Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. What is stored, where, and who else is involved.

This policy explains what personal data Vink (“Vink”, “we”, “us”) collects when you use vinkjournal.com and the Vink trading-journal application (the “Service”), why we collect it, who we share it with, and the rights you have under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

1. Who we are (data controller)

The controller responsible for your personal data is:

• Vink Journal, a sole proprietorship (eenmanszaak) under Dutch law
• Chamber of Commerce (KvK) number: 99781956
• VAT (BTW) number: NL005410553B66
• Address: Jan Steenstraat 6, 5143 GR Waalwijk, Nederland
• Privacy contact: privacy@vinkjournal.com

2. What data we collect

• Account data — your email address, an optional display name, and a securely hashed password, unless your account signs in only with Google or Apple and you have not set one. Your password is never stored in plain text. If you turn on two-step login: the key your authenticator app uses (stored encrypted), the public part of each passkey you add with the name you give it, and one-way hashes of your recovery codes. If you change your email address, we keep the previous address, the new one and when you changed it for 30 days, so that the previous address can undo a change it did not make.
• Making your account in the Vink app — if you make your account in the Vink app, what you entered in the app before (your check-ins, your trade with its chart, your Check) is sent with it and becomes part of your journal. If you sign up with a code, we send the code to your address and keep it, hashed, until it is used or 15 minutes have passed.
• Signing in with Google or Apple — only if you use it — when you choose “Continue with Google” or “Continue with Apple”, that provider tells us the identifier of your account with them, your email address, and whether they have verified it. We ask for nothing else: not your name, not your profile picture. We keep the identifier, the email address they gave us, when you added the sign-in and when you last used it. Apple may give us a private relay address that forwards to your own (ending in privaterelay.appleid.com); we email that address like any other. For Apple we also keep one token, encrypted, used only to end Vink’s access at Apple when you delete your account or remove Apple as a way to sign in. If you start creating an account with Apple and don’t finish, we hold that token, encrypted and with nothing else about you, for about an hour at most, then ask Apple to end Vink’s access and delete it. If you already have a Vink account with the same confirmed email address, the sign-in is added to it and we email you that it was. If an account with that address was never confirmed, the sign-in takes it over: its password is removed and every device signed in to it is signed out.
• Content you create — the trades, accounts, tags, notes, mental-state entries, reviews, portfolio holdings, and screenshots you add to your journal. A review also keeps the figures it showed you when you saved it. Your own verdict on a trade (a good trade, a mistake, or bad luck) is kept with the trade, whether you gave it in a review or on the trade’s page. A focus you set from Stats is kept too: its words, the finding or rule it came from, and when you set it. Something you chose to try from the dashboard is kept the same way, with how long you chose to try it, the figures it was proposed with, and when and how it ended. A proposal you put off is kept as a dismissed finding, with the date. If you answer “kept it?” from the phone before your review, or for a day in your debrief, that answer is kept with the focus and the day it was about. Limits you set yourself (most trades a day, a wait after a loss, a good-day mark) are kept with your settings, with the days Vink showed one of your rules back to you. Your trading plan is kept too: its rules in your words, what each setup is, and on each trade which of your rules you marked as kept or broken. If you add custom fields, we keep each field you define (its name, type and options) and the value you give it on each trade. Deleting a field in Settings deletes its values on every trade. If you log fees and payouts with prop firms, we keep each one: the firm, the account it belongs to, what it was, the amount, the date and your note.
• Sleep, energy and stress ratings — only if you switch them on — three ratings from 1 to 10 in your mental journal’s morning plan. Because this can count as information about your health, we store it only with your explicit consent (see section 3).
• Settings you choose — your theme, your timezone, your review-reminder schedule, your daily loss limit, your email preferences, what an accountability peer is allowed to see, the currencies you follow in the news calendar, the hour of your daily debrief, and your other display and dashboard preferences. Your timezone is taken from your browser, or from your phone when you make your account in the Vink app, and kept with your account, so that the emails you get from us arrive in your own morning rather than at a fixed hour for everyone.
• Accountability connections — if you invite someone, the email address you invited and, once they accept — with a Vink account of their own, or with a code we email them — the connection between you, when they last opened your dashboard if they have no account, and any messages they send you. See section 5.
• Survey answers — if you answer one of our occasional surveys, what you answered, stored against your account so that each person answers once. Answering is always optional, and your answers are deleted with your account.
• Payment data — we never see your full card number. When you subscribe we create a customer record for you in our Stripe account (your email address and your Vink account ID), and Link’s checkout then collects your payment details directly from you — see section 5. In our own database we keep only a Stripe customer reference, a subscription reference and which plan you are on.
