This section is for people who never signed up for ContactStar: the professionals whose published contact details a search surfaced, and anyone who received an email sent through our service (these arrive from a ContactStar address, shown as “Name via ContactStar”). Because we did not obtain your details from you, Art. 14 GDPR requires us to tell you what we hold, where it came from, and what you can do about it.

What we hold, and where it came from. Our AI search looks for professionals matching a user’s description (for example “therapists in Berlin”) using publicly accessible sources on the open internet — typically a practice website or a public professional directory. We store the professional contact information published there: name and email address, and where available a postal address, phone number and website, together with a salutation generated for the inquiry. ContactStar is built to find professionals in their professional capacity; we do not seek out special categories of data.

Why, and on what legal basis. We process these details so that a user can find a professional able to help them and get in touch directly — for example a patient looking for a therapist with an available appointment. The legal basis is the legitimate interest of that user and of ourselves in making such contact possible (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). We consider this to be within the reasonable expectations of a professional who publishes contact details in order to be reached by prospective clients or patients. Emails are sent on the user’s behalf: the user decides whom to contact and approves every message before it goes out.

Who receives it. Your details are visible only to the individual user whose inquiry surfaced them. They are never sold, licensed, published, shared between users, or made available as a list, and they are not used for advertising or profiling. ContactStar offers no facility to export, download or transfer them: they can be used only to write the one inquiry they were found for. Our service providers process them on our behalf as described under “Service providers” below.

How long we keep it. Contact details are stored as part of the inquiry they were found for. They are erased when that inquiry is deleted or the user’s account is closed, and we will erase them sooner at your request.

If you never want to be contacted through ContactStar again. Write to us at hello@contactstar.app and we will erase the details we hold about you and make sure your email address is excluded from future searches, so that it can no longer be contacted through the service. To be able to honour that, we keep the one piece of information needed to enforce the exclusion — your email address — for that single purpose and for no other.

Your rights. You can ask us for a copy of the data we hold about you, have it corrected or erased, restrict or object to the processing, and lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. These are set out under “Your rights” below, and apply to you in exactly the same way as to our own users. Write to us at the address above and we will respond within the time limits data protection law sets.