Privacy Policy

Last updated 2 October 2026

1. Who is responsible

BackBeer is made and run by Overnight Technology. For the purposes of this policy, Overnight Technology is the data controller.

If you have a question about your data, or want to exercise one of your rights, write to that address. It is also the address for complaints.

2. What we process

Your account

• Your email address. Needed to sign in, to reset your password, and to reach you if something happens to your account, and to email you about your subscription: the confirmation, a payment that fails and a renewal that is coming up.
• Your username. You choose it when you sign up, it does not have to be your real name, and you cannot change it afterwards, unless we ask you to because it is inappropriate. Other people see it on a trade, on a list you share, and on the Wall of Fame if you switch that on.
• Your password, hashed. See Security. We do not know your password and cannot read it.
• Your language preference and the moment you created the account.

Your collection

• The beers you add, with the batches, quantities, places (Fridge, Stash or Rest), best-before dates and purchase prices you fill in.
• What you take out and when, so the app keeps your stock straight.
• Groups you create and trades you make with other people.

This lives on your phone. With an account it is on our server too, so you do not lose your collection if you lose your phone.

If you use BackBeer in your browser, at back.beer/app, that browser keeps a copy of your collection while you are signed in, so the page can work. Signing out removes the copy. Your collection itself stays in your account.

A list you make public is public. With a public code it has an address of its own, it is in the public directory, and a search engine may index it. We ask the crawlers that collect text to train AI models not to read public lists or the directory. That is a request in our robots.txt file and we cannot make them keep to it. Take the code away in the app and the list is off the site. What a public page shows is described on Security.

Contributions to the catalog

The beer catalog is built by its users. When you add a beer or correct a detail, we record what you contributed and that it was you. That is needed to undo corrections, to see who contributes most to the catalog, and to count your Caps. With an account you contribute. Without one you contribute nothing and the app takes nothing from the catalog either: everything stays on your phone.

The Wall of Fame

The Wall of Fame on this site ranks contributors by their Caps. You are on it only if you switch it on in the app. It then shows your username, your rank and how many Caps you have: never your email address and never what you own. Switch it off and you are gone from the page the next time it loads. We keep a record of when you switched it on and off, so we can show when you agreed.

The beer data itself, meaning brewery, name, style and alcohol content, are facts about a product and not personal data. They are visible to everyone using the app. If you delete your account those facts stay, but the link to you is removed.

Technical data

• Session data, so you stay signed in: a token and the kind of device you signed in with.
• Server logs containing the IP address of the request. We use them to fix faults and to stop abuse, and they are overwritten after fourteen days.

3. What we use your data for, and why we may

• To run the app: signing in, storing your collection and syncing it between your devices. Basis: performance of the agreement you enter into with us when you create an account (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).
• To reach you about your account: a verification code, a password reset. Same basis. We do not send you marketing.
• To keep things safe and standing up: logs, rate limits and stopping abuse. Basis: our legitimate interest in a working, secure service (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
• To carry out your subscription: keeping track of whether it is running, the emails about it and cancelling. Basis: performance of the agreement (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).
• To let you know a subscription keeps running while you are not using the app. Basis: our legitimate interest and yours: nobody should keep paying without noticing (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
• To keep our books. Basis: a legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR): tax law requires us to keep payments for seven years.
• To show your supporter badge, if you switch it on. Basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). Switch it off and it disappears.
• To maintain the catalog: reviewing contributions, merging duplicates, undoing mistakes. Same legitimate interest.
• To know where BackBeer is used: a count of new accounts per country, never a list of who, so we know which languages the app needs. How it works is in section 4. Basis: our legitimate interest in knowing which countries and languages to build for (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
• To show what most people keep: the beers, breweries, styles and vintages in the most collections, as an order without numbers or names. How it works is in section 4. Basis: our legitimate interest in showing what BackBeer is used for (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

4. What we do not do

There is no analytics in the app and no tracking pixel on this site, and nothing measures you across the web. We do not measure which screens you look at, we do not build a profile of you, and we do not show advertising. We do not sell, rent or trade your data, and we do not pass it to third parties for their own purposes.

This website sets no cookies and the app sets no cookies. The exceptions are the moderation panel, the page where you take out a subscription, and BackBeer in your browser at back.beer/app: signing in to any of them sets a single cookie that keeps you signed in. You cannot stay signed in without it, so it needs no consent, and nothing is tracked with it.

Counting views on public lists

We count views on public lists. To avoid counting the same person twice in a day, we store an irreversible token derived from the visitor’s IP address and the list, using a key that rotates daily. The token expires after 24 hours and cannot be linked to a person or across days. We store no IP addresses and use no third-party analytics.

The count is shown on the list itself, and it is what orders the public directory when you have not said where you are.

