Privacy

Controller Art of Living gemeinnützige GmbH, Bad Antogast 1, 77728 Oppenau, Germany, represented by its managing director Marcel Verbay. Privacy contact: info@happinessfestival.de.

What we store For your account: email address, password (stored only as a hash), display name, language and year of birth. We use the year of birth only for the age limits (app 16+, contacts and messages 18+); nobody else can see it. Voluntary, only if you enter them: real name, city, age range, gender, interests and causes. Your content: completed challenges with notes and photos, messages, team and community membership, meditation entries. Technical: server logs (IP address, timestamp) to keep the service secure.

Why we use it To run the app and send the verification email when you register (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). Voluntary profile fields and push notifications rest on your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR) and can be withdrawn at any time in your profile or device settings. Gender is never shown publicly and is not visible to other members; authorised admins use it internally only to understand who the festival reaches.

Happiness Assessment (Wheel of Life) During onboarding and later if you wish, we ask how satisfied you are in eight areas of life, including your health and your values and spirituality. This can be special-category personal data under Art. 9 GDPR (health, philosophical beliefs). We only store your answers with your explicit, separately given consent (Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR). You can skip the questions without any disadvantage. Only you see your answers; they are never published and never compared with others. You can withdraw your consent and delete all answers yourself in the assessment at any time. Until you send the long assessment, unfinished answers are kept only locally on your device.

Push notifications If you turn on push notifications, a device identifier is passed to your browser's or operating system's push service — Google, Mozilla or Apple depending on your device. These providers may transfer data to the USA; the basis is the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (Art. 45 GDPR) or EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46 GDPR). The content of the notification is encrypted. Push notifications rest on your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR) and can be switched off at any time in the app or your device settings.

Photos When you upload a photo we remove metadata such as the location it was taken (EXIF/GPS).

Where the data lives On Hetzner Online GmbH servers in the EU (Finland). Verification emails are sent by our processor Resend (Resend Inc., USA); the transfer is based on EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR). There are no analytics or advertising tools. We only set technically necessary cookies: the login session, your language choice and — if you arrive through an invitation link — the invitation code.

Your rights You have the right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability, withdrawal of consent, and to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Write to info@happinessfestival.de. The competent supervisory authority is the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information of Baden-Württemberg.

Deletion You can delete your account yourself at any time in your profile (with all content, photos and messages) and download a copy of your data there. We'll also do it for you on request. Unconfirmed registrations are deleted after two days. Backups are overwritten after 14 days at the latest.

Minimum age The app is intended for people aged 16 and over.