Privacy

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Tankovač works out what a trip by car will cost. It does not need to know who you are for that — there are no accounts, no sign-up and no form asking for your name. Below is exactly what happens to what you enter, who else sees it and how long it stays. If anything is unclear, write to me.

Who runs this site

Jozef Môstka, Tvrdošín, Slovak Republic

E-mail: jozef@mostka.sk

I am the controller within the meaning of the GDPR. This is not a company with a support line but one person and his server — I answer that address myself. I have not appointed a data protection officer, as there is no obligation to.

The short version

  • No account, no name, no e-mail address. Tankovač knows nothing about you that you did not tell it explicitly — and it asks for nothing of the kind.
  • The places you enter are sent to a routing service (openrouteservice or GraphHopper, both in Germany). Without that a route cannot be measured. Those services do not get your IP address — our server asks them, not your browser.
  • The whole calculation lives in the page address. If you share the link, the recipient sees the start and destination too. If your start is your home, consider whether you want it in there.
  • The Share button stores the calculation for 3 months so that a short link can exist. Then it is deleted.
  • Analytics run without cookies, on my own server, and no place or address ever reaches the statistics.
  • I sell nothing and give nothing away. No ads, no profiling, no fonts or scripts from Google or Facebook.

What happens when you work out a trip

Searching for a place

While you type into From, To or Stop, your browser sends the text (from three characters on) to our server, which asks a place search service what matches. The suggestions are remembered on the server for 30 days (an empty result for 24 hours) so the same search does not have to be paid for again. That memory is shared by everyone and is not linked to anyone — it does not know who searched for what.

Measuring the route

Once you pick both start and destination from the suggestions, the server sends the coordinates of every point of the trip to a routing service. The finished route (points, shape, countries) is remembered for 30 days, again not linked to you.

Who receives that data

Service Run by What it receives Where
openrouteservice — first choice HeiGIT gGmbH, Heidelberg, Germany the text you type when searching, the coordinates of the route's points servers in the EU
GraphHopper — fallback when openrouteservice does not answer GraphHopper GmbH, Munich, Germany the same servers in Germany

Both receive the request from our server, not from you — they never see your IP address, your browser or anything else about you. According to their own policies, HeiGIT keeps coordinates rounded to two decimal places (about a kilometre) indefinitely, and GraphHopper keeps requests for at most 5 weeks. Their policies: HeiGIT, GraphHopper.

The towns along a route come from the GeoNames database, and fuel prices from the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic and the European Commission's Weekly Oil Bulletin. They are downloaded to our server regularly, and nothing about you is sent anywhere in the process.

The calculation in the page address

Start, stops, destination (with coordinates), date, fuel, consumption and number of people are written into the page address so the calculation can be shared and reopened. That means:

  • the address stays in your browser history until you delete it,
  • anyone you send the link to sees all of it, places included,
  • our server sees the address with all its parameters too (see Technical logs).

On the server, calculations are not stored against any person and are not linked together.

Short link for sharing

When you click Share or Copy text, your browser sends the calculation's parameters to our server, which stores them in its database under a random code — that makes a short link like tankovac.sk/c/Ab3xK9q0. Until you click, nothing is stored.

  • What is stored: start, stops and destination as you picked them (the place name with its coordinates — that may be your address), date, fuel, consumption, number of people and the chosen route. Plus the link's code and when it was created. No IP address, nothing about your browser and nothing that would link the link to you.
  • Who can see it: anyone who has the link — the code is the only key. It is random and long enough (8 characters, over 200 trillion possibilities) not to be guessed, and creating links is limited (see Protection against abuse). So send the link only to those you want to show the trip to.
  • How long: 3 months from when it was created. After that the link stops working and the server deletes it from the database within 24 hours. If you share the same trip again within a month, you get the same link and its time is not extended; later a new one is made.
  • Deleting it sooner: send me the link and I will delete it right away.

The link leads to the same calculator with the parameters in its address, so everything in the previous section applies to the opened page.

Protection against abuse

Every new route and every place search costs a credit with the routing provider. So the server counts how many new routes (30 per hour), searches (300 per hour) and short links (60 per hour) came from one IP address, and keeps the IP address with its counter in temporary storage for that. The entry stops being valid about two hours after the last request; the server physically removes it at the next clean-up of that storage.

Technical logs

For every request the web server records the IP address, time, page address (including the calculation's parameters and a short link's code) and browser type; when something fails, the application records what went wrong. This is used only to find errors and attacks. Logs are kept for at most 14 days.

