What this site collects, why, for how long and who else sees it. Written to be read, not to be accepted unread.
This site sends none of your browsing or form data to third-party services. Not through a tracking cookie, not an analytics tool, not an advertising pixel, not a typeface fetched from Google — and not the anti-spam check on the contact form either, which is usually the door the data goes out of even on sites that are careful about everything else. It runs on our own servers like the rest.
No outside company receives from us the data of your visit or your message, and no processing is carried out on our behalf by anyone else.
The only personal data we receive because you chose to give it is what you type into the contact form. Everything else is the ordinary technical record any web server keeps in order to stay up and stay safe.
This notice covers the public site www.aqumo.net. The myAqumo client area and the services we deliver under contract are governed separately — see the section at the end.
The controller is:
aqumo technologies SA
Via Ceresio 12, 6963 Pregassona (Lugano), Switzerland
Business identification number: CHE-113.809.603
Telephone: see the contact page
E-mail: address on the contact page
We have not appointed a data protection officer: Swiss law does not require one for a company of our size doing the processing we do. For anything to do with your data, write to the address above — it is read by the management.
Worth stating before the list of what we do, because it is usually the part people care about:
Like any web server, ours records the requests it receives. That is how we tell whether the site is working, diagnose an error and recognise an attack. We do not use these logs to build profiles and we do not cross-reference them with anything else.
| Data | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| IP address | Security, diagnostics, abuse defence | Legitimate interest |
| Date and time, page requested, response code | Operation and diagnostics | Legitimate interest |
| Browser and operating system | Compatibility and bot detection | Legitimate interest |
| Referring page | Understanding where visits come from | Legitimate interest |
If you write to us from the contact page, we receive what you wrote. Only name and e-mail address are required: company, telephone, subject and even the message itself may be left blank and the enquiry will still go through.
Along with the message we record your IP address, your browser and the referring page, plus an automatically calculated spam score. This is not profiling: it is how we tell a real enquiry from an automated submission, and how we can reconstruct what happened if something goes wrong. The score blocks nothing, and no automated decision is taken about you.
The enquiry is stored in our records and we are notified by e-mail. That notification contains what you wrote, so that we can reply.
Legal basis: steps taken at your request prior to entering into a contract — you wrote to us to discuss possible work — and our legitimate interest in replying and in protecting the form from abuse.
The form is protected by several checks, some of which touch personal data:
The site uses one cookie, on one page only.
| Name | When | What for | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|---|
aqmsess |
On opening the contact page | Ties the form to your session, so a form copied elsewhere cannot submit in our name | Until the browser closes, or one hour idle |
It is a technical cookie, marked HttpOnly (scripts
cannot read it), Secure (it travels only over an
encrypted connection) and SameSite=Lax. It holds no
personal data: only a random identifier. A cookie strictly necessary
for the service you asked for needs no consent, which is why you
will find no banner here — there is nothing to accept or refuse.
No cookie is set on any other page of the site.
If you pick a language from the selector at the top, your browser
remembers it in a local storage key called aqumo_lang.
It stays on your device and is never transmitted to us: it is not a
cookie and it does not leave your browser. Clearing the site's data
in your browser settings removes it.
On the contact page there is a box to tick, beside it the words Protected by aqTCHA. When you tick it, your browser solves a small mathematical puzzle: half a second of arithmetic, then the box turns green and the send button unlocks. There is nothing to read, nothing to copy out and nothing to recognise in a picture.
aqTCHA is the name we gave our own check, not a service we turn to. Underneath it is an open-source program that runs entirely on the machine serving you this page: there is no account to open, no key to ask anyone for, and no company that gets to know you came here.
The point is to make every submission cost something. Half a second is nothing to you; to a program that wants to send ten thousand messages it adds up to a bill. Without a step like this the form fills with spam within weeks.
It is not proof of anything, and we will not pretend otherwise: someone who really wants to reach us solves that puzzle far faster than your browser does. Its job is to make bulk submission uneconomic, which is why it sits alongside the other checks listed above rather than in place of them.
