Privacy notice
Written here in plain terms: the personal data that reaches the practice whenever you get in touch through this site, the use that is made of it, and the rights the law puts in your hands. This is a small independent practice based in Nice — no sales operation in the background, and no mailing list angling for your address.
Who handles your data
Lucien Varela runs this site as a small independent practice. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the party responsible for the personal data set out here is whoever operates geonice.org. Should you have a privacy question, or want to act on one of your rights, send a note to hello@geonice.org.
What is collected
Submitting the form passes the following to the practice:
- Your name and email — needed so the reply can reach you by name.
- Whatever you decide to send: the business case, the AI answer you actually got or were expecting, and the page, listing or public source you believe ought to steer that answer. The only required fields are name and email; everything else is optional.
The practice draws on this information for one purpose alone: replying to the case you raised. No list ever takes you on, and nothing about you is sold or handed off to outside parties. The moment of submission is logged, along with a salted SHA-256 hash of your IP address, purely to shield the form from automated abuse. The raw IP address is never written down, and the same goes for browser fingerprints and device metadata.
What is not collected
- There are no tracking cookies. The analytics runs cookie-free and assigns nothing that would single out one visitor from another.
- There are no remarketing pixels, no ad-network tags, and no marketing-automation trackers.
- There is no automated profiling, and no automated decision lands a legal effect on you.
- Personal data is neither sold nor shared with commercial partners — that is simply not where this practice puts its attention.
Why the law allows this
Anything you send through the form rests on Article 6(1)(b) of the GDPR — that is, steps carried out at your own request ahead of any agreement. The IP hash guarding the form draws instead on the legitimate interest covered by Article 6(1)(f). Where payment-status data exists, the contractual basis applies to it.
How long it is kept
- Form messages: they stay on file for as long as any engaged work runs, and 24 months on top of that so the thread of the exchange survives, after which they are deleted. Where a message leads to no work, it is held 12 months and then deleted.
- Payment records: they remain exactly as long as tax and accounting rules demand, and are deleted afterwards.
- IP hashes: they last 90 days — long enough to guard against abuse — and are then deleted.
- Email threads: they are retained while the work stays active, or until 24 months past the final contact, whichever of the two runs longer.
Your rights
The GDPR entitles you to see your data, to have it corrected or erased, to have it ported elsewhere, to have its processing restricted, or to object to that processing altogether. A message to hello@geonice.org covers any one of these, and you will hear back inside a month. Should you judge that your data has been handled unlawfully, you remain free to raise a complaint with the data-protection supervisory authority in the country where you live.
Where the data is held
The infrastructure that delivers this site is located in European Union (Germany). Whenever further processors (email provider) operate beyond the European Union, those transfers lean on standard contractual clauses together with whatever safeguards the receiving party makes public.
Changes to this notice
Whenever the handling of data shifts in any meaningful way, this notice is brought up to date. The version currently in force is the one the "Updated" date at the top points to. A substantive change is kept flagged on the home page for 30 days, so that returning visitors do not miss it.