RobotVersus is a robotics catalogue run by a small operation, not a company with a privacy department. For the purposes of the GDPR, the operator below is the data controller for everything described on this page.
Privacy mail is read and answered by a person. There is no ticketing system to escalate through.
You can read every robot, manufacturer, comparison, report and article without an account, and we do not create one for you in the background. No profile is built from catalogue reading alone. Google Analytics identifiers are set only if you grant statistics consent in Cookiebot.
Two things still happen at the infrastructure level, because a website cannot serve a page without them:
We keep a first-party page-view counter on robot, manufacturer and article pages — a single integer per page, incremented after the page loads, with short-lived per-address deduplication so refreshes do not inflate the number. Raw totals are not shown on the site; pages above the catalogue average for their type may show a Popular badge. The counter is not joined to accounts and is not used to build a browsing profile. Separately, Google Analytics may run if you grant statistics in Cookiebot — see below and the cookies page.
If you grant statistics consent in Cookiebot, we load Google Analytics (gtag, measurement ID G-QCJJPLZKVY) so we can see which pages are read and how traffic arrives. Until statistics is granted, the Google tag is not loaded and no Google Analytics cookies are set by us. Declining statistics leaves the catalogue fully usable.
Everything below is data you hand over on purpose, by using something. Nothing here is inferred, bought or enriched from an outside source.
| When | What is stored |
|---|---|
| You open a robot, manufacturer or article page | A page-view counter for that page is incremented at most once per address in a short window. Only the running total is stored; the address itself is not written to the database for this purpose. |
| You create an account | Email address, a display name if you give one, your password as a salted scrypt hash, whether the address has been confirmed, and the dates the record was created and last changed. |
| You sign in | A session record: a hash of the session token, its expiry, and the IP address and browser user-agent of the sign-in. The last two are the sign-in origin, kept as account-security evidence and shown back to you in your data export. |
| You save a robot or a comparison | Which robots, any name you gave the comparison, and when you saved it. |
| You write a review | Your rating and text, the language you wrote in, its moderation status, and the IP address and user-agent of the submission as abuse evidence. If a moderator approves it, the review and your display name become public on the robot page. |
| You subscribe to the newsletter | Your email address, subscription status, a confirmation token and a permanent unsubscribe token, your language, and — as consent evidence — the IP address, user-agent and the version of the wording that was next to the subscribe button. |
| You use the contact form | The topic, your name, email address, message, and the IP address and user-agent of the submission. |
| You submit a robot as a manufacturer | Company name, website, country, your name and email address, the models you want listed, your message, and the IP address and user-agent of the submission. |
| You reset a password or confirm an address | A hash of the single-use link token and its expiry, so the link can be checked once and then spent. |
Two things stay in your browser and never reach us: the robots in your comparison tray and your recent searches. They live in local storage, are not sent with requests, and the cookie page lists them by name.
Each purpose has one legal basis under Article 6 of the GDPR. Where the basis is consent, you can withdraw it and the processing stops; where it is our legitimate interest, you can object and we will weigh it.
| Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Running your account, keeping you signed in, and keeping your saved robots and comparisons across devices | Performance of the service you asked for — Article 6(1)(b) |
| Confirming your email address and letting you reset a forgotten password | Performance of the service you asked for — Article 6(1)(b) |
| Sending you the newsletter | Your consent, given by confirming the link we email you — Article 6(1)(a) |
| Answering a message you send us through the contact form or as a manufacturer | Our legitimate interest in replying to correspondence you started — Article 6(1)(f) |
| Publishing and moderating reviews, and keeping submission evidence against abuse | Our legitimate interest in a catalogue that carries usable community input without becoming a spam target — Article 6(1)(f) |
| Recording the sign-in origin, rate-limiting authentication, and keeping server logs | Our legitimate interest in keeping accounts and the service secure and available — Article 6(1)(f) |
| Audience measurement with Google Analytics | Your consent, given via Cookiebot (statistics category) — Article 6(1)(a) |
Google Analytics, when statistics consent is granted in Cookiebot, still uses Google’s own client identifiers. That is audience measurement under consent, not advertising on this site.
Providers that touch personal data, each doing one job under a data-processing arrangement, each acting on our instructions only.
| Provider | What it does | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | DNS, TLS and protection in front of the site. Sees request metadata, including your IP address, on the way through. | Global network operated from the United States |
| Resend | Sends the transactional email: address confirmation, password reset, newsletter confirmation and our own notification when you use the contact form. | United States |
| Sentry | Receives application error reports so we can fix faults. A report can include the URL, browser or server environment, and an IP address. It is not used for analytics, advertising or profiling, and we do not attach account emails to it by default. | European Union (ingest.de.sentry.io) |
| Google Analytics | Optional audience measurement (page views and basic traffic). Loaded only after you grant statistics consent in Cookiebot. Sees pages you open, your approximate region, device and browser metadata, and a client identifier Google stores. | United States (Google LLC), under Google’s data-processing terms |
| Cookiebot (Usercentrics) | Cookie consent banner and cookie declaration. Records which cookie categories you accept or decline and helps block non-essential tags until you choose. | European Union / Usercentrics infrastructure |
The database, the search index and uploaded media run on infrastructure we operate rather than in a managed cloud database service, so the data footprint is deliberately small. Cloudflare, Resend, Sentry, Cookiebot and — when statistics consent is granted — Google may process data outside the European Economic Area (or receive it in the EEA and transfer copies); those transfers rest on the standard contractual clauses in their data-processing terms.
Nobody else receives your data. We disclose it to an authority only where the law requires it, and we would tell you unless we are forbidden to.
| Data | Kept |
|---|---|
| Account, saved robots, saved comparisons | Until you delete the account, which you can do yourself at any time. |
| Session records, including sign-in origin | Sessions expire on their own and stop working. The record of the sign-in stays with the account as security history and goes when the account goes. |
| Reviews | Until you delete your account or we remove the review. Deleting the account removes your reviews from the site as well. |
| Newsletter subscription | While you are subscribed. After you unsubscribe we keep the address with its opt-out flag so a later import cannot quietly re-add you, and we clear the consent metadata when the matching account is deleted. |
| Contact and manufacturer submissions | While the matter is open, and afterwards as correspondence. Ask us to delete a message and we will. |
| Password-reset and confirmation tokens | Until used or expired; both are hashes with a short lifetime. |
| Server access logs | Until the server rotates them — weeks, not months. |
| Rate-limit counters | Minutes. They hold a number against an IP address and are never written to the database. |
Two of these are buttons rather than requests, because a right you have to ask for is a right somebody can forget to honour.
None of this costs anything and we do not ask why. Requests that are not a button go to [email protected] and are answered within a month, usually the same week.
No arrangement is perfect. If a breach affects your data, we will tell you and the relevant authority within 72 hours of finding out, and we will say what we know rather than what sounds best.
The catalogue is written for engineers, buyers and researchers, and it is not directed at children. We do not knowingly keep accounts for anyone under 16. If you believe a child has created one, write to us and we will delete it without asking for proof of anything.
The version and effective date at the top of this page move together, and only for a substantive change. Where processing rests on your consent, we record which version of the wording was on screen when you gave it, so an old consent is never silently treated as agreement to a new one.
Material changes are announced in the newsletter as well as dated here.
Anything about this notice, or about data we hold on you, goes to [email protected] or through the contact page.
Something here unclear or wrong? Tell us and we will fix the wording rather than defend it.