• Technical & usage data — data needed to run the Service securely, such as your IP address (for rate-limiting and abuse prevention), plus privacy-friendly performance and page-visit statistics that use no cookie and no persistent identifier (see section 10).
• When you last used Vink — a single timestamp on your account, updated at most once an hour while you are signed in. We use it for two things: to see how many people are actively using the Service and which features are worth building on, and to send you one reminder if you have not opened Vink for about two weeks (see section 3 — you can switch that off). It is overwritten each time, so it records that you were here, never a history of where you went. In our admin view it appears next to your account, with which features you have used — never what you wrote in them, and the mental journal only as a total across everyone. It is deleted with your account.
• Where you came from — if you reached Vink through one of our own short links (the kind we put under a video or in a profile), a cookie remembers which link for 30 days, and if you then create an account we record it on the account: the platform and the post. If you make your account in the Vink app, we record that it was made there. If you answer the optional “How did you hear about Vink?” question when you sign up, we keep that answer too. And whichever way you arrived, a cookie notes where your first visit came from for 30 days, and if you then create an account we record it on the account: the kind of source (a search engine, an AI assistant, a social platform, another website, one of our campaigns, or none), its name (such as “google” or the other website’s address, never what you searched for or which page of theirs you were on), the campaign tag on the link if it had one, the page you first landed on, and when. None of this is used for anything that touches you — no mail, no pricing, no feature reads it — only to learn which posts and which places bring people in. All of it is deleted with your account.
• The demo without an account — if you try the chart reader at /try, we keep the email address you give, the date, which short link (if any) brought you, how many reads you have used, whether the result mail has been sent, and — if you ticked the box for product updates — when we sent the one email asking you to confirm, and whether and when you did. The screenshot you drop is sent to the reader described in section 4, read, and discarded: it is not stored, and no trade is created. Before the demo starts, Cloudflare’s Turnstile checks that the form is being used by a person and not a script: it runs in your browser, Cloudflare sees your IP address and technical signals from your browser for that check, and we receive only whether it passed. We also refuse addresses at known throwaway email services. See sections 3 and 7 for what the address is used for and how long it is kept.
• Reading a chart in the app before you have an account — if you ask the Vink app to read a chart before you have made an account (your screenshot or our sample), the screenshot is sent to the reader described in section 4, read, and discarded: it is not stored, and no trade is created. With it the app sends a random number it made for this installation, and we keep that number with a count of its reads for up to 30 days, so one phone cannot use more than a few. Everything else you enter before making an account (your check-ins, your trade, your Check) stays on your phone; it reaches us only if you make an account.
• How far people get in the app’s first day — the Vink app tells us when one of the screens of its first day is reached for the first time on a phone (such as the morning check-in or the Check), when someone skips the rest, and whether the trade screen used our chart or yours. We receive only which screen and when: not the random number the app made for the installation, nothing you entered, and no account. The app keeps a list on your phone of the screens it has already reported, so each is counted once. Your IP address is used only for a short-lived limit on how many can be sent, as on our other forms.
• The help center — if you answer “Did this answer your question?” under a help article, we count which article and which answer. If a search in the help center finds nothing, we keep what you typed (in lower case, at most 80 characters) for 90 days, to learn which articles are missing. Neither is linked to you: no account, no IP address and no cookie is stored with them. Your IP address is used only for a short-lived limit on how many can be sent, as on our other forms. A message you send from the “Still stuck” box under an article is a support message like any other: kept with your account if you are signed in, or with the email address you give if you are not, and kept as section 7 describes for support correspondence. Its subject names the article you were reading.
• Error reports — if a page or an action fails, on our servers, in your browser or in the Vink app, or if the app closes unexpectedly or stops responding, we record what went wrong so we can fix it: the kind of error and its message, where in our code it happened, the address of the page or the name of the app screen (with the codes that identify a trade, a review or a link removed), the steps just before it (which pages or screens were opened and which requests failed, without their content), the name and version of your browser and operating system (as your browser announces them to every website) or your iPhone’s model and iOS version, the version of Vink, the time, and the reference shown on the error screen. Email addresses are removed from error messages before a report is sent. A report never contains your account, your name, your email address, your IP address, your cookies, the app’s installation number, your phone’s name, what you typed or uploaded, or your trades, and nothing is recorded of your screen. In the app you can switch error reports off in Settings. Reports are held for us by Sentry (section 5).
• Cookies and similar storage — see section 10.

