Privacy Policy — Impuls
Note: This English text is a convenience translation. The legally authoritative version is the German privacy policy; in case of any discrepancy, the German version applies.
This privacy policy describes how the Impuls app handles your data. It is written in plain language and deliberately detailed where it matters most: the distinction between local on-device data and data in the backend.
1. Controller
Timur Felix Cön
Contact: privacy@impulsapp.eu
The fastest way to reach me is by email. You can find the full postal address in the legal notice (Impressum).
2. Purpose of the app
Impuls is a political opinion and analysis app. It makes political questions, societal value axes and majorities visible: answer current topics, societal questions and parliamentary proposals, build a personal value-axis profile from your answers, compare it with the community average, and rate the government and political figures with school-style grades.
The app gives no voting recommendation. Party comparisons are explicitly described as profile proximity, not a recommendation. Ratings of individuals are user opinions, not statements of fact.
3. Which data is processed — and where
We clearly separate two layers.
3.1 Stays only on your device
The following is stored exclusively locally on your device and is not transmitted to our backend:
- Basic data: age, postal code and region, if you enter them voluntarily in the profile card. These fields never leave the device.
- Onboarding status: the marker of whether you have seen the first-start flow.
- Optional UI states: e.g. which sections you have expanded in detail views.
You can uninstall the app at any time — this removes that local data.
3.2 Transmitted anonymously to our backend
When you answer a voting question or give a rating, the submission is sent to our backend at Supabase (EU region). We transmit:
- the ID of the question/category/person your answer relates to,
- the answer/rating value,
- a device-bound, pseudonymous UUID (randomly generated on first launch) so that multiple submissions are prevented and votes can be updated per device,
- a timestamp of the submission.
We do not transmit: your name, your email address, your Apple/Google ID, your age, your postal code, your region, your location, your IP address beyond what a normal HTTPS request entails, or your device type in a personally identifiable form.
3.3 What the app does not do
- No sale of personal data.
- No advertising tracking, no ads, no tracking SDKs (Facebook/Google Analytics or similar).
- No real identity verification. The device-bound UUID cannot be resolved to your person.
- No access to your location, address book, photos, microphone or similar.
- No push notifications without your consent.
4. Political opinions (Art. 9 GDPR)
Answers on political topics are special categories of personal data. We process them exclusively pseudonymously and on the basis of your explicit consent (Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR), which you give in the app before first using the voting functions and can withdraw at any time (in the app under “Legal → Your data”).
5. Backend and hosting
Anonymized voting data is stored in a Supabase instance in the European Union (Frankfurt am Main). Supabase is a purely technical service provider (processor); no processing for advertising or profiling purposes takes place. No transfer to third countries outside the EU takes place.
5a. Optional account and profile backup
You can use Impuls entirely without an account. Optionally, you can create an account (Apple login or email code) to back up your value profile and restore it on another device. For this we process your email address (or the relay address provided by Apple) for sign-in and — only in the explicit “back up profile” flow — a copy of your answers and value profile linked to your account. This backup never happens automatically when voting. Your anonymous community votes remain separate and are not linked to your account. Basic data (age, postal code, region) is never part of the backup. You can delete your account including the backup at any time in the app (“Legal → Delete account”). Legal bases: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR and Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR (explicit consent via the backup flow).
6. Source links and in-app browser
Sources stored in detail views (Bundestag, bpb, Correctiv, ZDF, the Federal Constitutional Court and others) open in the operating system’s in-app browser. The source is loaded by your operating system, with the technical requests usual there (cookies/browser headers).
7. Analytics & error diagnostics
A production analytics engine is currently not active. If activated later, only pseudonymous usage events without answer contents will be processed. Crash reporting may be used for stability — without answer contents.
8. Retention
- Local data stays on your device until you change it, delete it in the app, or uninstall the app.
- Anonymous votes in the backend are retained for as long as the app evaluates the respective area.
- Deletion of your device-bound voting profile is possible on request by email (section 1). As we store no identity, we need your device UUID from the app for this.
9. Your rights (GDPR)
Even without an account, you have rights to access, rectification, erasure, restriction, data portability and objection (Art. 15–21 GDPR). You can delete local data yourself in the app at any time (“Legal → Delete all my data”). For anything else: email privacy@impulsapp.eu. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority.
10. Changes to this policy
We update this page when the app’s feature set or the data processed changes. The latest version date is shown above.