Privacy Policy

Information pursuant to Art. 13 and 14 GDPR

This English translation is provided for convenience. Only the German version (Datenschutzerklärung) is legally binding.

1. Controller

The controller responsible for data processing on this website is:

Adam Koch
Weißensteinstr. 44
58093 Hagen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Phone: +49 2334 4937304
E-mail: kontakt@advena-partners.com

2. Principle of data minimisation

BeatTime deliberately keeps data to a minimum: there are no user accounts, no sign-in, no advertising and no tracking. When you merely visit the website, we process personal data only to the extent that this is technically necessary for secure and functional operation. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (legitimate interest in secure, stable operation). Beyond that, we process data only if you actively use a feature, such as the timestamping service (section 6) or voluntary support (sections 10 to 14).

3. Hosting

This website is hosted by Hetzner Online GmbH, Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen, Germany. The host processes access data and server log files on our behalf; a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR) is in place.

4. Server log files

When you access the website or the API, information that your browser or client transmits is automatically stored in server log files: browser type and version, operating system, referrer URL, time of the request, the page or interface accessed, and the IP address. These data are not merged with other data sources. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.

Two restrictions apply from the outset. The IP address is stored in truncated form: the last digits are removed, so that only the network can be identified, not the individual connection. And those parts of the requested address (URL) that may contain a checksum of a document – for example when a timestamp is verified or a certificate is retrieved – are made unrecognisable before the entry is written. The hash value of your document therefore does not appear in the log.

Retention period: The log files are kept on a rolling basis: they have a fixed maximum size, and once it is reached, new entries automatically overwrite the oldest ones. There is therefore no fixed period in days – how far back the logs go depends solely on how many requests have been received in the meantime. Entries are kept longer only if we are investigating a specific case of abuse (such as an attack on our systems); in that case we separately secure only the entries concerned and delete them as soon as the matter has been concluded. The legal basis for this is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.

Rate limiting (protection against abuse): To prevent the forms and interfaces relating to voluntary support (sections 10 to 12) from being misused by automated means, and to keep our systems and the services integrated into them from being overloaded, we briefly count requests per sender in a cache (Redis) on our server. Only a counter is stored – in most cases for your IP address and, when you report a crypto transaction, for a truncated, irreversible hash value of your IP address. Each counter deletes itself automatically when its time window ends: 10 minutes for opening the thank-you page after a payment, 1 hour for the interfaces behind the forms, 24 hours for reporting a crypto transaction. For access via our onion service (section 17), the stored address is, for technical reasons, only that of our own Tor service. The counters are not analysed, not merged with other data and not exported. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (protection against abuse and overload).

5. BeatTime API

The public time API (beattime.live/api) is read-only and does not process any personal data: no content is uploaded, no accounts are kept and no usage profiles are created. For technical reasons, only access data are recorded in the server log files (see section 4).

6. Timestamping service (proof of existence)

When you timestamp a file on beattime.live/proof or in the app, your device calculates the SHA-256 hash value of the file. The file itself is not transmitted; only the 64-character hash value is sent to us. The content of the file cannot be reconstructed from it. The hash value is entered, together with the time, in a public log that can only be extended (append-only log), combined weekly into a Merkle root, signed and anchored externally (in Bitcoin via public OpenTimestamps calendar servers, and via a bank reference). Only the weekly Merkle root is transmitted to the OpenTimestamps servers – no individual hash value and no IP address of users.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (provision of the service you requested). Please note: the purpose of the service is a permanent, unalterable proof. Entries in the log therefore cannot technically be deleted without invalidating the proofs of all other users. You should therefore only timestamp files for which you agree to a permanent public entry of their hash value.

7. Beat handshake

During the “Beat handshake” in the app, two devices each transmit a randomly generated value and, optionally, a public device key (Ed25519). We store these values, the session code, the time and the hash value calculated from them, which is entered in the public log (section 6). Names or descriptions (“with whom”) remain exclusively on the devices and are not transmitted. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.

8. Sealed capsules

On beattime.live/capsule, a capsule is sealed and opened entirely in your browser. The content, keys and recovery code are not transmitted to us. To seal or open the capsule, your browser retrieves public data (key parameters and signatures released at the agreed time) directly from the following sources; for technical reasons, these servers receive your IP address in the process:

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR; the data are retrieved only when you use the feature.

