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Privacy Policy — Liebestaube

Last updated: August 26, 2026

This policy explains what data the Liebestaube app collects, why, and what you can do about it. It’s written to stand on its own as a page on felixreinsch.de — see the site’s Imprint for the operator’s full legal identification.

Summary of key points

In short: Liebestaube is a private, non-commercial app made by one person (Felix Reinsch) for two partners to exchange letters. There’s no sign-up with your name, email, or any real-world identity — just a pairing code that links two anonymous accounts together. Letter content and photos are end-to-end encrypted on your device before they ever reach a server, so neither the app’s operator nor its hosting provider can read them. A one-time, coarse location is used to calculate how far your “pigeon” has to fly, shown to your partner as an approximate, fixed departure/arrival point on the flight-tracking map. Separately, while either of you has that screen open, the app also shares a genuinely live (but still coarse, foreground-only) position marker between you — never in the background, never with “Always” location access (see Section 2 for exactly what that means). There are no ads, no analytics SDKs, and no data sold or shared with advertisers.

Full detail on all of this is below.

Table of contents

  1. Who is responsible for your data
  2. What information we collect
  3. How we use your information
  4. Legal basis for processing (GDPR)
  5. Who we share information with
  6. End-to-end encryption — what this actually means
  7. How long we keep your information
  8. Your rights
  9. Children’s privacy
  10. Changes to this policy
  11. Contact

1. Who is responsible for your data

Liebestaube is a private, non-commercial project developed and operated by a single individual, Felix Reinsch — not a company. For the full legal identification required under German law, see the Imprint. As an individual operating a small, non-commercial app, there is no formally appointed Data Protection Officer (none is required under GDPR Art. 37 at this scale) — reach out directly using the contact details in Section 11 for any privacy question or request.

2. What information we collect

Liebestaube deliberately collects as little as possible. There is no sign-up form, no email address, no password, and no real name required to use the app.

Account data. When you first open the app, it creates an anonymous account with Supabase (our backend provider) — just a random identifier, nothing tied to your real identity. You can set a display name yourself, which is shown only to the one partner you pair with, never publicly.

Pairing data. To connect with your partner, one of you generates a short pairing code and shares it with the other. Redeeming that code links your two accounts together as a “couple.” The code itself isn’t personal data, but the link it creates is stored.

Letter content and photos. The text and up to two photos attached to each letter you send. This content is encrypted on your device before it ever leaves it — see Section 6 for what that means in practice.

Location (one-time, coarse, shown to your partner). With your permission, the app takes a single, reduced-accuracy GPS fix — only once, the very first time you ever send a letter — to calculate the distance your letter’s “pigeon” has to fly, and reverse-geocodes it to a country/region for flight statistics. Every letter you send after that first one reuses this same original fix; the app has no way for you to refresh it, so it does not track you continuously and is never shown as your live, real-time position. It is, however, shown to your partner: every letter’s flight-tracking map displays a departure pin (roughly where you were the first time you used the app) and an arrival pin (the same, for your partner) — so your partner can see, approximately, where you were when you first started using Liebestaube, on every letter you send, not just the first.

Live position (foreground only, shown to your partner). Separately from the fixed snapshot above, the app also shows you and your partner a second marker on the flight-tracking map for roughly where each of you actually is right now. This refreshes automatically, on the same reduced-accuracy basis, every couple of minutes while either of you has the flight-tracking screen open — it stops the moment the app is closed or backgrounded and never runs continuously or in the background. The app does not request “Always” location access, and there is currently no in-app control to pause or disable this specifically (beyond turning off Location Services for the app entirely in iOS Settings, which disables both this and the one-time snapshot above).

Encryption key material. Your device generates a Curve25519 key pair for end-to-end encrypting letters with your partner. Only the public key is ever sent to the server (by design — that’s how public-key cryptography works); the private key never leaves your device.

Push notification tokens. If you allow notifications, the app registers a device token with Apple so it can alert you when a letter arrives or a flight updates. This token identifies your device to Apple’s push service, not you personally.

Technical/log data. Like any server, our hosting provider’s infrastructure processes standard connection metadata (e.g., IP address, request timestamps) as an ordinary part of serving API requests. This is not used for tracking or profiling — it’s incidental to running a server.

What we deliberately do not collect: your name (unless you choose to type one for your partner to see), your email address, your phone number, your contacts, or any advertising/analytics identifier. There are no analytics SDKs, ad networks, or third-party trackers built into the app.