3. How we use your data and our legal basis

• To provide the Service (create your account, store and display your journal, calculate your trading statistics) — legal basis: performance of our contract with you.
• To let you sign in with Google or Apple, if you choose to, and to add that sign-in to an account you already have (section 2) — legal basis: performance of our contract with you.
• To process screenshots with AI (see section 4) — legal basis: performance of our contract.
• To share your figures with a peer you invite, and to email them (the invitation, and loss-limit alerts where you both switch them on) — legal basis: performance of our contract with you, because you asked for it. Your mental journal is shared only with your explicit consent, given separately for each peer, which you can withdraw at any time (section 5). For the person you invite, we rely on our legitimate interest in delivering your invitation and, if they choose to view without an account, in sending them the code they ask for and keeping them signed in on their device; we use their address for nothing else.
• To show how your sleep, energy and stress relate to your trading — only if you switch this on under Settings → Mental journal. Legal basis: your explicit consent (art. 9(2)(a) GDPR). We keep a record of each time you switch it on or off and of the wording you were shown, until you delete your account. You can withdraw it at any time with the same switch; switching it off deletes every rating you saved. These ratings are used only for your own statistics: they are never shown to an accountability peer and never sent to our AI provider.
• To keep the Service secure (authentication, rate-limiting, preventing abuse, and letting your previous email address undo a change of address it did not make) — legal basis: our legitimate interest in keeping the Service and its users’ accounts safe.
• To understand how the Service is used (which features people actually use, and how many of the people who make an account in the app come back, start a trial and subscribe, counted as totals, so we can improve them and retire what nobody wants) — legal basis: our legitimate interests.
• To take payment for your subscription, and to meet the tax and accounting obligations that follow — legal basis: performance of our contract and legal obligation.
• To send account emails (email verification, password resets, security notices, a link to confirm a new email address and a notice to your previous address when it changes, confirmations of your subscription, cancellation and withdrawal, the reminder before a trial ends, reminders you set up yourself, and a notice when you near your storage limit) — legal basis: performance of our contract.
• To handle a withdrawal or a refund request — the statement you send us (your name, email address and, if you give it, your contract number), the date and time we received it, and what we did with it — legal basis: legal obligation (the withdrawal rules in the Dutch Civil Code) and performance of our contract (any other refund you ask us for). You can use this without an account or signing in.
• To keep a record of support exchanges and of the emails we send — legal basis: our legitimate interests in handling follow-up questions, investigating delivery problems and abuse, and defending legal claims (periods in section 7).
• To ask you how Vink is working — occasional short surveys or research requests about your use of the Service — legal basis: our legitimate interests in understanding and improving it. We send these only if you chose them: since 28 September 2026 by ticking the product-updates box when you create an account (legal basis then: your consent), and for older accounts by the choice we offered in the app, which you could decline. Answering is always optional, and every such message carries a way to opt out. Opting out never affects the account emails above.
• To tell you what has changed in Vink — occasional short product-update notes — legal basis: our legitimate interests in keeping the people who use the Service informed about it. We send these only if you chose them: since 28 September 2026 by ticking the product-updates box when you create an account (legal basis then: your consent), and for older accounts by the choice we offered in the app, which you could decline; every one carries an unsubscribe link, and you can also turn them off in Settings, as a separate switch from the surveys. We record which of these notes you have already been shown, so you are not told the same thing twice.