9. Apps: Android, Wear OS and BeatStamp for Windows

The apps “BeatTime: Universal Clock” and “BeatTime Watch Face” contain no analytics, tracking or advertising services and do not require an account. Settings, history, capsules and statistics are stored exclusively on your device. The app calls our time API to synchronise the clock and, when timestamping, transmits only the hash value (section 6).

Optionally, you can connect the app to Google Calendar (Google sign-in, permission calendar.events). Calendar data are processed exclusively between your device and Google and are not transmitted to us; their use complies with the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the “Limited Use” requirements. You can disconnect at any time in the app or at myaccount.google.com/permissions. The legal basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR).

BeatStamp for Windows. The desktop program BeatStamp (Microsoft Store and direct download) likewise contains no analytics, tracking or advertising services, requires no account and sends no telemetry. When timestamping, it calculates the SHA-256 hash value on your computer and transmits only that value (section 6); files, file names and notes do not leave your computer. For technical reasons, every request contains your IP address and the program identifier BeatStamp/‹version›; section 4 applies to the server log files.

To verify a proof in “fast mode”, BeatStamp looks up the hash value at beattime.live. In “private mode” (the default), it instead downloads a copy of the entire public log and verifies locally – the hash value of your document is then not transmitted for verification.

Independent witnesses: While the program is open, it checks at start-up and roughly every 15 minutes whether the signed checkpoints of beattime.live match independent copies. To do so, it retrieves public data from the following sources, which for technical reasons receive your IP address and the program identifier – but no information about your documents:

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; our legitimate interest lies in enabling you to verify the proofs independently of us. In the case of GitHub, the Internet Archive and the block explorers, data may be transferred to third countries, in particular the USA; the privacy policies of these providers apply. The queries to third parties and the regular background check can be switched off in BeatStamp under Settings → Witnesses. In Tor mode, all of the program’s requests are routed through the Tor network.

Local data: BeatStamp stores its history (hash values, file names, notes, times), settings, an event log for troubleshooting, the copy of the public log and the verification results exclusively on your computer, in the folder %USERPROFILE%\BeatStamp. We have no access to it. The folder is kept when the program is uninstalled so that your proofs are not lost; you can delete it yourself at any time.

10. Voluntary support via Stripe

You can support BeatTime voluntarily with a one-off amount. Card payments and the other payment methods offered on the payment page are handled by the payment service provider Stripe: Stripe Payments Europe, Limited, The One Building, 1 Grand Canal Street Lower, Dublin 2, Ireland; regulated payment services are, where applicable, provided by Stripe Technology Europe, Limited, 1 Wilton Park, Wilton Place, Dublin 2, D02 FX04, Ireland (together “Stripe”).

When you click “Continue to payment (Stripe)”, you are redirected to a Stripe payment page (checkout.stripe.com). You enter your payment details there and nowhere else. We do not embed any Stripe scripts on our own pages.

The following data are processed in this context:

Stripe sends the payment receipt to the e-mail address you enter on the payment page. We ourselves do not send you any e-mails in connection with a payment.

Stripe processes the data on our behalf in order to carry out the payment (as our processor under Art. 28 GDPR, on the basis of Stripe’s data processing agreement). For its own purposes, Stripe is itself a controller, in particular for detecting and preventing fraud (including an automated risk assessment that may lead to a payment being declined), for complying with legal obligations (e.g. anti-money-laundering rules), for selecting banks and payment networks, and for improving its own services. If you use Stripe’s “Link” service to save your payment details, this too is done under Stripe’s own responsibility. If you choose a wallet such as Apple Pay or Google Pay or – where offered – PayPal on the payment page, the respective provider additionally processes your data under its own responsibility in accordance with its privacy notice.

The legal bases are Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (processing the payment you initiated), Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR (tax record-keeping and retention obligations, §§ 146 and 147 of the German Fiscal Code, Abgabenordnung – AO) and Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (our legitimate interest in secure, efficient payment processing and in preventing fraud and abusive chargebacks). The details requested for the payment are required; without them, support via Stripe is not possible.

Stripe also processes data outside the European Economic Area, in particular in the USA (Stripe, Inc.). Stripe, Inc. is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, for which there is an adequacy decision of the European Commission of 10 July 2023 (Art. 45 GDPR); in addition, Stripe uses the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR).

