Who is responsible
Max Nowack, Schillerstr. 1, 37120 Bovenden, Germany.
[email protected]
— see the imprint.
Server logs
Like any web server, ours records the requests it answers: the time, the page requested, the response, the browser identifier, and the IP address the request came from. This is how a server is operated and debugged, and it happens whether or not you ever sign up.
Legal basis is our legitimate interest in running the site securely and correctly, Article 6 (1) (f) GDPR. These logs are not combined with your account, are not used to build a profile, are not analysed for reach or behaviour, and are kept only as long as operating the service requires.
Signing up and signing in
There is no password. You give us your email address, and we mail you a link that signs you in; the first time you follow it, your account and a workspace are created. The form on this website only opens the sign-in page and hands it the address you typed — it stores nothing and sends nothing anywhere else.
So that the sign-in form cannot be used to flood somebody's mailbox, we count for fifteen minutes how many links were asked for an address and from an IP address. The count is held in memory only and is gone after those fifteen minutes.
Your account. We store your email address, the workspaces you belong to, whether you want their notifications by email, and your sign-ins: a session that ends when you sign out, and an audit trail of security-relevant actions — sign-ins, invitations, membership changes, connected and removed servers, started runs — with the IP address they came from. Legal basis is the contract you enter by using PatchPilot, Article 6 (1) (b) GDPR, and for the audit trail and the counting above our legitimate interest in keeping accounts secure, Article 6 (1) (f). Signing in mails you a link through Brevo; inviting somebody mails them an invitation, which we keep for seven days or until it is used. We mail you nothing but these and the notifications of your workspaces: no newsletter, no sales sequence, and your address is never sold or shared for anyone else's purposes.
Your servers. What the PatchPilot agent reports from a server — its name, release, packages, pending updates and the results of runs — we process on behalf of the workspace it belongs to, as its processor, under the data processing agreement the workspace accepts. Its subprocessors are named there. Only the current state of a server is kept, with its past runs, until the server or the workspace is removed.
Notifications go by email through Brevo to the members who have not turned them off, and to the webhooks the workspace added — Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams or an address of its own, each the workspace's own choice. To name the CVEs of pending security updates and installed packages we ask osv.dev, run by Google, about a package name, a version and a release; to say how likely a CVE is to be exploited we ask FIRST.org about the CVE's name; to know a CVE's severity and age, and which source files a kernel CVE is in, we ask CVE.org, run by MITRE, about the CVE's name; and we fetch CISA's public catalogue of exploited vulnerabilities whole. None of this identifies anybody.
How long
Your account and its audit trail until you delete your account in the settings; a workspace until a member deletes it. Deleting takes effect at once in the service.
The database is backed up every hour, and the backups are thinned out as they age: we keep the last 72 hourly, 30 daily, 13 weekly and 12 monthly backups, and one backup of every year without a time limit. Data you delete therefore stays in the backups taken before it was deleted until they are thinned out — in a yearly backup, for good. Backups are on servers in the European Union and are reachable only by us.
Who else sees it
Brevo (Sendinblue SAS, 17 rue Salneuve, 75017 Paris, France) sends our email. It processes your address on our instructions and under a data processing agreement. Brevo is established in France; where it relies on sub-processors outside the European Union, it does so under the safeguards set out in that agreement.
Hetzner Online GmbH (Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen, Germany) runs the servers this site and PatchPilot are on, in its Nuremberg data centre, and stores the backups. It processes on our instructions, under a data processing agreement. Nothing leaves the EU here.
Cloudflare, Inc. (101 Townsend St., San Francisco, CA 94107, USA) sits in front of this domain: every request to it, with your IP address, passes through Cloudflare's network on its way to Hetzner, which protects the site against attacks and overload. Cloudflare processes the requests on our instructions under its data processing agreement. Because Cloudflare is a US company, this may involve a transfer to the United States, made under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, under which Cloudflare is certified, and the standard contractual clauses in that agreement.
Nobody else. There is no analytics provider, no tag manager and no advertising network involved, and the fonts you are reading are served from this domain rather than from someone else's.
Cookies, and the thing that is not a cookie
The website sets no cookies. Signing in to PatchPilot sets one, _patchpilot_key, when you open the sign-in page: it keeps you
signed in for fourteen days, protects the forms there, and for ten minutes
remembers which address this browser asked a sign-in link for, so that the
link signs you in at once when you follow it here. It is strictly necessary
for that, signing out empties it, and it expires fourteen days after it was
last changed.
When you type your address into the form on this website, it is put in your browser's session storage for the moment it takes to open the sign-in page, which takes it out again as it reads it. It never leaves your browser except in the sign-in form you are sending, and closing the tab removes it in any case.
Your rights
You have the right to access your data (Art. 15 GDPR), to have it corrected (Art. 16), erased (Art. 17) or restricted (Art. 18), to receive it in a portable form (Art. 20), and to object to its processing (Art. 21). Write to [email protected] — or delete your account in the settings, which does the erasing for you.
You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. The one responsible for us is:
Die Landesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz Niedersachsen
Prinzenstraße 5, 30159 Hannover, Germany
lfd.niedersachsen.de
Is any of this required to use the site
No. Everything on this website is open to you without giving us anything. Using PatchPilot needs an email address, because signing in works by mail. There is no automated decision-making and no profiling.