Privacy

About settlein

settlein is an independent platform providing practical guidance and resources for people moving to and living in Switzerland.

Legal notice (imprint) and controller

settlein is operated by Rosie Clark and Clive Marambwa as a simple partnership under Swiss law. Contact address: c/o JL Consulting Group GmbH #1644, Zürcherstrasse 84, 8852 Altendorf, Switzerland. Email: enquiries@settlein.ch. Both partners are jointly responsible for your data.

What we collect, and why

• Your email — to sign you in, reset your password, send one welcome email when your plan is saved and, if you ask on a task, remind you on the date you chose. If your household has a membership, we email the person who bought it 30 days before your household’s membership ends — a service email about your membership, not marketing; it carries a link to stop these reminders. Occasional updates about settlein (new guides, features and changes) go only to people who ask for them. We send nothing else.
• Your email choices — whether you asked for updates, the date you did and where (when you signed up, or in Settings), and whether you stopped membership reminders. They are kept with your account, included in your export, and deleted with it.
• Your household — given names, roles, children’s age bands (not birth dates), work situation, permit status as you describe it, optional nationality and US-person status, arrival window, canton and Gemeinde, and optional practical answers (driving, a car or pet coming with you, housing, language, whether a marriage or birth happened abroad, whether you might apply for citizenship). Every optional answer can be skipped. We use these only to work out which tasks apply to you. You confirm you have read this notice before any of it is stored. We process it because it is needed to run your plan (the contract between us); we do not rely on consent, so there is nothing to withdraw — you can delete your household instead.
• Your progress — task status and the target dates you set.
• Ask settlein messages — your questions and the answers, so settlein can build on earlier conversations: with each new question it re-reads your last 10 messages. When it would not answer because we have not verified an official source yet, we read that question to decide which source to verify next. Questions you save to ask in person are kept with your plan. They are deleted with your household; to remove a single one sooner, email us.
• Contact form messages — so we can reply.
• Beta invitations — if we invited you to the private beta, your email and a short note we wrote for ourselves, so you could sign up. They are deleted with your account. An invitation never used to create an account is deleted after 31 January 2027, when the beta ends.
• Records that keep the service working — when you accepted our Terms and confirmed you are 18 or over (deleted with your account); your IP address and, when you sign in, your email, stored only in a form that cannot be turned back into them, to limit repeated attempts (deleted after a day); and, for each Ask settlein answer, a cost record — which model, how much text, and whether it answered, but never the question or the answer. When you delete your household, the cost records stay, with nothing left that links them to you.

We do not collect dates of birth, passport numbers, documents or health records. There is no upload.

If another adult in your household entered your details: they did so to build a shared plan. We hold about you what they typed — given name, role, work situation, permit status and, if they chose, nationality and US-person status — and nothing else. Ask them to show you this page, or email us to see, correct or delete it.

Where it is stored

Product data is stored in a Supabase Postgres database in Frankfurt, Germany (EU). Switzerland recognises EU/EEA countries as providing adequate data protection, so no extra transfer safeguards are needed for it. Once a week we copy the database to an encrypted backup on one of the founders’ computers in Switzerland, so we can restore it if something goes wrong; each backup is kept for up to 8 weeks. The AI provider and its processing region are named below.

Where our providers are based

Switzerland treats EU and EEA countries, and US companies certified under the Swiss–US Data Privacy Framework, as providing adequate data protection (Federal Council decision in force 15 September 2024). Where a provider is not certified, we rely on standard contractual clauses recognised by the FDPIC.

