1. Introduction

Welcome to Reloways! Your privacy is important to us, and we are committed to protecting your personal data. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard your information when you use Reloways, a platform designed to connect businesses, freelancers, and expats worldwide, providing support, professional connections, and local resources for those relocating to a new country.

By accessing or using our platform, you consent to the collection and use of your information as outlined in this policy. If you disagree with our policies and practices, please discontinue using our services.

Who is responsible for your data. The controller of your personal data, in the sense of Article 4(7) GDPR, is Amir Shalev, Siegfriedstraße 15, 12051 Berlin, Germany. Email: amir@reloways.com. Full operator details are in our Impressum.

2. What Information Do We Collect?

We collect the following types of data:

• 1. Information You Provide Directly
• Account Information: Name, email, and profile details upon registration.
• Business Listings: Business name, description, location, and contact details (for business accounts).
• Communications: Messages sent between users and inquiries to customer support.
• Housing Listings: if you post a flat on the housing board, we store what you enter about it – the street address and neighbourhood, the rent or asking price, the deposit, the dates the flat is available, and the photos you upload. The street address is shown to other members only if you choose to make it public; otherwise it is held for moderation and shared with an interested member only at your request. Listing photos are not public: they are served to signed-in members through short-lived links and are not readable by search engines or by anyone without an account.
• 2. Information We Collect Automatically
• Device & Browser Information: IP address, browser type, and operating system.
• Usage Data: Pages viewed, interactions with listings, and search queries.
• AI Search: search queries and the answers generated for them are stored without any personal identifier – no name, no user ID and no link to an account – for up to 12 months, so we can improve answer quality and see which topics we are missing content for. Search conversations saved to your account are visible only from that account and can be deleted at any time from the search screen.
• Cookies & Tracking Data: Used for website performance analysis.
• 3. Information from Third Parties
• Social Media Integrations: We may access limited public profile data if linked.
• Profile Photo: if you sign up with Google, we save the profile picture from that account and store it on our own servers. It is shown on your public profile and next to anything you post, so other members can recognise you. You can replace or remove it at any time in Account Settings, and removing it deletes the copy we hold.

3. Legal Basis for Processing Data

Under GDPR (Article 6), we process personal data based on:

• Performance of a Contract: Necessary for providing platform services.
• Legitimate Interests: Improving user experience and preventing fraud.
• Consent: Required for marketing emails, cookies, and tracking technologies.

4. How Do We Use Your Information?

We use your data to:

• Provide and maintain the platform.
• Improve user experience and platform functionality.
• Prevent fraud and ensure security.
• Communicate updates and respond to inquiries.

5. Will Your Information Be Shared?

We never sell your personal data. We share it only in these situations:

• With other members, for the parts of your profile and the content you chose to publish. Your email address and phone number are never shown to other members.
• With the service providers listed below, who process data on our instructions under a data processing agreement.
• With authorities, only where we are legally required to do so.

6. Who Will Your Information Be Shared With?

These are the service providers that process personal data on our behalf. We name them individually rather than describing them as categories, so you can check each one yourself.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) – hosting, database, sign-in and file storage. This is where the platform itself runs. Our primary region is US East (N. Virginia), so your account data is stored in the United States.
• Amazon SES – sending transactional email, such as sign-in and notification messages. Receives your email address and the message content.
• Strapi Cloud – our content management system, which stores our articles and serves article images to your browser.
• Anthropic – the AI model behind our search answers and content classification. Receives the text of your query. See the AI section below.
• Voyage AI – converts text into the numeric representations that power search. Receives the text being searched or indexed.
• Google (Generative Language API and Places API) – additional AI processing, and the city lookup used during sign-up. The city lookup runs on our server, not in your browser, so Google does not receive your IP address or place cookies through it.
• Brevo – sends our email. That includes service messages such as a reply to your post, a new chat message, an invitation or an alert you asked for, and it includes the newsletter. Receives the recipient's email address and the content of the message.
• Cloudflare – network delivery and cookieless traffic analytics.
• Microsoft (Clarity) – heatmaps and session recordings, and only after you consent. See the cookie section below.
• Google (YouTube) – hosts our podcast episodes. Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play or accept cookies; on an episode page before that, no request to YouTube is made at all. Once it loads, YouTube receives your IP address and may set cookies. We use the no-cookie player.
• Spotify – an alternative way to listen. We link to it rather than embedding it, so nothing reaches Spotify unless you follow the link.
• Slack – receives messages sent through our contact form, so we see them and can reply. That means your name, your email address and what you wrote. Kept as long as the conversation is useful, and deleted on request.
• Iconify – serves the small interface icons. It receives your IP address, which is unavoidable for anything loaded from another server, and nothing else.

If we add a provider that processes personal data, we update this list.

7. Do We Use Cookies & Tracking?

We use two analytics tools to understand how our platform is used and to improve it:

• Cloudflare Web Analytics – a privacy-friendly, cookieless tool that measures only aggregated, anonymous traffic (such as page views and countries). It uses no cookies and collects no personal data, so it runs without consent.
• Microsoft Clarity – helps us see how people navigate the site (heatmaps and session recordings, with text and inputs masked by default) so we can fix problems and improve the experience. Clarity uses cookies and is provided by Microsoft, which acts as a data processor on our behalf. See Microsoft's privacy statement.

Because Microsoft Clarity uses cookies, it runs only after you give consent through our cookie banner. You can decline, and you can change or withdraw your choice at any time using the "Cookie settings" link in the footer of every page. You do not need an account to do this. Signed-in members can also change it from account settings ("Notifications & Privacy"). Withdrawing also clears the Clarity cookies we can reach. If you decline, only the cookieless Cloudflare analytics runs.