Further information: stripe.com/privacy; Stripe’s data protection officer: dpo@stripe.com. For retention periods, see section 14.

11. Voluntary support in cryptocurrencies

On our website, we list receiving addresses for Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC). Please note: payments in these networks are recorded in a public blockchain. The sender address, receiving address, amount and time are permanently visible there to anyone and cannot be changed or deleted, either by us or by you. Blockchain addresses are pseudonymous, but they can be attributed to a person using other information (e.g. an account on a trading platform). Because we publish the receiving addresses, anyone can trace the payments received at them.

Our server detects incoming payments automatically on the basis of public blockchain data. For each incoming payment, we record the following in a continuous income log that cannot be altered afterwards: network, transaction ID, our receiving address, amount, block number and block time, as well as the euro equivalent, which we determine uniformly from a fixed rate source (the daily closing price on the Kraken trading platform for the calendar day of receipt in Coordinated Universal Time, UTC). We do not store your sender address; however, the payment remains traceable in the public blockchain via the transaction ID. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR in conjunction with the tax record-keeping obligations (§§ 145 to 147 AO).

For detection and valuation, our server retrieves public data from the following services: mempool.space (Bitcoin), litecoinspace.org (Litecoin), Etherscan and a public Ethereum access node (currently ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com), and Kraken (exchange rates). These requests contain only our own, public receiving addresses and our API key – no data about visitors to our website.

If, after supporting us in cryptocurrency, you would like to be named on the supporters list (section 12), you can report the transaction to us using a form on our website. In doing so, we process the network, the transaction ID, the name or nickname you choose, your confirmation that the transaction was sent by you or on your behalf, and your consents, including the age confirmation, together with the time they were given. We match the transaction exclusively against our own income log and review the details before approval. If the transaction cannot be found in our income log after 14 days, we reject the report and delete the name. We do not publish which name belongs to which transaction; neither the transaction ID nor the amount or date appears on the list. The legal basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR).

12. Public list of supporters

Anyone who supports BeatTime can, regardless of the amount, voluntarily be named on our public list of supporters under a name or nickname of their own choosing. Being named is a free thank-you and not something given in return for the payment. It is offered only after a payment: for Stripe, on the thank-you page after payment; for crypto support, via the form described in section 11.

For this purpose, we process: the name or nickname you provide, your confirmation that you are at least 16 years old, the time, language and version of the consent text and a checksum of the text displayed, the approval status, an internal link to the payment (the Stripe payment or the transaction ID; for crypto support, also its internally determined euro equivalent) and a hash value of your personal removal code. We show you the removal code itself only once and do not store it; we therefore cannot display it again. We do not collect e-mail addresses for this purpose.

Only the name or nickname is published, sorted alphabetically – no amounts, no dates, no payment information and no links.

The legal basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). It is voluntary; you can equally support us without being named. Being named is only possible from the age of 16 (cf. Art. 8 GDPR). We review every name before publication and may decline, shorten or remove an entry. Recipients: the list is public and can therefore be accessed by anyone worldwide, including outside the European Union.

Important note on search engines and AI systems: beattime.live as a whole is extensively crawled and analysed by search engines and AI systems (such as AI search services and language models). The page with the supporters list asks search engines, by means of a technical tag (“noindex, noarchive”), not to include it in their index or their archives, and via our robots.txt we ask AI crawlers not to retrieve it. The list is nevertheless public: not all services respect such tags, and third parties can copy the list at any time. Even if we remove an entry immediately after you withdraw your consent, copies that third parties have already made – for example in search caches, web archives or AI systems – may persist; we have no influence over them. You should therefore only choose a name you want to be publicly associated with, or a nickname that does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about who you are.

Withdrawal: You can withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future – via your personal removal link or by e-mail to the address given in section 1. Via the removal link, the name is deleted immediately; if you withdraw by e-mail, we remove it without undue delay after receipt. The list shows the change immediately. Should a removed name nevertheless appear in a search engine, we will, as far as technically possible and reasonable, request the removal of the outdated content there (Art. 17(2) GDPR); a note from you is sufficient. The lawfulness of the publication up to the withdrawal remains unaffected. If a contribution is refunded in full or charged back, we remove the listing automatically. In the case of a partial refund, the listing remains.