Performance monitoring writes the time and memory each request took to a file in the server's memory. Every minute it is summed up and emptied; only the page's path without parameters and the timing figures go any further.

Error reports

When an error occurs on the server, a report is sent to Bug Catcher — an error tracker running on my own server (not a third party). The report contains a description of the error, the place in the code and the page address. The calculation's parameters and a short link's code are removed from the address before it is sent, and coordinates, places and API keys are wiped from the error description, so your route does not end up there. The IP address is not sent.

Cookies

Tankovač sets one cookie, and it is a technical one:

Cookie What for How long
PHPSESSID remembers which language you read the site in, so that tankovac.sk takes you back to it until you close the browser

It holds nothing but the language. There is no cookie banner because a cookie strictly necessary to provide the service you asked for needs no consent (Section 109(8) of Slovak Act No. 452/2021 Coll. on Electronic Communications). There is no advertising, tracking or third-party cookie. If you block cookies, Tankovač keeps working; the address without a language will simply always follow your browser's setting.

Tankovač as an app (what stays on your device)

You can add Tankovač to your home screen as an app. So that it opens quickly, on your first visit your browser keeps the application's files in its own storage — scripts, styles, the font, icons and the "You are offline" page. They are the same for everybody and hold nothing about you or your trips: pages with a calculation are not stored on the device, and neither are the server's answers with routes, prices or place suggestions. None of it is sent anywhere; clearing the site's data in your browser removes it.

When you close the bubble offering to install the app, your browser writes the time you closed it into its storage (localStorage, key tankovac:install-dismissed) so that it does not offer it again for 90 days. Nothing else is in there and it never reaches the server.

Analytics

I count visits with Matomo — an open-source tool on my own server, reached at matomo.tankovac.sk. Not Google Analytics, nothing that sends data to a third party.

  • It runs without cookies and stores nothing on your device.
  • The IP address is anonymised — its last two bytes are replaced with zeros (e.g. 192.168.0.0), which leaves roughly the country.
  • It collects: which page, when, which page you came from, device type, browser, operating system, screen resolution and language.
  • The page address is sent without its parameters — instead of tankovac.sk/en?from=…&to=… just tankovac.sk/en, and instead of a short link's code just tankovac.sk/en/c/redacted. No place, coordinate, address or link code reaches the statistics. The one exception is the fixed marker ?source=pwa the installed app opens with — so that I know how many people start Tankovač as an app. It says nothing about you or the trip.
  • When you work out a new route, one event is sent with coarse facts: the chosen fuel, the number of stops, the number of countries on the route and whether it is a round trip. Nothing more — not where to, not where from, not what it cost.
  • If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, the tracking script is not loaded at all. That is not a setting in Matomo but a decision made by the application itself: no request goes to matomo.tankovac.sk, so not even your IP address reaches it.

Matomo keeps raw data for 12 months and then deletes it; only aggregated figures remain.

Why I may process this

  • Working out the trip (the places you enter, sending them to the routing provider, the temporary memory of results) — Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR: without it I could not provide what you asked for under the Terms of use.
  • Short link (storing the calculation for 3 months) — Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR: you explicitly ask for the link by clicking Share or Copy text, and without storing the calculation a short link could not work. It is kept only as long as is reasonable for the recipient to open it.
  • Protection against abuse, technical logs, error reports — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, legitimate interest: keeping the service running, not exhaustible, and fixable when something breaks.
  • Analytics — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, legitimate interest in knowing how the site is used, with an anonymised IP address, no cookies, and Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control respected.

You may object to processing based on legitimate interest at any time — write to me. For analytics you do not even have to write: switch on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control in your browser.

Where it physically is

On a server in the Czech Republic (vpsFree.cz, Prague). The application, its temporary storage, logs, Matomo and Bug Catcher are on the same machine. The routing providers are in Germany. Nothing is sent outside the European Union.

Your rights

You have the right of access to your data, to rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability, and to object to processing based on legitimate interest (Art. 15 to 21 GDPR).

To be honest: since Tankovač does not know who you are, I mostly cannot find you in its data. If you send me, for example, your IP address and the time of your visit, I will look up what the logs hold about it and delete it.

Just write to jozef@mostka.sk. I will reply within one month.

If you believe I handle data wrongly, you can lodge a complaint with the Office for Personal Data Protection of the Slovak Republic, Hraničná 12, 820 07 Bratislava (dataprotection.gov.sk).

There is no automated decision-making or profiling.

Changes

When this text changes, so does the date at the top.

Related: Terms of use.