The puzzle is ours, and it does not leave here. It is minted by the same machine that served you the page, and it travels inside the page itself: the widget contacts no address at all, not even one of ours. When you press send, the answer travels back with the form and our web server checks it. No outside company is involved at any point.
The check sets no cookies and does no browser fingerprinting. The program that draws the box would also be able to watch how you move the pointer, how you scroll and how you type: we have switched that off. Nothing of you remains beyond the ordinary line in the server log.
Legal basis: our legitimate interest in defending the form from abuse. The check is present on the contact page only.
The anti-spam check is the point at which almost every site — including ones that are scrupulous about everything else — sends its visitors' IP addresses to a foreign company, usually an American one, and does it on the contact page, where the person writing expects the opposite. We kept ours in house.
Nobody else receives from us the data this site collects. We give it to no one for analytics, hosting, mail, anti-spam, advertising or any other processing on our behalf. There is no external processor because there is no processing given to anyone outside.
One caveat, so as not to claim more than is true: like any website, aqumo.net depends on the basic services of the network — name resolution and the certificate that authenticates the domain — which by their nature do not sit with us. We transmit nothing that this site collects to those suppliers: not the forms, not the server logs, not visitors' IP addresses. Our relationship with them concerns aqumo's own company data as a customer, not yours.
In our own data centre, in Switzerland. Not on a machine rented from someone else, not in somebody's cloud, not in the European region of an American provider: the machines are ours, the data centre is ours, and it is on Swiss soil.
Every part of it is there, not just the site: the web server, the mail server and the database that your message ends up in — on a machine of its own, not shared. The anti-spam check does not even have a machine of its own: it is a program that runs inside the site itself. None of these steps leaves our network.
The data we collect through the site stays on our own systems in Switzerland. We do not rely on a third-party hosting, mail, database, anti-spam or analytics provider to store or process it.
| What | How long | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Server logs | Technical rotation, on the order of weeks | Beyond that they diagnose nothing |
| Contact form enquiries | Up to 24 months from the last exchange | Picking up a conversation again, and documenting how a commercial relationship began |
| Submission attempt log | Up to 12 months | Recognising recurring spam sources |
Where an exchange turns into a contract, the data forming part of it follows the statutory retention periods for business records, which are longer.
You can ask us to delete sooner at any time — see the next section.
Under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, you may in particular:
To exercise them, write to us: the address is in the first section. We answer within thirty days. We will not ask for identity documents if we can identify you another way — usually it is enough that the request comes from the same e-mail address you wrote from. Exercising these rights is free.
You may contact the Swiss supervisory authority:
Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner
(FDPIC)
Feldeggweg 1, 3003 Bern, Switzerland
www.edoeb.admin.ch
We would rather hear it from you first, though: it is nearly always something we can put right in an afternoon.
We are a Swiss company and the primary reference is the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection. If you write to us from the European Union the General Data Protection Regulation may also apply: in that case the legal bases given above correspond to Article 6(1)(b) (pre-contractual steps) and 6(1)(f) (legitimate interest), and to the rights listed above is added the right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority of your country of residence.
Some of the technical measures, for those who want to know:
No measure makes a system impregnable. Should a data security breach occur that is likely to pose a high risk to your personality or fundamental rights, we will notify the FDPIC as soon as possible and inform you where this is necessary for your protection.
myAqumo sits behind authentication and is not covered by this notice. Project data, uploaded documents and the processing that happens there are governed by the contract in place with each client and by the data processing terms that form part of it. If you are a client and want the detail, ask us and we will send it.
When something changes in how we handle data, we update this text and publish a new version. Each version carries a number and a date, shown at the top of the page. We keep the earlier versions: if you need to know what the notice said on a particular day, ask us and we will send it.
Should a change be substantial — a new recipient of data, a new purpose — we will not simply swap the file in silence: we will say so on the site.