Privacy of the LOST–FOUND service

Provisional text, under review.

Who processes your data

The LOST–FOUND service is operated by the Cabinet vétérinaire Au Furet, Chemin du Chêne 1, 1112 Échichens, Switzerland. The Cabinet vétérinaire Au Furet is the controller of the data used by this service. For any question about the protection of your data: confidentialite@animaux.ch.

What is published, what stays private

Published on the notice page: the species, the locality and its region, the neighbourhood, the date, your description, a photo if you give one — and only if you tick the box: the animal's name, your verified phone number. Never published: your e-mail address, the animal's distinguishing mark, your account. Messages written to you go through the service: no one sees your address, you do not see theirs. Codes and management links are kept only as a fingerprint. If you tick the anonymous summary box, animaux.ch shows the species, the locality, the date and the reduced photo — never your name, your address or your contact. If you give a second place the animal might return to, that place and its reason are neither published nor shown to the other person: they only serve to suggest your notice to someone who finds an animal nearby.

Why

To publish the notice you ask for and to put the person searching in touch with the person who found (the service you request); to match nearby notices and notify you (legitimate interest: finding an animal); to show an anonymous summary on local pages only if you have agreed (consent, withdrawable in one step).

How long

A notice stays online for ninety days, extendable. A draft never confirmed is erased after twenty-four hours. On closing, withdrawal or expiry: the photo, description, neighbourhood, name, distinguishing mark and management link are erased at once, and for a « found » notice the management address too. After closing, the page says « Animal found » for thirty days, then disappears; after a withdrawal or expiry it disappears at once. A paused publication is no longer visible, but nothing is erased: it is deleted for good if it is not put back online within seven days. Publishing a « lost » notice creates an account at your address, without a password. Messages are erased twenty-four hours after an unconfirmed submission, thirty days after closing, and at the latest after one hundred and eighty days. An abuse report is kept for twelve months, with the optional e-mail address of the person reporting it. Verification codes and management links are kept only as a fingerprint; the short code printed on the poster is public. To keep the service secure, prevent repeated sendings and handle any dispute, we keep a protected fingerprint of the address used for the sending. This fingerprint cannot be used to send a message. It is deleted 30 days after the announcement is closed and, in every case, at the latest 12 months after the sending. Where an incident or a dispute has been reported before that deadline, the strictly necessary trace may be kept until the case is closed. Server logs keep the IP address for ten days; backups keep a copy for up to thirty days after an erasure.

Who receives your data

The data published in a notice is accessible to the public according to the choices made when it was created. Infomaniak hosts the service in Switzerland. Brevo receives the e-mail address and the content of the e-mails needed to send them, in particular the codes and the management links. Its servers are located in the European Union, but its contract allows technical access from the United States and India for support and maintenance, with the contractual safeguards provided for in data protection law. The SOS service currently sends no SMS. No personal data is sold.

Sharing on social networks

The service publishes nothing on social networks and does not see your groups. It offers you a text and an image, which you can edit and publish yourself: the edited text and the image are prepared on your device, and the service neither receives nor keeps them. The image carries neither your name nor your contact details. What you publish in a group follows that network's rules, and a shared post can travel beyond your control: add only what you accept to see stay online.

What our team can do with your notice

A published notice can be checked by our team. It can make it invisible while something is verified, remove it, or remove from a public text a passage that must not appear there — a phone number, a number plate, a third party's name. It never rewrites your text: it removes a passage and leaves the rest word for word. Each time, you receive an email stating the reason, and you can reply from your management page. A removed notice is not deleted straight away: it can come back until the deadline given in that email has passed. What we keep of these exchanges disappears with the notice.

Your rights, and how to exercise them

You can edit, extend, close or withdraw your notice at any time from your management link: withdrawal is immediate. You can withdraw the local summary in one step, close a conversation or block a person. To access your data, have it corrected or request its erasure beyond what the management link allows, send your request to the Cabinet vétérinaire Au Furet, Chemin du Chêne 1, 1112 Échichens, Switzerland.

The “Who to notify near…” block

On a notice, this block offers links to external search engines: Google, Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. Only the searched word (for example “veterinarian”) and the name of the locality with its region appear in the link address, and they leave only if you click. The external service then sees your IP address and applies its own privacy rules. We send it nothing else and keep no trace of this click.

Sources of the localities

Switzerland: Official Directory of Towns and Cities, swisstopo. Other countries: GeoNames (www.geonames.org), under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0). The service uses only the name, postcode and region of a locality; no data from these sources concerns a person.