3. How we use your information

  • To create and maintain your anonymous account and link it to your partner’s via a pairing code.
  • To store and deliver your (encrypted) letters and photos to your partner, and only your partner.
  • To compute a letter’s flight distance, duration, and route, to show in-flight weather effects along that route, and to display an approximate departure/arrival location to both you and your partner on the flight-tracking map (see Section 2).
  • To send you push notifications about letters and flight status, if you enable them.
  • To keep the service secure and working as intended (e.g., basic abuse/rate-limit protection on pairing-code redemption).

We do not use your information for advertising, do not build behavioral profiles, and do not sell or rent it to anyone.

For users in the EU/EEA/UK, processing relies on:

  • Art. 6(1)(b) — processing necessary to provide the specific service you’re actively using the app for (pairing, letters, flight tracking).
  • Art. 6(1)(a) — your consent, for optional, permission-gated features like location access and push notifications, which iOS asks you to grant explicitly and which you can revoke at any time in Settings.
  • Art. 6(1)(f) — legitimate interest, for the minimum technical/log data needed to operate and secure the service.

5. Who we share information with

Liebestaube shares data only with the infrastructure it needs to function — never with advertisers or data brokers.

  • Supabase (database, authentication, and serverless functions), hosted in the EU (Ireland). Supabase acts as a data processor on our behalf and only stores what’s described in Section 2 — critically, your letter content and photos reach it only as encrypted ciphertext it cannot read.
  • Apple, for services the app relies on directly on your device:
    • Push notifications (APNs) — delivers alerts to your device.
    • WeatherKit — provides current weather conditions along a flight’s route for the in-app “currently flying over ___” display.
    • Location Services — resolves your one-time GPS fix to a city/country.
    • If you downloaded the app from the App Store, Apple also processes your Apple ID and purchase/download data under Apple’s own privacy policy — we have no visibility into that.

We do not use Google Analytics, Firebase, Facebook SDKs, ad networks, or any other third-party tracking or analytics service.

6. End-to-end encryption — what this actually means

Letter text and photos are encrypted on your device using a key derived from a Curve25519 key exchange between you and your partner’s devices, before anything is sent to the server. The server only ever stores and transmits opaque encrypted bytes (AES-GCM sealed boxes) — it does not have the key needed to read them, and neither could we, Supabase, or anyone with database access. Only your device and your partner’s device can decrypt a letter’s contents.

This means we genuinely cannot read your letters, recover their content if you lose your device, or hand over plaintext content in response to a request we might receive — we simply don’t have it.

7. How long we keep your information

Your account, pairing, and letter data are kept for as long as your account exists — there’s currently no fixed automatic deletion schedule, since the app has no concept of an inactive-account cleanup. If you want your data deleted, contact us (see Section 11) and we will delete your account and associated data. Note that deleting your account does not delete data your partner already received and stored on their own device, since a letter’s content is decrypted and kept locally by whoever received it — that’s outside our reach by design (see Section 6).

8. Your rights

If you’re in the EU/EEA/UK, you have the right to:

  • Access the personal data we hold about you.
  • Rectify inaccurate data (e.g., your display name).
  • Erase your data (“right to be forgotten”).
  • Restrict or object to processing.
  • Data portability — receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
  • Withdraw consent at any time for anything based on consent (e.g., by turning off location or notifications in iOS Settings), without affecting the lawfulness of processing before the withdrawal.

To exercise any of these, contact us using the details in Section 11. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. As the operator is based in Saxony, Germany, the competent authority is:

Sächsische Datenschutz- und Transparenzbeauftragte Maternistraße 17, 01067 Dresden, Germany +49 351 85471-101 · datenschutz.sachsen.de

You’re also free to contact the supervisory authority in your own country of residence instead.

9. Children’s privacy

Liebestaube isn’t directed at children and isn’t designed with any age-verification or parental-consent flow. If you believe a child has used the app and provided data through it, contact us and we’ll delete the associated account.

10. Changes to this policy

If how the app handles data changes, this page will be updated and the “Last updated” date at the top will reflect it. Material changes will be called out clearly rather than buried in a diff.

11. Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns about this policy or your data:

Felix Reinsch Glückauf 21, 08523 Plauen, Germany info@felixreinsch.de

See also the Imprint for full legal identification, and the general felixreinsch.de privacy policy for how this website itself (as opposed to the app) handles data.