Privacy notice
How we handle your information
This explains what we collect when you apply for emergency housing, why we collect it, who sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do about it.
Section 1
Who is responsible for your data
Förderverein Grains Germany e.V., Chaussestraße 34b, 10115 Berlin, Germany, is the controller of the personal data described here.
For anything to do with your data, write to hello@grains.education. We do not operate a phone line for this programme.
Section 2
What we collect
When you apply, we collect:
- Your name, date of birth, email address and phone number
- Your immigration status in Germany and the circumstances that led you to apply
- Where you are staying at the time of applying
- The number of people in your household, and the name and date of birth of each person who would stay with you
- The dates, length and location of accommodation you need
- Where you plan to go after the stay, and how firm that arrangement is
- Any practical requirement the accommodation must meet
If your application progresses, we also ask to see identification and a document showing your circumstances. We record that we have verified these; we do not keep copies unless we have to.
We do not collect health information. The application asks what the accommodation needs to have — ground-floor access, for example — not why. Please do not send us medical details. If you do, we will delete them.
The eligibility check on our website collects nothing. It runs entirely in your browser, and no answer is stored or sent to us.
Section 3
Why we use it, and on what legal basis
We use your information to assess your application, to decide who can be offered a place, to make and manage a booking, and to stay in contact with you during your stay.
Our legal basis is your consent (Article 6(1)(a) GDPR), which you give when you submit the application. You can withdraw it at any time, as described in section 7.
Where the information you give us reveals something the GDPR treats as a special category — for example your religion, ethnic origin or political opinions, which can be implicit in an account of why you were displaced — we rely on your explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a) GDPR).
We also keep records of bookings to meet obligations to our funder and to comply with German accounting and record-keeping law (Article 6(1)(c) GDPR).
Section 4
Who we share it with
- The accommodation provider and Airbnb. To make a booking we must give the platform and the host the primary guest’s full name and date of birth, and the dates of the stay. This is the minimum a booking requires.
- Airbnb.org. Our funder receives reports on how the grant was used — number of guests, dates, type and location of accommodation, cost, and the crisis being responded to. These reports do not name anyone.
- Our service providers. The form platform that receives your application and the workspace where we manage cases. Both process data on our instructions under written agreements.
We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone else — including authorities — unless the law requires us to.
Section 5
Where your data is held
Our service providers store data within the European Union or European Economic Area.
Making a booking involves Airbnb, which operates internationally. Where data reaches a country outside the EEA, it is protected by the safeguards set out in Chapter V of the GDPR, such as the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.
Section 6
How long we keep it
- Applications that do not lead to a stay: deleted twelve months after the decision, unless you ask us to delete them sooner.
- Applications that lead to a stay: kept for five years after the end of the stay. Our grant agreement requires records of how the funding was used to be retained for that period.
- Emails you send us: deleted on the same schedule as the application they relate to.
Section 7
Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to:
- Ask what data we hold about you, and get a copy
- Have inaccurate data corrected
- Have your data deleted, subject to the retention periods in section 6
- Restrict or object to how we use it
- Receive your data in a portable format
- Withdraw your consent at any time
Withdrawing consent does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it. If you withdraw consent while an application is open, we will close it, because we cannot assess an application without processing the information in it. If you withdraw it during a stay, we may need to keep the booking record to meet our obligations to the host and our funder.
To exercise any of these rights, write to hello@grains.education. We answer within one month.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to a supervisory authority. Ours is the Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit, Alt-Moabit 59–61, 10555 Berlin. You may also complain to the authority where you live.
Section 8
Cookies and this website
These pages set no cookies, run no analytics, and contain no tracking pixels or advertising tags. Web fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address in order to serve them.
The application form is hosted by a third-party form provider and is subject to that provider’s own privacy terms, which are linked from the form itself.
Section 9
Changes
If we change this notice we will update the version and date at the top of this page. Changes do not apply retroactively to data already collected under an earlier version.