• To help you get started, and to remind you if you go quiet — in the first week of your trial, at most two short emails: one about a day after it starts if you have not logged a trade yet, and one about a week in summing up what you logged (read from your trades); and, if you have not opened Vink for about two weeks, one email saying your journal is still there — legal basis: our legitimate interests in helping you keep up a habit you signed up for. The first-week notes are sent once each, ever; the quiet reminder is one message per spell away, not a series; none contains promotion. They are one switch. We send them only if you chose them: since 28 September 2026 by ticking the reminders box when you create an account (legal basis then: your consent), and for older accounts by the choice we offered in the app, which you could decline; every one carries an unsubscribe link, and you can turn them off in Settings (the app’s Settings, for an account made in the app).
• To tell you about the journal on vinkjournal.com, if you made your account in the Vink app: at most three emails in your first two weeks, which may mention how many trades and check-ins you logged and whether you have set a daily loss limit, read from your journal. None is sent once you have started a trial or a subscription. Legal basis: your consent, given with the box when you made your account. Every one carries an unsubscribe link, and you can turn them off in the app’s Settings.
• To run the demo at /try and send you its result — reading the screenshot you drop, and emailing you what it read, once — legal basis: performance of a contract (you asked for the demo). Your address goes on our product-update list only if you tick the second box on that form and then confirm with the button behind the link in the one email we send to ask — the demo does not check that an address belongs to the person typing it, so ticking the box alone puts it on no list. If you do not confirm, nothing else is sent. Once you have confirmed, you receive the same occasional notes about what is new in Vink that people with an account get, and we record which ones we have sent you so you never get one twice. Legal basis: your consent, withdrawable at any time through the same link, or the unsubscribe link in every such email.
• To keep the demo from being run by scripts — the Turnstile check and the throwaway-address refusal described in section 2 — legal basis: our legitimate interest in protecting the service from automated abuse, since every demo read is paid for.
• To read a chart in the app before you have an account — legal basis: performance of a contract (you asked for the read). Counting the reads of an installation and of a connection — legal basis: our legitimate interest in protecting the service from automated abuse, since every read is paid for.
• To find and fix errors — the error reports described in section 2 — legal basis: our legitimate interest in a Service that works and stays secure. The reports are not linked to you and are used for nothing else.
• Other marketing email — we do not send it unless you have asked us to. If that ever changes it will be on the basis of your consent, opt-in and withdrawable.

You need to give us your email address and either a password or a Google or Apple sign-in to create an account; without them we cannot provide the Service. Everything else you enter is up to you. You are not required by law to give us any personal data.

4. Automatic extraction from your screenshots

When you upload a screenshot for automatic extraction, the image is sent to Anthropic PBC (USA), which reads the chart to suggest the trade details. Anthropic acts as our processor under a data-processing agreement, may not use it to train its models, and deletes it from its systems within 30 days unless it must keep it longer to comply with the law or investigate misuse of its service. The transfer to the United States is covered by the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses. Crop out anything you would rather not have processed, such as an account number. If you prefer not to use AI extraction, you can enter trades manually.

If you use the account importer, the screenshot you upload is of MetaTrader’s Navigator, and it is sent to Anthropic under the same terms so it can read your account numbers, their names and the trade servers they sit under — that is its job. You can add accounts by hand instead.

Extraction only suggests values; no trade is saved until you review and confirm it. The screenshot itself is stored when you upload it, so it can go with the trade; one you never attach to a trade is deleted after a day. We do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing, including profiling, within the meaning of article 22 GDPR.