Reports by third parties: Anyone who considers an entry impermissible – for example because it uses someone else’s name, is offensive or names a person without their consent – can report this to us at the address given in section 1. We review every report and remove impermissible entries. We process the details of the person making the report only to handle the report (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; where the Digital Services Act applies, Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR).

Retention period: We delete the name and the hash value of the removal code upon withdrawal, rejection or removal of an entry. Even without a decision, every submission comes to an end by itself: if, 30 days after an entry was submitted following a Stripe payment, we have not decided on it, we reject it automatically and delete the name; for reports of a crypto transaction, the 14-day period from section 11 applies. We keep a record of the granting and withdrawal of consent (times, version and checksum of the consent text, status and the internal link to the payment – without the name) for up to three years after the withdrawal or the decision, in order to be able to demonstrate the lawfulness of the processing (Art. 5(2), Art. 6(1)(c) and (f) GDPR), and delete it automatically afterwards. As long as you do not withdraw your consent, an approved entry remains in place. For payment data, the periods in section 14 apply.

13. Contact by e-mail

If you write to us by e-mail – for example about a withdrawal, a report, a question about a payment or a refund – we process your e-mail address, your name and the content of the message in order to deal with your request. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR, for requests concerning your rights Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR, and otherwise Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (answering enquiries). Our mailbox is operated on our behalf by an e-mail service provider (as a processor under Art. 28 GDPR).

We do not send newsletters, advertising or automatic confirmation e-mails; the payment receipt for support via Stripe is sent by Stripe (section 10). E-mails that are relevant for tax purposes (for example concerning a refund) are kept for six years (section 14); we delete other e-mails as soon as your request has been dealt with conclusively.

Our server notifies us by e-mail of certain events – such as chargebacks, entries awaiting review or technical faults. These notifications do not contain the names of supporters, at most payment or transaction identifiers, and are sent via an e-mail service provider acting on our behalf (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

14. Retention periods for support payments

Details of payments and incoming payments are relevant for tax purposes. We therefore keep them for the statutory periods and, during that time, use them only for this purpose (Art. 6(1)(c), Art. 17(3)(b) GDPR):

The periods begin at the end of the calendar year in which the document was created (§ 147(4) AO) and are extended for as long as the limitation period for tax assessment has not yet expired (§ 147(3) AO). We delete technical event identifiers of Stripe’s notifications after 90 days. The details for the supporters list, by contrast, are deleted in accordance with the rules in section 12. Stripe stores data for which Stripe itself is the controller according to its own retention periods.

15. No cookies, no tracking

The public pages of this website set no cookies and do not embed any third-party analytics, tracking or advertising services. The API documentation, too, loads no scripts or fonts from third-party servers. Technically necessary cookies (session, CSRF protection) are set exclusively in the non-public administration area and only for administrators.

This also applies to the pages for voluntary support: they set no cookies and load no scripts from Stripe. Only after you have been redirected to Stripe’s payment page (section 10) does Stripe use its own cookies and similar technologies there, which are necessary for the payment and for fraud prevention; Stripe’s privacy notice applies to these.

16. Fonts

Only the system fonts available on your device are used. No fonts are loaded from third-party servers (such as Google Fonts); your IP address is not transmitted to third parties for the purpose of displaying fonts.

17. Tor (onion service)

This website is also available as a Tor onion service. When you access it via Tor, your IP address is not transmitted to us; only the address of our own Tor service appears in the server log files. Card payments via Stripe are not available via the onion service.

18. External links

Links to Google Play, GitHub and other services are simple links. Data are transmitted to these providers only when you click the link; their privacy policies then apply. The automatic checks that the BeatStamp program performs with the sources named in section 9 are an exception to this.

19. Your rights

Within the scope of the statutory provisions, you have the following rights at any time:

Right to object: Where we process data on the basis of Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, you may object at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation (Art. 21 GDPR). You can withdraw any consent you have given – for example to being named on the supporters list – at any time with effect for the future. An informal message to the address given in section 1 is sufficient.

20. Right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority

You have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. The authority responsible for our place of business in North Rhine-Westphalia is the Landesbeauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit NRW (LDI NRW – the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information of North Rhine-Westphalia), ldi.nrw.de.

21. Status of this policy

This privacy policy is current as of September 2026. Further development of the website or changes in legal requirements may make it necessary to amend it.

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