Counting new accounts per country

When you enter the code that confirms your account, our own server looks up which country your IP address is in, using a file kept on that server, and adds one to a count for that day and that country. That count is all we keep. It is not linked to your account, the IP address is not kept, and nothing is sent to anyone to look it up. Deleting your account does not change the count, because nothing in it is about you. The file is IP to Country Lite, IP Geolocation by DB-IP, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Counting what most people keep

The home page and the public directory show which beers, breweries, styles and vintages the most people have in their collection. To make those lists, our own server counts every hour how many accounts have a beer in Stock. Only the order is kept and shown: no number, no name and nothing that says whose collection a beer is in. A beer, brewery, style or vintage that fewer than five people have is never shown, and nothing is shown at all until every list is long enough to be about everybody. Beers you typed in yourself and the sample beers from the tutorial are not counted. Delete your account, or run out of a beer, and it is out of the count within the hour.

5. Security

How we store and secure your data is described separately, in plain language, on Security. In short: traffic is encrypted, passwords are hashed with argon2id, and a backup is taken every night and immediately read back to check that it is sound.

6. Who else processes your data

The server is with Hetzner in Germany. The email goes through Proton (Proton AG, Geneva) in Switzerland, which is outside the EU but which the European Commission recognizes as protecting personal data to the same standard. Both handle only what they need to do their part.

The subscription is not open yet, so for now nothing goes to Mollie, Apple or Google. Once it opens:

If you take out a subscription through the website, Mollie (Mollie B.V., Amsterdam) handles the payment. For that, Mollie receives your email address, a number that refers to your account and what you pay. Mollie processes your payment details as an independent controller, under its own privacy policy.

If you take out a subscription in the app, you pay through Apple or Google, under their own terms and privacy policies. We hear from them only whether your subscription is running, until when, and an order number. We do not receive your payment details. With Google, our server reads a purchase using the purchase token to check that it is genuine. We check the proof of a purchase with Apple ourselves. No collection and no email address goes to either.

Two more services are spoken to, each only for one specific action:

• The map on the public directory. It loads map tiles from the OpenStreetMap Foundation (United Kingdom). Your own browser does that, so it sees your IP address, and it is told the map is on back.beer, without the page or anything you searched for. Only on the directory, never in the app.
• The breached-password check goes to Have I Been Pwned (United States). Our server asks, not your phone, and your password is not sent. See Security.

The United Kingdom and the United States are outside the EU. The first is a request for a map tile; the second is five characters of a hash of your password. No collection, no email address and no password goes to any of them.

Beyond that, the app shares only what you share: if you make a collection visible to someone or trade a beer, the other person sees what you shared for that and nothing else.

7. How long we keep it

• Your account and your collection: until you delete them. Apart from the next line, we do not tidy anything away on our own and we keep nothing "just in case".
• An account whose email address is never confirmed: 48 hours. It cannot be used until the address is confirmed. We remind you after 24 and 36 hours, and at 48 we delete the account and tell you, so the username is free again.
• A username we found inappropriate: kept for good, with when and why, so nobody can take it again. When the account is deleted, the name stays and the link to the account goes.
• Your subscription: for as long as your account exists. Delete your account and it leaves our database.
• Your payments: seven years, at Mollie, in our books. That holds even if you delete your account, because tax law requires it. We remove your customer details at Mollie as soon as you delete your account, but the payments themselves stay.
• Server logs: fourteen days, then overwritten.
• Backups: daily backups are kept for fourteen days, monthly ones for twelve months. That is the only place a deleted account can still appear for a while. See below.

8. Deleting your account

You do it yourself, in the app, under Settings. It takes two steps: first you delete your beers, then your account. That is deliberate: it means you see exactly what goes before it goes.

Once you confirm with your password, your account is gone immediately. Not flagged as deleted, not held pending, but deleted: your email address, your password, your collection, your groups and your trades leave our database at that moment. You are signed out and there is nothing to restore.

If a subscription through the website is running, it stops at that same moment. A subscription through the App Store or Google Play you cancel yourself with Apple or Google.

Two things remain, and it is fairer to say so here than to let you find out:

• Contributions to the shared catalog stay, without your name on them. They are facts about beers that other people rely on.
• A backup taken before your deletion still contains your data until that backup’s turn comes to be overwritten: fourteen days for the daily copies, at most twelve months for the monthly ones. We never restore a deleted account from a backup.

If you no longer have the app on your phone, you can also request deletion through this page.

9. Your rights

You have the right to see your data, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to take it with you to another service, and to object to a processing operation.

Seeing it and taking it with you work straight away: the app has an export button that writes one readable file with your collection and the rest of what your account holds: your settings, your groups and lists, your trades, and when you accepted these documents. Correcting is done in the app, and so is deleting. If something will not work, or you want something else, write to cheers@back.beer; we answer within a month.

If you disagree with us, you can complain to the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens). We would rather hear it ourselves first, but the right is yours either way.

10. Age

BackBeer is about beer, so we ask you to use the app only if you are old enough to buy alcohol in your country. In the Netherlands that is eighteen.

The app is not for children. If we find that an account belongs to somebody below the drinking age where they live, we delete it.

11. Changes

If what we process changes, we update this policy and put a new date at the top. If it is something substantial, we say so in the app or by email. We keep older versions. Ask if you would like to see them.

This policy was written in Dutch. This English version is a translation provided for information. If the two differ, the Dutch text is the binding one.