5. Who we share data with

We do not sell your personal data. It goes to three kinds of recipient: the service providers that help us run Vink, our payment provider, and, only if you choose it, an accountability peer you invite. If you sign in with Google or Apple, they take part too, as described at the end of this section.

Service providers (processors)

These handle your data only on our instructions, each under a data-processing agreement:

• Vercel Inc. (USA) — hosting, and privacy-friendly site statistics; the functions that handle your data run in Frankfurt, Germany;
• Neon (USA; part of Databricks) — our database, holding your journal, located in Frankfurt, Germany;
• Cloudflare, Inc. (USA) — storage of your screenshots, in Western Europe, and the check that the demo at /try is used by a person (Turnstile);
• Anthropic PBC (USA) — reading screenshots you submit for extraction;
• Resend (USA) — sending our emails, and receiving the ones you send to our addresses; and
• Sentry (Functional Software, Inc., USA) — holding our error reports (section 2), located in Frankfurt, Germany. Your browser and the Vink app send them to our own server, which passes them on, so Sentry does not receive your IP address.

We will update this list before we add or replace a provider.

Market prices. For your portfolio, our server asks Yahoo Finance and CoinGecko for the prices of the symbols you hold, and Yahoo Finance for the results of a symbol search you type. They receive only the symbols and the search text, from our server — never your name, your account, your IP address or how much you hold.

Our payment provider

Payment is handled through Stripe Managed Payments: your purchase is processed by Stripe’s affiliate Sold through Link, LLC(“Link”) as merchant of record. For the sale, Link is not our processor: Link and its Stripe affiliates collect your name, billing details and card data directly from you at checkout, decides and remits the applicable tax, carries out its own fraud, anti-money-laundering and identity checks, and issues your receipt and invoice in its own name. Link’s own terms state that Stripe and the businesses it sells for are independent controllers of this data, so for it Link’s privacy policy governs, not this one. You can see and manage your orders and payment methods at link.com.

Separately, when you subscribe we create a customer record for you in our own Stripe account (your email address and your Vink account ID). In that account Stripe makes available to us your email address, billing country and address, your subscription status, your invoices, and the type and last four digits of your card — never the full card number. For that information Stripe acts as our processor.

Accountability peers (people you invite)

Vink lets you invite someone to keep you accountable. Nothing is shared until you send an invitation and they accept it, and you can end the connection at any time from Accountability. While a connection is active, that person gets a read-only view which includes:

• your name and the email address on your account;
• whether you are within your daily loss limit today, and on how many of your last 10 trading days you stayed inside your day limits;
• summary statistics for the period — number of trades, win rate, profit factor, net R;
• a performance curve over time. The instrument names are removed, but the curve is drawn from your individual trades, so it shows the timing and relative size of each result;
• discipline signals — how often you followed your plan, which risk-related emotions you tagged, and how recently you reviewed;
• only if you switch it on, a short list of recent trades showing the instrument, date and time, direction, and outcome;
• only if you switch it on for that peer, your Vink score: the number and its five parts (your rules, your limits, your routine, your journal and the result);
• and, only if you switch it on for that peer, your mental journal for the period: each day’s before and after feeling (1–10), the change between them, and the emotions you picked — and, only with a second switch, the notes you typed.

Your mental journal is never shared unless you choose it for a peer. How you feel about your trading can be sensitive, so it is off for every peer, including new ones, and you switch it on for each person separately under Accountability → Visibility; we record when you did. Switching it off, or removing the peer, stops it from their next visit. Your sleep, energy and stress ratings are never part of what a peer sees, even when you share your mental journal.

Your Vink score is shared only with the peers you choose. It is off for every peer, including new ones, until you switch it on for that person under Accountability → Visibility; we record when you did. Its routine part counts whether you wrote your morning plan and debrief, never what you wrote, so sharing the score does not share your mental journal. Switching it off, or removing the peer, stops it from their next visit.

