Privacy

Readertrail is made to need as little of your data as possible: no accounts, no tracking, and the site itself sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device.

Who is responsible

Rafael Heinrich, c/o POSTFLEX PFX-373-906, Emsdettener Straße 10, 48268 Greven, Germany (see the imprint). For questions about your data, write to info[at]readertrail.com.

When you visit a page

The site is delivered by Cloudflare, Inc., 101 Townsend St., San Francisco, CA 94107, USA. To send you the pages and to protect the service against attacks, Cloudflare processes technical data such as your IP address, the date and time of the request, the address of the page you asked for (including a light or dark choice or, without JavaScript, search words carried in it, see below), the page you came from and the type of browser. We use this only to run the site securely; the legal basis is our legitimate interest in a working and secure website (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

• Cloudflare as our processor: Cloudflare processes this data on our behalf under its Data Processing Addendum, which is part of our agreement with Cloudflare (Art. 28 GDPR).
• Transfer to the USA: Cloudflare may process the data in the USA. Cloudflare is certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, which the European Commission has found to give an adequate level of protection (Art. 45 GDPR); in addition, its agreement contains the EU standard contractual clauses (Art. 46 GDPR).
• How long: the data is deleted as soon as it is no longer needed to deliver the pages and to keep the service secure. Request logs that we can see in our Cloudflare account are kept for at most 31 days.
• Required? Without this data the pages cannot be delivered to you; you do not have to give us any other data to use the site.
• Encryption: every page is sent over an encrypted connection (HTTPS).

No cookies, no tracking

• Our pages set no cookies and do not track you. They store nothing on your device and read nothing from it: no cookies, no local or session storage.
• Security cookie of our host: to tell people from automated attacks, Cloudflare may set a short-lived security cookie (for example __cf_bm, which expires after 30 minutes) or show a check page. It holds no profile and is used for nothing else. It is strictly necessary to deliver the site securely, so it needs no consent (§ 25(2) no. 2 of the German Telecommunications Digital Services Data Protection Act, TDDDG); the legal basis for the data is our legitimate interest in a secure website (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
• If you switch between light and dark, the choice lives only in the open page. If you click from there to another page of this site, it travels along in that page’s address (as ?theme= followed by dark or light) and is removed from the address bar at once. The site stores it nowhere: a reload or a new visit starts with your device’s setting. Because it is part of the address your browser requests, Cloudflare receives it like the rest of the address and may keep it in its logs together with your IP address (see “When you visit a page”). Your browser’s history may also keep that address, like any page you visit; you can delete it there.
• We do not know where you are in a series. A stop of a series is a page like any other: your place is the page you bookmark, and the bookmark lives in your browser.
• Fonts, search and all other parts of the site come from this site itself. We load nothing from other servers: no fonts from Google or any other font service, no scripts, embeds or images from third parties. The search runs in your browser: it loads the search index and the snippets of matching pages from this site. What you type into the search page stays in your browser, in the part of the address after the #, which a browser never sends to a server. If you use the search box in the header, a script moves your words behind the # before the search page opens. Without JavaScript the search box in the header is a plain form: it sends your words as part of the address (/search/?q= followed by your words), so Cloudflare receives them like the rest of the address and may keep them in its logs together with your IP address (see “When you visit a page”).

Statistics

We do not measure visits at the moment. If we switch on Cloudflare Web Analytics, it counts page views without cookies and without storing anything on your device. We will update this page before we do, and ask for your consent where the law requires it.

When you write to us

• Email: when you write to us, we use your address and your message to answer you. If your message concerns a contract or steps before one, the legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR; otherwise it is our legitimate interest in answering the messages we receive (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). We keep your message until your request is settled, unless statutory retention periods require us to keep it longer. Writing to us is voluntary.
• Contact form: the form on the contact page sends your name (if you give it), your email address and your message to us as one email. A small program at Cloudflare (a Worker) receives the form and hands the email to Cloudflare’s Email Routing; it stores nothing. The legal bases and how long we keep your message are the same as for an email. The form loads nothing from other servers and sets no cookie.
• Where your email goes: mail to our readertrail.com addresses is received by Cloudflare’s Email Routing (Cloudflare, Inc., see above, under the same Data Processing Addendum) and forwarded to our mailbox at Google (Gmail; Google Ireland Limited in Ireland and Google LLC in the USA). Google may process the message in the USA; Google LLC is certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (Art. 45 GDPR).

Links to other sites

The pages of a book and of a series link to stores such as Amazon. When you follow such a link, you leave Readertrail and the store’s privacy policy applies. Your browser tells the store which site you came from (only the site’s address, not the page you were on). With an affiliate link (see the affiliate disclosure), the store also records that a purchase came through us.

Do Not Track

Some browsers can send a “Do Not Track” signal. We do not track visitors over time or across other sites, and no third party tracks you on this site, so the signal changes nothing here: every visitor is treated the same way, with or without it.

Your rights

You can ask us what data about you we process, and you can ask us to correct, delete or restrict it, to object to its processing or to receive it in a portable format (Art. 15–21 GDPR). You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority (Art. 77 GDPR), for example where you live or where we are based. The authority responsible for us is the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information of Baden-Württemberg (Der Landesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit Baden-Württemberg), Lautenschlagerstraße 20, 70173 Stuttgart, Germany. If you live in the UK, you can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Right to object: where we rely on our legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR), as for the hosting data above and for answering your messages, you can object at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation (Art. 21 GDPR).

We make no automated decisions about you and build no profiles. We have not appointed a data protection officer, because the law does not require one for a site of this size (§ 38 BDSG). If this page changes, the new version appears here with a new date.

Last updated: 3 November 2026.