Privacy policy
Last updated: 26 August 2026
This policy covers berlinflats.net. It is written in two halves, because there are two kinds of people in our database: subscribers, who gave us an email address, and people who posted a flat in a public Telegram group, who did not.
Who we are
berlinflats.net 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@berlinflats.net.
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. The record is the cap. | About a day; older rows are deleted whenever a new one is written |
| Your search filters: neighbourhoods, budget, minimum 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 | So your feed remembers. 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 |
| Sign-in timestamps, and whether the digest is on | Support, and not emailing people who asked us not to | Until you delete your account |
We never see your card. Payment details are entered on Stripe’s own 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 (the sign-in rate limits, error reports).
The listings themselves
We read messages posted in public Berlin housing and sublet groups on Telegram and store the ones offering a place: the message text as posted, any photos attached to it, the poster’s display name and Telegram username, the group it appeared in, and a link back to the original message. Subscribers see all of it, because contacting the poster is the entire point 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 posts were made publicly to find a tenant, and showing them to people looking for a flat is what the poster was after. We do not build profiles of posters, we do not enrich the data from anywhere else, and we do not sell it.
If you posted a flat and want it gone, email hello@berlinflats.net from any address, or message us on Telegram, and say which post. We will delete it and stop storing further posts from that account. You do not have to explain why.
Who else touches the data
- Hetzner (Germany) — the server this site runs on. Everything lives on one machine in the EU.
- Stripe — payments and subscription management.
- Postmark — sends the sign-in links and the digest. It processes your email address and the mail content.
- Microsoft Clarity — anonymous usage analytics, loaded only if you accept analytics cookies. See our cookie policy.
- Sentry (EU region) — error reports when something breaks. Configured not to send personal data; 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 pull out the price, area and dates. If you have written a free-text description of what you are looking for, that text is sent too, so the model can rate listings against it. Your email address never is.
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 row outright — 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 survives, deliberately. 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), and it is also how we tell that an address has already had its free trial. It holds your email address and your payment history — 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@berlinflats.net and we will respond within a month. This applies whether you are a subscriber or someone whose Telegram post we stored.
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.