Privacy Policy
Last updated: 12 October 2026
This privacy policy explains how Auto-Briefingsheet ("we", "us", "the Service") collects, uses, stores, and protects your personal data when you use the website https://briefingsheet.ch. It is written to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the revised Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (revFADP / revDSG).
Auto-Briefingsheet is an aviation tool that compiles personalised pilot briefing sheets from Crew Briefing PDF packages. It is operated by a private individual ("the Controller").
1. Who we are
Controller:
Roland Bieg
Switzerland
For privacy requests: please use our contact form.
We are not legally required to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO) and have not done so. You can contact the Controller directly for any data protection matter.
2. What personal data we collect
When you use Auto-Briefingsheet we collect and process the following categories of personal data:
Account data
- Email address
- Password (stored only as a salted hash; we never see your plaintext password)
- Account creation date, email verification status
- Setup guide progress: when you started and when you finished the setup guide
Third-party service credentials (optional)
- Your Crew Briefing username and password
- Your Augur (Eurocontrol RAIM) username and password
- These credentials are encrypted at rest using AES with a server-side key. They are decrypted only in memory, and only when the service needs them: to create a briefing sheet, to pre-load your briefing package (after you sign in or save them) and for a login check right after you save them. We use them only to log in to those services on your behalf.
Login check results
- For Crew Briefing and Augur: the result of the last login check (connected, not accepted or not reachable) and its time. We show it to you in Settings and to the administrator in the admin dashboard, for support.
- The times of your login checks, used for one hour and deleted within a day, to protect your Crew Briefing and Augur accounts and your duty calendar link from too many sign-in attempts.
Authentication and security data
- Login events: timestamp, IP address, success/failure and the username or e-mail address entered
- Email-verification and password-reset tokens (short-lived, single-use)
Usage and briefing data
- Briefing-generation events: a record that you generated a briefing sheet, with timestamp. We use these only for internal, aggregated product metrics (for example how many users complete the sign-up-to-first-sheet funnel); no external analytics provider and no client-side tracking is involved.
- A short-lived cache of the flight and briefing data retrieved on your behalf from Crew Briefing / Augur, kept only to render your sheet and automatically purged after a few days.
- Your NOTAM history: which NOTAMs (airport and NOTAM number) you have seen in a briefing, which ones you selected and which critical NOTAMs you deselected. We use it only to preselect NOTAMs and to mark new ones in your next briefings.
Fleet values (optional)
- The fleet values you enter or import in Settings → Fleet: aircraft types, registrations, DOM and DOI per pantry, crew corrections and weight limits. We use them only to calculate your briefing sheet. They are yours: we do not provide or check them.
- Fleet file requests: when you ask for your airline's fleet file, we record, linked to your account, the domain of the address you entered (for example example.com), the time and whether a file was sent, to limit the number of requests. The full address is passed to our e-mail service provider only to send the file and is not stored.
Duty calendar (optional)
- If you add your schedule feed link in Settings → Data sources, we store the link encrypted and fetch your schedule when you save the link and together with your briefing package. We keep only the duties from yesterday to the day after tomorrow — flight numbers, routes, times, aircraft registrations and the duty type (for example Standby or Off) — to print your pickup time, preview your next duty and check the package against your roster. We never store booking references, crew codes or the rest of your roster.
- The result of the last check of the link (connected, rejected or not reachable) and its time, shown to you in Settings and to the administrator in the admin dashboard, for support.
Technical data
- Server access logs containing IP address, request time, URL, response status, and user agent
- Error reports: when an error occurs on our server, we record technical error data — the error type and message, the code location (stack trace, including the surrounding source-code lines), the time, the app version, the route or background task concerned, internal identifiers such as request, task and job IDs, and a pseudonymous internal user number. Passwords, request contents, email addresses and IP addresses are filtered out before the report is stored.
We do not collect: location data beyond IP, contact lists, biometric data, data about minors (the Service is not intended for users under 16), advertising identifiers, or special-category data under Art. 9 GDPR.
3. How we collect your data
You provide most of the data directly when you:
- Register an account
- Verify your email address
- Save Crew Briefing or Augur credentials in your settings
- Log in
- Use the Service to generate briefing sheets
We collect technical data automatically through your browser (server logs, session cookie) when you interact with the Service.
We do not receive personal data about you from third parties.
4. How and why we use your data
We process your data only for the following purposes and only on the legal bases listed.
| Purpose | Data used | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Create and operate your account | Email, password hash | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) |
| Verify your email address | Email, verification token | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Reset a forgotten password | Email, reset token | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Automatically retrieve your briefing package from Crew Briefing / Augur | Encrypted third-party credentials | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) — only if you save those credentials |
| Check that your saved Crew Briefing / Augur login works | Encrypted third-party credentials, check result and time | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) — only if you save those credentials |
| Limit login checks to protect your Crew Briefing / Augur accounts | Times of your login checks (deleted within a day) | Legitimate interest in service security (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
| Show the setup guide until you finish it | Setup guide progress | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Detect and prevent abuse, brute-force attacks, and unauthorised access | Login events, IP, server logs | Legitimate interest in service security (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
| Detect, analyse and fix technical errors | Error reports (see section 2), including a pseudonymous user number | Legitimate interest in a reliable service (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
| Send transactional emails (verification, password reset) | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) | |
| Comply with legal obligations | Account data | Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)) |
We do not use your data for marketing, profiling, or automated decision-making with legal or similarly significant effect.
5. Where and how we store your data
The Service runs on a virtual server rented from Hetzner Online GmbH, located in a data centre in Germany (European Union). The application stores its data in a PostgreSQL database on that server.
