tracerDB

Privacy policy

tracerDB sets one technically necessary security cookie, runs no analytics and loads no scripts, fonts or stylesheets from other providers. Personal data is only collected when you submit data to us. The details follow.

Who is responsible

The controller for the purposes of the GDPR is Martin Schwalm, Eichenweg 20, 61197 Florstadt, Germany, martin.schwalm@tracerdb.org (see the imprint).

Hosting and server logs

The site is hosted by wservices GmbH (djangoeurope), Freiburgstrasse 562, 3172 Niederwangen, Switzerland, on servers in Germany. Switzerland is recognised by the European Commission as providing an adequate level of data protection. Like any web server, the server records each request, including your IP address, the date and time, the page requested, the referring page and your browser's user agent. This is technically necessary to deliver the site and to keep it secure and available. Legal basis: Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in operating a secure website. The logs are used only for that purpose and are deleted on the host's regular schedule.

The domain and the tracerdb.org mailboxes are provided by IONOS SE, Elgendorfer Str. 57, 56410 Montabaur, Germany.

Cookies

Pages with a form (the home page search, compound pages and the submission page) set a cookie called csrftoken. It contains a random value that protects forms against cross-site request forgery, no information about you, and expires after one year. Because it is strictly necessary for the forms to work securely, it does not require consent (section 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG); the legal basis for the associated processing is Article 6(1)(f) GDPR. Administrators who log in additionally receive a session cookie. There are no tracking, advertising or analytics cookies.

Submitting data

If you use the submission form, we receive the information you enter (details of the tracer, target and assay, the optional name of your lab and comment), the CSV files you upload and your email address. The form sends this by email to info@tracerdb.org, a mailbox hosted by IONOS (see above), where only the tracerDB maintainers read it.

We use the submission to review your data and, if accepted, add the scientific data to tracerDB. Your email address is used only to contact you about your submission, as you agree to with the checkbox on the form, and is never published. Legal basis: Article 6(1)(a) GDPR (your consent), which you can withdraw at any time by writing to us; the withdrawal does not affect processing that has already taken place. We delete your email and its attachments once your submission has been processed and no questions remain.

To prevent abuse of the form, your IP address is held in the server's memory for up to one hour to limit the number of submissions per hour. It is not stored anywhere else (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Contacting us by email

If you email us, we use your address and message only to answer you, and delete them when the matter is settled, unless we are legally required to keep them (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).

3D structure viewer

Compound pages for protein tracers show a 3D structure. To display it, your browser loads the structure file directly from the RCSB Protein Data Bank (files.rcsb.org), operated by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA. This necessarily tells RCSB your IP address and the time of the request; no cookies are involved. The legal basis is Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in showing the structure. The United States does not in general provide a level of data protection equivalent to the EU. The request only happens on these compound pages.

Links to other sites

Links to UniProt, PubMed, publishers and other external sites open other people's sites. Nothing is transmitted to them until you click; after that, the site you visit decides what it collects.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access your personal data and to have it corrected, erased or restricted, to data portability, to object to processing based on legitimate interest, and to withdraw consent at any time. Write to martin.schwalm@tracerdb.org. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, for example the Hessian Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (HBDI), Wiesbaden.

Changes

If the site starts processing data in a new way, this page will be updated. Last updated: October 2026.