You control two further things per peer: whether they see cash amounts (with this off, they see R-multiples and percentages but no monetary figures), and the time period their view covers. A peer can send you short written messages. We email a peer when you reach your daily loss limit only if you and that peer have both switched this on — it is off unless you do. We never show a peer your screenshots, your trade notes, or your reviews.

Your peer does not need a Vink account. If they have none, opening your invitation sends a six-digit code to the address you invited — never to one typed on the page, so a forwarded invitation opens nothing. The code works for 10 minutes; entering it keeps that browser signed in to your dashboard, and only yours, for 30 days. They see exactly what a peer with an account sees, under the same settings. Your Accountability page shows which peers have no account and when they last opened your dashboard, and removing a peer ends their access on their next visit.

Google and Apple, if you sign in with them

When you sign in with Google or Apple, you do so on their page, under their own terms. They are not our processors: each decides for itself what it records about your sign-in, under its own privacy policy (Google, Apple), and they learn that you use Vink and when you sign in to it. We send them nothing about you, except that when you delete your account or remove Apple as a way to sign in, we send Apple the token described in section 2 so that Apple ends Vink’s access.

6. International transfers

Some of our providers are based in, or can access data from, the United States. Where the provider is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework — Vercel, Neon, Cloudflare, Resend, Stripe and Sentry — the transfer relies on the European Commission’s adequacy decision of 10 July 2023, and these providers’ agreements also contain the Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses. For Anthropic the transfer relies on the Standard Contractual Clauses. You can ask us for a copy of the relevant safeguards at privacy@vinkjournal.com.

7. How long we keep your data

We keep your account and journal data until you delete it — including after a subscription ends, because a lapsed account stays readable rather than being removed (Terms section 9). When you delete your account, your journal is permanently deleted — your trades, screenshots (including the image files themselves), tags, custom fields and their values, accounts, reviews, portfolio, fees and payouts, any accountability connections, any survey answers you gave, the record of which product updates you were shown, and any Google or Apple sign-in linked to your account (we also ask Apple to end Vink’s access). This happens immediately, not on a queue.

Some things deliberately outlive your account, and you should know which — and for how long:

• Support correspondence — if you have emailed our support address, that exchange is kept, with your account no longer linked to it, for 24 months after the last message in it.
• Emails we have sent you — a copy of any email we wrote to you ourselves, and the record of subscription notices such as a cancellation confirmation or a trial reminder, for 12 months, so we can investigate delivery problems and abuse. Our email provider also keeps its own short delivery log of every email, including password resets and verification links, for the period it sets.
• Invoices, accounting records and the customer record in our Stripe account — for seven years, which is the retention period Dutch tax law requires of us (fiscale bewaarplicht, art. 52 AWR). We cannot delete these on request during that period. Link’s own records are Link’s: ask Link to access or delete them. If you ask Link to delete your data, Link may also delete the copy held in our Stripe account; we keep the accounting records the law requires in our own books.
• Your email choices — each time you choose whether to receive product updates, surveys and the inactivity reminder (at sign-up, in the app, in Settings or through an unsubscribe link), we keep a record of what you chose, when, and which wording you were shown, together with your email address, for five years — also after you delete your account — so we can prove what you agreed to.
• The confirmation of your contract — that we sent it, when, and which version of these Terms it carried — for seven years, with the billing records above, as the record of what was agreed.
• A withdrawal or refund request you made — for seven years, with the billing records above, as the record that it reached us in time and was honored. If you delete your account, it is kept with your account no longer linked to it.
• An invitation you sent that was never accepted — the invited address is deleted 30 days after the invitation expires.
• Your previous email address — after you ask to change your address, the previous address and the new one are kept for 30 days, whether or not you confirmed the change, so the previous address can undo a change it did not make. Then the retention job deletes them. If you delete your account sooner, they are deleted with it.
• A peer who views without an account — their address, their loss-limit email choice, when they last viewed and their messages are kept while the connection exists, and deleted when you remove them, when they stop, or when you delete your account. A code is deleted once it is used or replaced, and is useless after 10 minutes.
• The code for making your account in the app — until it is used, and at most 15 minutes.
• An email address you gave the demo at /try — for 90 days, then deleted by the retention job, unless you create an account with it first, in which case the demo record is deleted at that moment and the account carries on under this policy. If you confirmed product updates, it is kept for as long as you stay subscribed, and deleted by the retention job within a day of your unsubscribing (or at the 90 days, if that is later).
• The read count of an installation (a chart read in the app before you have an account) — 30 days, then deleted.
• IP addresses used for rate-limiting — kept only for the length of the limit (at most 24 hours) and deleted within a day after that.
• A security log — when something looks like an attack or abuse (repeated failed sign-ins, a forged request, a flood of form submissions, reaching a usage limit), when you sign in on the phone app or with Google or Apple, and when a Google or Apple sign-in is added to your account or removed from it, and when your email address changes or a change is undone, we record what happened and when, with the IP address and, if you were signed in, your account — for 30 days, to detect and investigate abuse. Entries linked to your account are deleted when you delete it.
• Error reports — 30 days at Sentry, then deleted.
• Backups — a deleted account can persist in our database provider’s backups until they expire, which is at most 30 days.
• Hosting request logs — our host keeps a log of requests to the Service, including your IP address, for 12 hours, to run and secure it.

