Data Protection & GDPR

1. Who we are (Data Controller)

Votira is a survey-validation platform for startups. For the personal data you provide as an account holder, Votira acts as the data controller. For survey responses you collect from your own respondents, you are the controller and Votira acts as a data processor on your behalf. You can reach our data-protection contact at privacy@votira.app. The service is reachable at https://votira.co.

2. What personal data we process

We deliberately collect the minimum data needed to run the service:

Category	Data	Why
Account	Email, display name, password (stored only as a bcrypt hash), or OAuth provider identifier (Google / GitHub).	Create and secure your account.
Login history	Timestamp, IP address and an estimated location for your last 5 sign-ins.	Account-security visibility (shown only to you in Settings).
Survey content	Questions, settings, optional uploaded images and a custom domain you configure.	Deliver the core product.
Survey responses	Answers plus any respondent fields you choose to collect (name, email, company, role, location). A coarse de-duplication signal may be derived from the respondent's request.	Provide results and analytics to you, the survey owner.
Billing	Stripe customer identifier, subscription status and invoice metadata. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach Votira's servers.	Process subscriptions and show your invoices.
Operational logs	Audit events (action, user identifier, timestamp). Sanitised to exclude passwords, tokens and other secrets.	Security, compliance and troubleshooting.

3. Legal bases for processing

Performance of a contract — operating your account, surveys and billing.
Legitimate interests — securing accounts (login history), preventing abuse (rate limiting) and improving reliability, balanced against your rights.
Legal obligation — retaining invoice/tax records where required.
Consent — where you, as a survey owner, collect personal data from respondents, you are responsible for obtaining their consent.

4. Where your data is stored and who processes it

Votira runs on Microsoft Azure. We use the following sub-processors, each engaged under appropriate data-processing terms:

Sub-processor	Purpose
Azure App Service	Application hosting.
Azure Cosmos DB	Primary database for accounts, surveys, responses and subscriptions.
Azure Blob Storage	Uploaded survey images and data exports.
Azure OpenAI Service	AI-assisted survey generation. Prompts are processed within Azure and not used to train foundation models.
Azure Cache for Redis	Rate limiting and abuse prevention.
Azure Application Insights	Telemetry and audit logging.
Stripe	Payment processing and invoicing (PCI-DSS compliant).
Google & GitHub OAuth	Optional single sign-on, only if you choose it.
ip-api.com	Best-effort, coarse location estimate for your login-history display. Only an IP address is sent; lookups are skipped for private addresses.

Some sub-processors may process data outside the European Economic Area. Where they do, transfers are protected by Standard Contractual Clauses or an equivalent safeguard.

5. How long we keep it

Account, survey and response data is retained for as long as your account is active. Login history is capped at your 5 most recent sign-ins. Account deletion disables access immediately and removes personal account data, surveys, responses, and uploaded files in the background. Personal subscriptions are canceled without automatic refunds. Invoice records may be retained by Stripe to meet legal/tax obligations.

Organization owners must explicitly close their organization and its additional licenses before deleting their account. Shared personas and pools created by other departing members remain with the organization without creator attribution.

Audit records are retained under the service retention policy after account or organization deletion. The account audit trail defaults to 90 days; Application Insights and provider-managed backups follow their separately configured retention periods.

If your free trial ends and you do not activate a paid plan, the account switches to read-only and is kept for a further 30 days. Once those 30 days have passed, the account and all data associated with it — surveys, responses, uploaded files and AI analyses — are permanently and irreversibly deleted, with no obligation on us to notify you or to restore them. Activating a paid plan at any point within that window keeps everything intact; if you want to preserve your results, export them before the window closes.

6. How we protect your data

Passwords are stored only as salted bcrypt hashes — never in plain text.
All traffic is served over HTTPS/TLS.
Session cookies are HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax and Secure in production.
CSRF protection on state-changing forms and a signature-verified Stripe webhook.
Rate limiting to mitigate brute-force and abuse.
Audit logs are sanitised to never contain passwords, tokens or other secrets.

7. Your rights under the GDPR

You have the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict and port your personal data, and to object to certain processing. You can exercise most of these directly in the app:

Access & portability — view your data in your dashboard and export survey results.
Rectification — update your profile and survey content at any time in Settings.
Erasure — request permanent account deletion from Settings → Danger Zone, subject to the organization and audit-retention rules above. You may register a new account with the same identity after deletion is complete.

For any request you cannot complete in-app, contact privacy@votira.app. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data-protection supervisory authority.

8. Changes to this notice

We may update this notice as the service evolves. Material changes will be reflected here with an updated revision date.

Data Protection & GDPR Notice