’s tick-box agreeing that we may reply to you by email. You can withdraw either at any time, with no effect on processing that already happened.
Where an uploaded document happens to contain special-category data under Art. 9, we rely on Art. 9 Abs. 2 lit. a — you provide the document to us deliberately, for the express purpose of having it translated, and it is used for nothing else.
We do not use your data for automated decision-making or profiling within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR.
Processors and recipients
We keep this list short on purpose. Each of the following processes personal data on our behalf under a data processing agreement, and only to the extent its function requires:
- Supabase — database, sign-in and file storage
- Stores your account, orders, messages and uploaded documents. Data is held in the eu-central-1 region (Frankfurt, Germany). Supabase Inc. is US-incorporated, so support access from outside the EEA is covered by the EU standard contractual clauses.
- Hetzner Online GmbH — application hosting
- Runs our order-processing application on a server in Falkenstein, Germany. A German company, hosting in Germany; no third-country transfer arises.
- Vercel Inc. — website hosting
- Serves the website itself from a global content network. Requests may be handled outside the EEA; covered by the EU standard contractual clauses.
- Stripe — payment processing
- Handles payment. Stripe receives your name, email address, billing address and the amount due, and returns only the outcome to us. For customers in Europe the contracting entity is Stripe Payments Europe Ltd (Ireland). Stripe is a controller in its own right for its regulatory obligations, such as anti-money-laundering checks.
- Google — website analytics, only with your consent
- Google Analytics 4 tells us which pages people use and which they abandon. It runs only if you accept it: until you do, Google’s consent mode is set to deny storage, so no cookie is written and no identifier for you exists. If you accept, Google LLC receives your IP address, the pages you view, your approximate location derived from that address, and your device and browser type. Google LLC is in the United States; the transfer is covered by the EU standard contractual clauses, and Google is certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. If you accept and then pay for an order, Google Analytics also records that the order was paid, with its order code and amount — not your name, your email address or your documents — and passes that event to our Google Ads account, so we can see which of our ads lead to orders. We have not enabled Google Signals, remarketing or any other advertising feature, and nothing about you is used to show you ads. The lawful basis is Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR — your consent — together with § 25 Abs. 1 TDDDG, and you can withdraw it at any time on our Cookie Policy page.
- Microsoft — usage heatmaps and session recordings, only with your consent
- Microsoft Clarity shows us where people scroll and click and replays individual visits, so we can see which pages confuse people. It runs only if you accept it: until you do, the Clarity script is not loaded at all. If you accept, Microsoft Corporation receives your IP address, the pages you view, your mouse movements, clicks and scrolling on them, and your device and browser type. Text you type into forms is masked in your browser before anything is sent, and Clarity is stopped before any order, upload, message, invoice, account or sign-in page opens, so those are never recorded. Microsoft is in the United States; the transfer is covered by the EU standard contractual clauses, and Microsoft is certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. We do not link recordings to your order, your email address or your account. The lawful basis is Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR — your consent — together with § 25 Abs. 1 TDDDG, and you can withdraw it at any time on our Cookie Policy page.
- Resend — transactional email
- Sends order confirmations, delivery notices and password resets. Receives your email address and the content of those messages. Resend Inc. is US-based; covered by the EU standard contractual clauses.
- The court-sworn translator assigned to your order
- Receives your uploaded documents and any messages you send on the order — they cannot produce the translation otherwise. Each translator is bound to confidentiality, both by their own professional obligations as a sworn translator and by their agreement with us. Translators see only the orders assigned to them. They process your data on our behalf and only on our instructions, as processors under Art. 28 GDPR, bound by the data processing agreement in Annex 1 of our Translator Terms of Service. Certifying the translation remains their own act under their oath.
Beyond these, we disclose your data to no one. We do not sell it, rent it, or share it for advertising or any other purpose unconnected with your order, and there is no advertising or retargeting infrastructure on this site that could do so. We would disclose data to a public authority only where the law obliges us to.
Retention
Deletion is automated. It runs whether or not you ask, and these periods are enforced by scheduled jobs rather than by anyone remembering:
- Uploaded documents, finished translations and chat attachments
- Deleted 30 days after delivery, counted from when your order was delivered or shipped. Both the files and their database records go; the deletion is permanent and not recoverable from a backup on our side.
- Unpaid, abandoned orders and their uploads
- Deleted 7 days after the order was started, if payment was never completed. We email you two days beforehand so an order you meant to finish is not lost silently.
- Files uploaded to a message but never sent
- Deleted after 24 hours.
- Order records, invoices and messages
- Retained for as long as German tax and commercial law requires — up to 10 years for invoices and accounting records under § 147 AO and § 14b UStG. This is the record of the transaction: the order reference, what was ordered, what it cost and that it was paid. It deliberately outlives the documents themselves, which are gone at 30 days.
- Withdrawal declarations
- A declaration linked to an order is kept for as long as that order’s records (up to 10 years, as above). A declaration not linked to any order is deleted no later than three years after the end of the year in which it was made (§§ 195, 199 BGB); this is done in a manual review, not by an automated job.
- Your account
- Held for as long as you have an account. Ask us to close it and we delete your account and profile, keeping only the invoice and order records and the withdrawal declarations the retention obligation above covers.
- Server logs
- Kept only as long as needed to diagnose faults and abuse, and then rotated out.
How we protect your data
Traffic to and from this site is encrypted in transit (TLS). Uploaded documents are not published at a guessable address: every download goes through a link that is generated on request, tied to your session, and expires five minutes after it is issued. Access to an order is limited to you, the translator assigned to it, and us.
No system is beyond compromise. Where a breach is likely to result in a risk to your rights, we will notify the competent supervisory authority within 72 hours as Art. 33 GDPR requires, and notify you directly where Art. 34 requires it.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to:
- Access the personal data we hold about you, and receive a copy (Art. 15).
- Rectification of data that is wrong or incomplete (Art. 16) — including the spelling of your name, which matters for a certified translation.
- Erasure of your data (Art. 17). We will act on this except for invoice and order records and withdrawal declarations we are legally required to keep; for those we restrict processing to the retention purpose instead of deleting them.
- Restriction of processing (Art. 18) and data portability in a machine-readable form (Art. 20).
- Object to processing based on our legitimate interests (Art. 21).
- Withdraw consent at any time where processing rests on it (Art. 7 Abs. 3) — for the newsletter, in your account settings.
To exercise any of these, email contact@trustedlingo.com. We will respond within one month, as Art. 12 Abs. 3 requires. There is no charge, and you do not have to give a reason.
You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. Ours, because we are established in Frankfurt am Main, is:
- Competent supervisory authority
- Der Hessische Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit
Postfach 3163, 65021 Wiesbaden, Germany
datenschutz.hessen.de
You may also complain to the authority where you live or work, if that is elsewhere in the EU.
Cookies
We set the cookies that keep you signed in, which need no consent because the site cannot work without them, and — only if you accept — the Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity cookies. That is what the banner asks about. We set no advertising cookies at all. Each cookie is named, with its lifetime, in our Cookie Policy, where you can also change or withdraw your answer.
Changes to this policy
If we change how we handle your data — a new processor, a different retention period — we update this page and the date at the top of it. Where a change materially affects you, we will tell you directly rather than relying on you to re-read it.