Particularly sensitive fields — your Crew Briefing and Augur credentials — are encrypted at the application level using AES before they are written to the database, with a server-side key that is never stored alongside the data. In addition, the application enforces HTTPS in transit, salted password hashing, and CSRF protection.
A copy of the previous Swiss self-hosted system (Synology) is retained temporarily as a fallback while the migration to Hetzner is confirmed, and will be decommissioned thereafter.
Backups are taken regularly and stored within the same European hosting environment.
Access to the production system is restricted to the Controller and protected by SSH key authentication.
6. Recipients and processors
We share your personal data only with the following processors, each of whom acts on our written instructions and is bound by a data-processing agreement where required:
| Processor | Purpose | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Hetzner Online GmbH | Hosting and infrastructure provider for the production server (stores all account, credential, and usage data) | Germany / EU |
| Mailjet (Sinch Email) | Outbound transactional email relay (verification, password reset) | France / EU |
| Functional Software, Inc. (Sentry) | Error monitoring for our server: stores error reports (no passwords, request contents, email addresses or IP addresses; only a pseudonymous user number) | USA (company); data stored in the EU (Frankfurt, Germany) |
| Synology Inc. (hardware vendor) | Previous Swiss self-hosted server, retained temporarily as a fallback copy and being decommissioned | Switzerland |
| Open-Meteo | Public weather data API for arrival weather icon — no personal data is sent, only airport coordinates | Germany |
| green.ch AG | Domain registrar for briefingsheet.ch |
Switzerland |
We do not sell your data, share it for advertising, or transfer it to data brokers.
7. International data transfers
Apart from the exception below, all processors used by the Service operate within Switzerland or the European Economic Area.
Our error-monitoring provider Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.) is based in the USA. Error reports are stored in the EU (Frankfurt, Germany), but access from the USA cannot be ruled out. These transfers are safeguarded by Sentry's certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (DPF) and the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and by the EU Standard Contractual Clauses in Sentry's Data Processing Addendum. Error reports are stripped of passwords, request contents, email addresses and IP addresses before they are sent.
8. How long we keep your data
| Data | Retention period |
|---|---|
| Account data (email, password hash, settings) | Until you delete your account, or after 24 months of inactivity |
| Encrypted third-party credentials | Until you remove them in settings or delete your account |
| Duty calendar link (encrypted) | Until you remove it in Settings or delete your account |
| Duty calendar extract (yesterday to the day after tomorrow) | With the briefing cache — deleted after 7 days |
| Login check results (result and time of the last check) | Until you change or remove the credentials, or delete your account |
| Login check times (rate limit) | 1 hour, then automatically deleted within a day |
| Login events / authentication logs | 90 days, then automatically purged |
| Briefing-generation events (usage metrics) | 90 days, then automatically purged |
| Fleet values | Until you delete them in Settings → Fleet or delete your account |
| Fleet file requests (domain, time, sent or not) | 90 days, then automatically purged |
| NOTAM history (seen, selected, deselected per airport) | 30 days after the NOTAM expires, at the latest 180 days after your last briefing for that airport; deleted with your account |
| Flight / briefing data cache | A few days, then automatically purged |
| Email-verification tokens | 1 hour, single-use |
| Password-reset tokens | 1 hour, single-use |
| Server access logs | 30 days |
| Error reports (Sentry) | 30 days, then automatically deleted by Sentry |
When you delete your account, we delete your account data without undue delay.
9. Your data protection rights
Under GDPR and revFADP you have the following rights:
- Right to access — Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
- Right to rectification — Ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data.
- Right to erasure ("right to be forgotten") — Ask us to delete your data, subject to legal retention obligations.
- Right to restrict processing — Ask us to limit how we process your data in specific circumstances.
- Right to object — Object to processing based on legitimate interests.
- Right to data portability — Receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
- Right to withdraw consent — Where processing is based on consent, you can withdraw it at any time without affecting prior lawful processing.
- Right to lodge a complaint — See section 13.
Most of these rights you can exercise yourself in the settings area: change your email or password, remove saved third-party credentials, or delete your account. For anything else, contact us via the form linked in section 1. We will respond within one month.
10. Cookies and similar technologies
We use only strictly necessary cookies:
| Cookie | Purpose | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| Flask session cookie | Keeps you signed in and protects against CSRF | Expires after 1 hour of inactivity (at most 12 hours) |
remember_token |
Signs you back in when you chose "Keep me signed in" (random token, no personal data) | 30 days, deleted on sign-out |
We do not use analytics, advertising, tracking, or third-party cookies. Because all cookies we set are strictly necessary for the Service to function, no consent banner is required under the ePrivacy Directive.
You can delete cookies in your browser settings at any time, but you will then be signed out and unable to use the Service.
11. Links to other websites
Our Service may contain links to third-party websites (e.g. Eurocontrol AIS, Crew Briefing, Augur). This privacy policy applies only to our Service. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of other websites and recommend you read their privacy policies.
12. Changes to this privacy policy
We review this policy regularly and may update it to reflect changes in our Service or in applicable law. The "Last updated" date at the top shows when it was last revised. For material changes that affect your rights we will notify registered users by email.
13. How to contact us and how to complain
For any question about this policy, your data, or to exercise your rights:
Online: contact form
If you believe we have not handled your data lawfully you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority:
Switzerland:
Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC / EDÖB)
Feldeggweg 1, CH-3003 Bern
https://www.edoeb.admin.ch
European Union: The data protection authority of the EU/EEA member state where you live, work, or where the alleged infringement took place. A list is available at https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/about-edpb/members_en.