Privacy

Application privacy notice

How Solo + AI Berlin handles personal data for this website, applications, and the founding pilot.

Last updated: 19 September 2026

1. Controller and contact

The controller is DataTalks.Club, Schonensche Straße 13, 10439 Berlin, Germany, represented by Alexey Grigorev. Full operator details are in the Impressum. For questions about this notice or your data, write to alexey@datatalks.club.

There is no appointed data protection officer.

2. What we collect and why

The application asks for your name, email address, general location, an optional public work link, project stage, descriptions of your business and AI work, what you would bring to the group, optional notes, and the participation acknowledgements you tick. We use this to assess fit, organise the pilot, match a Stripe payment to your application, and contact you about the decision, venue, and practical details.

Please do not include confidential client information, special-category data, or sensitive personal details. If you do, we will delete that content where we reasonably can.

Your written answers are stored before you leave for Stripe, including if you later abandon payment. Stripe receives a random application reference, not your written answers. You enter payment details only on Stripe. This site records the payment reference, amount, currency, and status needed to reconcile the payment with the application. We do not collect card numbers.

3. Legal bases

• Article 6(1)(b) GDPR — taking steps at your request before a contract, and performing the pilot contract if you are accepted: application review, payment matching, confirmation, venue information, and the private group chat.
• Article 6(1)(c) GDPR — tax, accounting, and commercial-record duties that apply to the operator.
• Article 6(1)(f) GDPR — operating a secure website: short-lived abuse-prevention records (a keyed hash of the connecting address), application-reference integrity, and webhook verification. The interest is preventing spam and fraudulent payments; it does not override your rights to a fair application.

Ticking the privacy box records that you have read this notice. It is not a blanket consent for marketing. There is no marketing list and no newsletter signup on this site.

4. Hosting, Stripe, and other recipients

The website and application database run on Amazon Web Services in the EU (Ireland, eu-west-1). AWS acts as a processor for hosting, object storage used in deployment, and the application table.

Payments are processed by Stripe. Depending on how you pay, the relevant Stripe entity is typically Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. (Dublin) and, where needed, Stripe, Inc. Stripe acts as an independent controller for the payment data you enter on checkout, and as a processor for the limited reconciliation data we receive (session id, payment intent, amount, currency, status, and the application reference). See Stripe’s privacy policy.

If a private group chat is opened for accepted participants, the organiser will name the platform and its privacy information before anyone is added. No chat account is created by submitting this form.

We do not sell personal data. We do not use advertising networks, analytics pixels, or social-media tracking on this site.

5. International transfers

AWS processing for this site is configured in the EU. Stripe may transfer payment data outside the EEA where necessary to process the payment, using the safeguards Stripe publishes (including Standard Contractual Clauses). Opening Stripe checkout is a transfer you initiate by continuing to payment.

6. Storage and retention

• Unpaid or abandoned applications: deleted or anonymised within 90 days of submission.
• Declined applications and applications we cannot place: deleted or anonymised within 90 days of the decision, except payment records we must keep.
• Accepted participants: kept for the pilot and follow-up, then deleted or reduced to the minimum needed, by 31 December 2027, unless a longer statutory period applies.
• Invoices, payment identifiers, and tax-relevant records: kept for the statutory German retention period (generally up to 10 years).
• Abuse-prevention hashes: at most 15 minutes.
• Server logs from the host: as retained by AWS for the deployed service, used only for security and debugging, not for profiling.

7. Cookies and similar technology

This landing page does not set analytics or marketing cookies and does not persist form answers in browser storage. Stripe’s checkout page on buy.stripe.com / checkout.stripe.com is Stripe’s service and may use cookies that Stripe requires to take payment. Returning from checkout with ?checkout=returned only shows a status message; it does not prove payment and does not store a cookie.

8. Automated decisions

Fit is reviewed by a person. Payment matching is automated against the Stripe webhook and the €59 net + 19% VAT / EUR checks; a mismatch is flagged for manual review. No automated decision produces legal or similarly significant effects without human review.

9. Your rights

You may request access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection (for legitimate-interest processing), and data portability, within the limits of Articles 15–21 GDPR. Write to alexey@datatalks.club. You may complain to the Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit, Alt-Moabit 59-61, 10555 Berlin, datenschutz-berlin.de, or another competent supervisory authority.

Name, email, location, project answers, and the required acknowledgements are needed to complete an application. You can close the page without submitting. After you pay, some records must be kept for tax and contract purposes even if you later ask for erasure of the rest.