If you want support correspondence or the email log removed sooner, email us at privacy@vinkjournal.com and we will do it unless we are required to keep it.

8. How we protect your data

Passwords are never stored in plain text. They are salted and hashed with a deliberately slow algorithm, chosen so that a stolen database would be expensive to attack rather than merely encoded. Connections are encrypted in transit with TLS. Your screenshots are private to your account and served only through an authenticated, owner-scoped proxy, never via public links. Access to production systems is limited. You can turn on two-step login in Settings, so that signing in also needs a code from an authenticator app or a passkey; we email you whenever it changes. Two-step login applies to a sign-in with Google or Apple too.

9. Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you;
• correct inaccurate data;
• erase your data (“right to be forgotten”);
• receive a portable copy of your data;
• restrict or object to certain processing; and
• withdraw consent where processing is based on consent.

You can exercise two of these directly in the app at any time: Settings → Export my data (portability) and Settings → Delete account (erasure). Both keep working if your subscription ends and your account becomes read-only — that is a commitment in our Terms, section 9. The export is a JSON file containing your account details and settings, every trade with its notes, mental-state entries and custom-field values, the custom fields you defined, your mental journal and tilt checks, your tags, accounts (with their prop-firm rules and risk), rotations, reviews and portfolio, your accountability peers and what each one sees, your support-form messages, your survey answers, the findings you pinned or dismissed, the focuses you set from Stats or chose to try from the dashboard, your “kept it?” answers, your trading plan with the rules you marked on each trade, the Google or Apple sign-ins linked to your account (never the Apple token), any change of email address from the last 30 days, and the record of your sleep, energy and stress consent; screenshot image files are not in it, so ask us if you want those too. For any other request, contact us at privacy@vinkjournal.com.

We answer requests free of charge, without undue delay and within one month of receiving them. If a request is complex, or we receive many, we may extend this by up to two further months; we will tell you within the first month and explain why. To protect your account, we will ask you to send the request from the email address on your account, or otherwise confirm it is you; we only ask for what we need to verify your identity. If a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive, we may refuse it or charge a reasonable fee, and we will explain why. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl).

Your right to object

Where we rely on our legitimate interests — the entries that say so in section 3 — you have the right to object to that processing at any time, on grounds relating to your particular situation. If you do, we stop, unless we can show compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests or we need the data to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

For anything in the nature of direct marketing — which includes the product-update notes and the inactivity reminder in section 3 — the right is absolute and needs no reason. Use the unsubscribe link in the message, or the switch in Settings, or simply tell us, and we stop. To object to any other processing, email us at privacy@vinkjournal.com.