Who else processes it

• Database and sign-in: Supabase.
• Hosting: Vercel Inc. (server logs: IP address, time, page; kept 1 hour on our current Vercel plan).
• AI model provider (Ask settlein only): your question; your household’s answers — given names, roles, canton and Gemeinde, arrival window, work situation, permit, nationality, US-person status, children’s age bands and the practical answers (driving, car, pet, housing); your last 10 messages; and the official sources we retrieved are sent to generate an answer. The same answers go with every question. Your email and payment details are never sent. If you paste the text of a letter, that text is sent too, after AHV, IBAN and card numbers are removed; the letter itself is not stored, but the answer may quote it and is kept with your messages, so the model can read that quote again with your next questions. The provider is Amazon Web Services (Amazon Bedrock), running Anthropic's Claude model in the European Union — Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, Stockholm, Milan or Spain, never Switzerland or the United States. We have set it to keep none of this data and not to use it to train models.
• Payments (members only): Stripe receives your email and billing details — never your household facts. Deleting your household cancels any renewal at Stripe first, deletes your customer record there (your saved email, name and card) and deletes our own record of your purchases. The receipts and invoices for past payments stay in settlein’s Stripe account, as the payment records we must keep (see below); Stripe also keeps its own records of them under its own privacy policy.
• Email: Resend, sending from its EU region, sends our emails — sign-in and password-reset links, one welcome email, the reminders you ask for on a task, the email before your membership ends and, only if you ask for them, our occasional updates. Every update and every membership reminder has a one-click unsubscribe link, and you can switch either off in Settings. Your address for updates stays in our own database; we do not copy it to a mailing-list service. Contact-form messages also reach our support mailbox, which runs on Google Workspace, and our replies come from it.
• Visit statistics: Vercel Web Analytics, loaded from our own domain. It sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. Each page view is counted under a code Vercel makes from the request (your address and browser) and discards within a day, so visits are not joined across days or across sites. Before a page view is sent, our code removes any task or record id from the address and every query parameter except campaign tags. We see totals only: page, the site you came from, country, device type, operating system and browser. Vercel keeps them for one month on our current plan.

We never share your household with an employer, and we do not sell data.

Cookies

We use only the cookies needed to keep you signed in — and, if you untick “Keep me logged in”, one more that ends your sign-in when the browser closes. While you build a plan, your unfinished answers stay in your own browser tab. Our visit statistics use no cookies. That is why there is no cookie banner. The full list is on the cookies page.

How long we keep it

Your household stays until you delete it. Inactive accounts: if you have not signed in for 24 months, we delete your account and household. We email you 30 days and 7 days before, and signing in once cancels the deletion. An account whose email address is never confirmed is deleted, with its password, after 24 hours. Answers you gave before confirming your email are deleted after 7 days if you never confirm. Contact-form messages: we keep a message and our reply for 12 months after the last message in the conversation, in our database and in our support mailbox, then delete both. If the conversation concerns a dispute, a complaint or a request about your data, we keep it until the matter is closed and for 12 months after. Deleting your household deletes your contact-form messages from our database; the copies in our support mailbox are not deleted with it. They follow the same 12 months, or ask us and we delete them sooner. Payment records: receipts and invoices for membership payments are kept in settlein’s Stripe account for 10 years after the end of the financial year, as Swiss accounting law requires (Code of Obligations Art. 958f), even if you delete your household. They contain your name, email and the amount — never your household answers. Backups: we keep each weekly backup of the database for up to 8 weeks, so anything you delete, or that we delete, is gone from the backups within 8 weeks.

Your rights

You can download everything we hold about your household from Settings → Export, correct your household’s answers at Your household, and delete your household and account from Settings → Delete. You also have the right to access, correction, deletion, a copy of your data in a portable format, objection, and restriction of processing: email enquiries@settlein.ch and we answer within 30 days. You can complain to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC).

If you live in the EU/EEA or the UK: the GDPR or UK GDPR also applies to you. Our legal bases are: performance of our contract with you (your account, household, progress, messages, payments, membership reminders); your consent (occasional updates, which you can withdraw at any time with the link in any update or in Settings); our legitimate interest in running a secure service (abuse limits, cost records, the details of another adult in your household); and legal obligation (payment records). You may complain to the data protection authority of your country. We have not appointed a representative in the EU; contact us directly at enquiries@settlein.ch.

Version 2026-11-01.