Privacy policy
Last updated: 27 August 2026
This policy covers Berlin Flat Finder (berlinflats.net). It is in two parts, because there are two kinds of people in our database: subscribers, who gave us an email address, and people who advertised a flat in a public Telegram group or on a public listing website, who did not.
Who we are
Berlin Flat Finder is operated by Bloom Computing Ltd (company number 16578589), registered in England & Wales at 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. We are the data controller for everything described below. Reach us at hello@henrystanley.com.
What we collect about subscribers
| Data | Why | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address | It is your account. We sign you in by emailing a link, and we send the daily digest to it if you leave that on. | Until you delete your account |
| Sign-in link records: the email address and IP address a link was requested from | Each link works exactly once, and we cap how many can be requested per address and per IP. This record is how the cap is enforced. | About a day; older rows are deleted whenever a new one is written |
| Your search filters: neighbourhoods, budget, shortest and longest stay, move-in date, flat type, and the free-text description of what you want | To build your feed and rank it | Until you change or delete them |
| What you did with a listing (saved, messaged, hidden, marked taken) and any private notes you typed on it | Notes are private. Other subscribers never see them. | Until you delete your account |
| Billing references from Stripe: a customer ID, a subscription ID, the subscription status and the date the current period ends | To know whether your subscription is live | See Deleting your account below |
| Your answer to the occasional "How are we doing?" question: a score from 0 to 10 and any comment | To find out what to fix. It is emailed to us with your address so we can reply. The copy we keep for counting is not linked to your account. | About 13 months |
| Sign-in timestamps, and whether the digest is on | Support, and respecting unsubscribes | Until you delete your account |
We never see your card. Payment details are entered on Stripe’s checkout page and stay with Stripe. We store only the references above.
Legal basis: performance of our contract with you for everything needed to run your account and subscription; consent for the analytics cookies described in our cookie policy; legitimate interests for keeping the service secure and working (sign-in rate limits, error reports).
The listings themselves
We read offers published in public Berlin housing and sublet groups on Telegram, and on public listing websites, and store the ones offering a place: the text as published, any photos attached to it, the poster’s display name and Telegram username where there is one, the group or site it appeared in, and a link back to the original. Subscribers see all of it, because contacting the poster is the purpose of the service. None of it is shown to people who are not signed in and subscribed. The public pages of this site publish counts and anonymised summaries only.
Our legal basis is legitimate interests: the offers were published openly to find a tenant, and showing them to people looking for a flat is what the poster wanted. We do not build profiles of posters, we do not enrich the data from other sources, and we do not sell it.
If you advertised a flat and want it removed, email hello@henrystanley.com from any address, or message us on Telegram, and say which post or ad. We will delete it and stop storing anything further from that account. You do not have to give a reason.
Counting page views
We count page views ourselves, on our own server, for every visitor. For each page we store its address (without the query string), the site you came from, any campaign tags in the link, whether you are on a phone, a tablet or a computer, and a pseudonymous ID made by hashing your IP address and browser details together with a random key. That key is replaced every day and the old one deleted, so the ID cannot be traced back to you or linked from one day to the next. No cookie is set and nothing is stored on your device, and none of it goes to anyone else. The records are kept for about 13 months. Legal basis: legitimate interests, in knowing which pages people use.
Who else touches the data
- Hetzner (Germany) hosts the server this site runs on. Everything is on one machine in the EU.
- Stripe handles payments.
- Postmark sends the sign-in links and the digest. It processes your email address and the mail content. The digest alone carries a tracking pixel and routes its links through Postmark, so we can see how many digests are opened and clicked in total. We read those as totals, never per person. Sign-in links are never tracked.
- Google Ads tells us which of our adverts brought someone here. Its tag runs on every page, but stores nothing on your device and sets no cookie unless you accept analytics cookies. Before that it reports only an anonymous, cookieless page view. Ads personalisation and Google Signals are switched off permanently, so it measures this site and does not follow you elsewhere.
- Microsoft Clarity provides anonymous usage analytics and is loaded only if you accept analytics cookies. See our cookie policy.
- Sentry (EU region) receives error reports when something breaks. It is configured not to send personal data, and sign-in links and unsubscribe tokens are stripped from any URL it records.
- A language-model provider (currently Anthropic, with Google as a fallback). Listing text is sent to a model to extract the price, area and dates. If you have written a description of what you are looking for, that text is sent too, so the model can rate listings against it. Your email address is never sent.
Some of these are outside the EEA/UK. Where they are, transfers rely on the provider’s Standard Contractual Clauses or an adequacy decision.
Deleting your account
There is a delete button in your settings. It cancels your subscription and then deletes your record: email address, filters, free text, saved listings and notes all go, immediately and irreversibly. Sign up again later and you start from nothing.
One thing is kept on purpose. We do not delete your Stripe customer record. Its invoices are accounting records we are required to keep for six years (UK Companies Act s.388 and VAT rules). It holds your email address and your payment history, but not your filters, your notes or anything else from this site.
Your rights
Under the UK and EU GDPR you can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct or delete it, object to processing based on legitimate interests, or ask us to restrict it. Email hello@henrystanley.com and we will respond within a month. This applies whether you are a subscriber or someone whose post or listing we stored.
If you posted a flat and want it removed from here, see removing a listing: one email, no reason needed, nothing to prove.
If we get it wrong you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk) or to the supervisory authority where you live.
Security and changes
The site is served over HTTPS, sign-in links expire after 15 minutes and work once, and the database sits on an encrypted, backed-up volume. No system is perfect. If something involving your data goes wrong we will tell you.
If this policy changes materially we will say so on this page and, for anything that affects subscribers, by email.