Terms of Service for the global Foodsoft platform

Version: 2023-05-22

This document describes how we provide the global hosting service. What data we need to provide a Foodsoft instance and how we use it. This document also describes under what conditions we may terminate your instance and asserts our limited liability. Your use of the global hosting platform constitutes your agreement to these Terms of Service.

Emacipatory Approach

We offer this service to support all movements with emancipatory character. Approaches which promote exclusion and oppression are condemned and we reject cooperation.

Privacy Policy

To provide the global hosting service we need to know some information about you and your foodcoop. We retain only the bare minimum of information about you or your foodcoop that is required to make the service work. We do not sell or share any of it with third parties.

Data location

We store all data at servers located in Germany. Our services are protected against attacks and data theft by technical measures.

Registration information

To setup a new instance we need to know the following personal data:

  • Your name and your email address
  • The name and email address of another contact person

Usually you contact us by mail. This mail will be forwarded to a private category at our forum.

Furthermore we will add this data to a mailing list which we use to send out important information about the service. Such messages may contain (but are not limited to) information about updates, outages or call for donations.

Only members of the admin team are able to access to the data.

We save this data as long as your Foodsoft instance exists.

Help requests

Our support mailing address hosting@foodcoops.net contains a private archive. Only members of the admin team are able to access the data.

Data connected to a Foodsoft instance

If you start using your Foodsoft instance you will probably enter personal infomation about your members. These data may consists of real names, email addresses, postal addresses, telephone numbers and information about a member’s virtual balance. We store these data inside a database at our servers. Only members of the hosting team are able to access these data. The databases are not accessable from outside the server and we do our best to protect the server against attacks.

We save this data as long as your Foodsoft instance exists.

Logging

To ensure safe operation and protect against attacks our servers collect the following data:

  • IP addresses
  • Login dates
  • Meta data of email connections

We save this data for no longer than 48 hours.

Usage statistics

We are using Matomo, an Open Source, self-hosted software for collecting anonymous usage statistics for the hosting service. Matomo is processing the following data:

  • Cookies
  • Anonymized IP-address
  • Pseudo-anonymized Location of the user
  • Date and time
  • Title and URL of the page being viewed
  • Operating system and screen resolution
  • Main Language and User Agent of the browser

Our Matomo instance will not track visitors who have specified “I do not want to be tracked” in their web browsers.

Your rights as an owner of a Foodsoft instance

You are entitled to all legal rights without execption. If you want to move to another Foodsoft provider we make your Foodsoft’s database available for download.

Contact

If there are any questions regarding our privacy policy you may contact us using the information in our Imprint.

Termination of a Foodsoft instance

We may terminate your Foodsoft instance at any time for any reason. Typically, however, instances are deleted because of lack of activity for more than 18 months. In that case we will inform about the upcoming deletion by sending a notification to the contact addresses.

No Warranty

The service is run by volunteers. We automatically monitor our systems and create daily backups of the data. However, you understand and agree that the global hosting group provides online services “as is” and without any warranty, express, implied, or statutory. We specifically disclaim any implied warranties of title, merchantability, fitness for a particularly purpose and non-infringement. We make no warranty as to the reliability, accessibility, or quality of our services. You agree that the use of our services is at your sole and exclusive risk.

Changes to this policy

We reserve the right to change this policy. If we make major changes, we will notify our users in a clear and prominent manner. Minor changes may only be highlighted in the changelog of our repository.

You can find contact information in our Imprint.