Content inside private community rooms is masked and is never captured in recordings, to protect the privacy of sensitive discussions.

8. How We Use AI, and What It Does With Your Text

Parts of Reloways run on AI: the search answers, the classification that decides which city a question is relevant to, the job matching, and the tool that pre-fills a business profile from a website. This section says plainly what that means for your data.

• What gets sent. The text of your query or the content being processed. Alongside it we may send a few things you told us about yourself, so the answer fits you: the city you are in, whether you said you are looking for work, the topics you chose as priorities, and your gender — the last one only so Hebrew addresses you correctly, because Hebrew has no neutral form. Nothing else. We do not send your name, your email address, your user ID, or anything that links the text back to your account.
• Who receives it. Anthropic, Voyage AI, and Google, acting as our processors under a data processing agreement. These are the same providers listed above.
• Your data is not used to train their models. Our agreements with these providers prohibit it.
• What we keep. A log of queries and answers, stored with no personal identifier, for up to 12 months. We use it to improve answer quality and to find topics we have no content for. Search conversations saved to your own account are visible only from that account and can be deleted at any time from the search screen.
• No automated decisions about you. Our AI suggests, ranks and routes. It does not make decisions that produce legal effects or similarly significant effects about you, in the sense of Article 22 GDPR.

AI answers can be wrong. They are generated from our guides and can be incomplete or out of date. Treat them as a starting point, not as legal, tax, immigration, medical or financial advice, and confirm anything important with the competent authority or a qualified professional.

Podcast transcripts, and who is answerable for them. We produce a written transcript of each episode with an automatic tool, and machine transcription of Hebrew makes mistakes. The transcript is stored so our own search can find the moment in a conversation where something was discussed and point you to that episode. It is not published as visible text on the site, and the search does not quote from it — that ability exists in the software and is switched off. If we ever turn it on, we will do so only for transcripts a person has read and corrected. Every AI-assisted text about an episode is reviewed by a person before it is published, and the guest reads and approves their own episode page. Editorial responsibility for what appears on this site rests with Amir Shalev. A guest can ask us at any time to correct something, to remove a passage, or to take their episode out of search entirely, and does not have to give a reason.

9. Your Rights Under GDPR

You have the right to:

• Access your data and receive a copy of it (Article 15).
• Correct data that is wrong or incomplete (Article 16).
• Delete your data (Article 17).
• Restrict processing, meaning we keep your data but stop using it, while a dispute about it is resolved (Article 18).
• Data portability – receive the data you gave us in a structured, machine-readable format, and have it sent to another provider (Article 20).
• Object to processing based on our legitimate interest (Article 21).
• Withdraw consent at any time, for anything we do on the basis of your consent. Withdrawing does not affect what we lawfully did before you withdrew (Article 7(3)).

To exercise any of these, email amir@reloways.com. Exercising them is free and we will not treat you differently for asking.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Ours is: Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit, Alt-Moabit 59-61, 10555 Berlin, Germany. You may also complain to the authority in the EU country where you live.

We respond to all data rights requests within one month, as required by GDPR Article 12(3). Extensions may apply for complex cases, and we will notify you if this occurs.

10. How to Manage Your Data Preferences

You can control your data by:

• Adjusting cookie preferences in browser settings.
• Clicking unsubscribe in marketing emails.
• Contacting amir@reloways.com for account-related requests.

11. International Data Transfers & Security

Where your data actually lives. Our primary infrastructure region is Amazon Web Services US East (N. Virginia), in the United States. We are saying this plainly because many of our members moved to Germany and reasonably assume their data stays in the EU. It does not. Some of the providers listed above also process data outside the EEA.

Amazon Web Services acts as our data processor. For transfers outside the European Economic Area we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) and Data Processing Agreements (DPAs), and on adequacy decisions where they apply:

• EU-approved Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs).
• Data Processing Agreements with service providers.
• Adequacy decisions where applicable.

12. Data Retention Policy

We retain data only as necessary:

• User accounts remain active unless deleted by the user.
• Customer support data is retained for 12 months.
• The AI-search log of queries and answers, which carries no personal identifier, is deleted after 12 months.
• Housing listings are deleted 90 days after they expire or are marked as taken, together with their photos. Deleting a listing yourself removes it and its photos straight away.
• Transaction records (if monetized in the future) are stored for compliance.

13. How We Keep Your Information Safe

We implement:

• Data encryption for sensitive information.
• Restricted access controls.
• Regular security audits.

14. Data Breach Notification Policy

In case of a data breach, we will:

• Notify affected users within 72 hours.
• Inform relevant authorities if required.
• Provide guidance on user security measures.

15. Do We Collect Information from Minors?

There are two different minimum ages, because German law treats the two situations differently.

• Personal member accounts: 16 and over. Germany did not lower the digital consent age under Article 8 GDPR, so it is 16. Below that age, a parent or guardian must give or authorise consent.
• Business profiles and any future paid plan: 18 and over. A business account is a commercial contract, and under German law a minor needs both a guardian's authorisation and family court approval to run a business (§112 BGB).

We do not knowingly collect data from anyone below these ages. If you believe a child has given us personal data, write to amir@reloways.com and we will delete it.

16. How Can You Contact Us?

For privacy-related concerns: Email: amir@reloways.com

17. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this policy periodically. Changes will be posted with a revised effective date.

18. Effective Date

Updated on 08/23/2026.