This notice covers the auction on fateseeker.art: registering to bid, placing bids, and the emails that come out of that. It doesn’t cover the checkout on Etsy that winning bidders use to pay — that’s governed by Etsy’s own privacy policy, since Etsy is a separate, independent controller for that step.

Who’s responsible

Raphaela Raudaschl, Hamerlingstraße 7, 4040 Linz, Austria — business@fateseeker.art. No data protection officer is appointed, as none is required at this scale of processing (Art. 37 GDPR) — the email above reaches the person actually handling your data.

What’s collected, and why

Registration & bidding

Email address and first name, when you register to bid; each bid amount and time you place. This is used to run the auction, tell you if you’re outbid or if you’ve won, and enforce the auction terms — necessary to provide the service you asked for (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). To other visitors, bids are shown against a rotating label like “Bidder 6”, not your name.

Session & security

A session cookie and a matching CSRF cookie, set once you register, so the site knows it’s you without a password. Each session also records the IP address and browser/user-agent string it was created from. This is necessary to keep the bidding session working and to catch abuse of the bidding system (Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR). Sessions expire automatically after 30 days.

Optional marketing

If you tick the optional box when registering, we’ll email you about future drops. Based on your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR), which you can withdraw at any time by emailing us — this doesn’t affect emails about an auction you’re already bidding in.

Cookies

Only the two cookies described above are used, both strictly necessary to let you use the bidding feature you asked for. Under Austrian law (§ 165(3) TKG 2021) that means no cookie consent banner is required for them. We don’t use analytics, advertising, or tracking cookies of any kind.

Who else sees it

• Our email delivery provider, to send registration, outbid, and winner emails.
• Our hosting/database provider, to run the site and store auction data.
• Etsy, only if you win — to invoice and collect payment for the item, as a separate controller under its own privacy policy.

We don’t sell or trade your data, and we don’t use it for anything beyond what’s described here.

How long it’s kept

• Session cookies: deleted automatically after 30 days.
• Registration and bid records for auctions you didn’t win: kept for a short period after the auction closes to handle any disputes, then deleted.
• Records tied to a completed sale (winning bid, payment): retained for 7 years, as required by Austrian tax and bookkeeping law (§ 132 BAO).

Your rights

You can ask us for access to, correction of, or deletion of your data, ask us to restrict or object to processing, or request a copy in a portable format. Email business@fateseeker.art for any of this. You can also complain to the Austrian data protection authority (dsb.gv.at) at any time.

No automated decisions

The auction winner is decided purely by whoever holds the highest bid at closing time — there’s no profiling or automated decision-making about you.

Changes

If this notice changes, the update date at the top will change too. Material changes affecting an auction you’re actively bidding in will be emailed to you.