10. Cookies and similar storage

We store a small amount of information on your device, all of it our own (first-party) and none of it for advertising or for following you across other sites:

• Signing in — a cookie that keeps you logged in (30 days, or until you sign out), and a second one that only tells our public pages you are signed in, so they can link to your journal instead of to the sign-in page (until you close your browser; it carries no identifier of you). With two-step login on, two short-lived ones: one holding a sign-in between your password and your code (10 minutes), and one for adding or using a passkey (5 minutes). When you change two-step login or the ways you sign in, one remembering that you just confirmed your password (10 minutes). If you sign in with Google or Apple, up to three more: one while you are on their page (10 minutes), one holding their answer while you finish creating your account (15 minutes), and one noting that you just signed in again to confirm a deletion or a change to how you sign in (5 minutes).
• Viewing as an accountability peer without an account — a cookie for each dashboard you opened with an emailed code, keeping you signed in to that one view (30 days, or until you choose “Forget this device”).
• Your timezone — set automatically so that “today” means your day for the daily loss limit (1 year).
• Choices you make in the app — theme, which account and view you last used, chart and calendar settings, whether amounts are hidden, and that you dismissed a banner (up to 1 year).
• Which of our links you came through — if you arrived by one of our short links, a cookie names the platform and the post for 30 days, so an account you create in that time can be credited to it (section 2). It carries no identifier of you.
• Where your first visit came from — if you are not signed in, a cookie set on your first visit names the kind of source and its name (for example “search, google”), any campaign tag on the link, the page you landed on, and the time, for 30 days, so an account you create in that time can be credited to it (section 2). It is not changed by later visits and carries no identifier of you.
• The demo session — if you use the demo at /try, a cookie remembers which demo record is yours for 30 days, so your second read and your result mail find the same record without asking for the address again.
• In the phone app — your sign-in (for 7 days, in the phone’s secure keychain), the times of reminders you set, your theme, and whether you switched error reports off. If the app closes unexpectedly, the error report about it is kept on your phone until the app next opens and sends it (section 2). These stay on your phone; reminders are scheduled on the phone itself, so no push service is involved.
• Unsaved drafts — if you are part-way through a trade or review, a copy is kept in your browser’s local storage so a refresh does not lose it; it is deleted when you save, and after 7 days at the latest. It never leaves your device.

The demo page at /try also loads Cloudflare’s Turnstile check (section 2), which reads technical information from your browser only to tell a person from a script, as part of the security of the demo you asked to use; it is not used for advertising or to follow you across sites.

Most of this is strictly necessary for the service you asked for, or only remembers a choice you made. Four things only measure how well Vink reaches and serves people: the short-link and first-visit cookies above, Vercel’s web analytics, which we use to count visits and measure page speed, and the error reports described in section 2, for which our pages watch for errors in your browser and store nothing on your device. The analytics stores nothing on your device; to tell visits apart for one day it uses a hash of the request that Vercel discards after 24 hours, we remove anything that identifies a page of yours (such as a link’s code or a trade’s id) before a visit is counted, and we only see totals. The Dutch Telecommunications Act allows this kind of measurement of a service’s quality and effectiveness without consent when it has little or no effect on your privacy (art. 11.7a(3)(b)), so we show no consent banner. The Vink app does the same for its first day: the only thing it keeps on your phone for this is the list of screens it has already reported (section 2), and it sends no identifier with them. Its error reports work the same way as the website’s: they carry no identifier, the app keeps one on your phone only until it can send it, and you can switch them off in the app’s Settings. You can clear this storage in your browser at any time; clearing the sign-in cookie signs you out.

11. Children

You must be 18 years or older to use Vink. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18; if you believe a minor has created an account, tell us and we will delete it.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. We’ll change the “last updated” date above and, for material changes, notify you by email or in the app. If we want to use your data for a new purpose that is not compatible with the ones above, we will tell you before we start, and ask for your consent where the law requires it.

13. Contact

Questions about this policy or your data? Email us at privacy@vinkjournal.com.