Privacy
Effective 7 September 2026
Teastained is a personal tea journal. It keeps what you write in it, and it keeps as little else as it can. This page says exactly what that is, where it lives, and how to take it with you or have it erased.
Who runs it
Teastained is made and run by Adrian Essig, a private individual in Austria, as a personal project. For anything about your data, write to hello@teastained.app. Under EU data-protection law he is the "controller" of the data described here.
What is stored
Your account. You sign in with Google. From Google, Teastained receives and keeps your Google account's stable identifier, your email address (only if Google reports it as verified), your name and your profile picture's address. Teastained never sees your Google password and keeps no Google access tokens. On first sign-in you choose a username, which is permanent, and a display name, which you can change in Settings.
Your journal. Everything you enter: teas, sessions, vessels, wishlist items, purchases, notes, tags, ratings, the prices Teastained finds for your teas, and the photos you upload or fetch from a shop page. Photos are re-encoded to a display size; the original file you uploaded is not kept.
Technical. One session cookie (teastained_session, valid for 90 days,
renewed while you use the app) that signs you in, plus two short-lived cookies that only exist
during the Google sign-in round trip. Preferences such as your theme and display currency are
kept in your browser's own storage, never on the server. The web server keeps ordinary
connection logs, which include your IP address, for troubleshooting and for the rate limits
that keep the service up; they are not used to profile you. To improve the app we also note
whether you use it installed or in the browser, on a phone or a desktop, and which browser.
Nothing else is recorded about your device.
Visit statistics
Teastained measures visits with Umami, an open-source analytics tool that runs on Teastained's own server; nothing leaves that infrastructure and no third party receives the data. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. For each page view it records the page's address, the referring page, screen size, browser language, browser and operating system type, and the country and region derived from your IP address; the address itself is used only transiently to work those out and to form a salted hash that tells visits apart within a month, and is not stored. None of this is linked to your Teastained account.
This is done to understand how the site and the app are used and where visitors come from, so they can be improved, under the legitimate-interest basis (Article 6(1)(f)); because no cookies or device storage are used, no consent banner is shown. The statistics are kept in aggregate form indefinitely: nothing in them identifies a person, so there is nothing to delete per person.
Where it lives
On a server rented from Hetzner Online GmbH in its Helsinki, Finland data centre, inside the European Union. Connections to it are encrypted (HTTPS). Google processes the sign-in itself under Google's privacy policy, which may involve processing outside the EU on Google's side.
Who else is involved
- Google, for signing in. Teastained sends nothing about you back to Google.
- Tea shops. When Teastained checks a tea's price or fetches a product image, the
request goes from Teastained's server to the shop; the shop sees the server, not you. When
you follow a link to a shop yourself, that shop sees your visit like any other, tagged as
coming from Teastained (a
ref=teastainedparameter) with nothing about who you are. Teastained counts such clicks per shop in aggregate, without any link to a person. - An exchange-rate service (frankfurter.dev), asked by the server for currency rates; no personal data is involved.
- Ko-fi, Stripe and PayPal, only if you leave a tip. The tip page belongs to Ko-fi and the payment is handled by Stripe or PayPal under their own privacy terms; Teastained receives no card or account details, only Ko-fi's note that a tip arrived and the name or message you chose to leave with it.
Why it may be stored
Your account and journal are stored because that is the service you asked for (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)). Connection logs and rate limits exist to keep the service secure and available for everyone (Article 6(1)(f), a legitimate interest that does not override yours).
How long
As long as your account exists. Delete it in Settings → Account: the account is unusable at once and is permanently removed, with everything in it, after a 14-day grace period during which signing in again lets you keep it. Operational backups of the whole database are made on a weekly cycle and overwritten by the next one, so a deleted account can persist in a backup for up to a week after the purge. Connection logs are kept only as long as troubleshooting needs them.
Your rights
- See and take your data. Settings → Data → Export backup gives you everything in your account, photos included, as one file you can keep or import elsewhere.
- Correct it. Everything you entered can be edited in the app; your display name in Settings → Account.
- Erase it. Settings → Account → Delete account, as described above.
- Object or ask. For anything else, including objections to the processing described here, write to the address above. You may also complain to a supervisory authority.
Children
Teastained is not meant for people under 16 and does not knowingly keep their data.
Changes
If this page changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes with it.