Privacy

The data controller is VšĮ “Volnyja”, a non-profit organisation registered in the Republic of Lithuania. We work under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Lithuanian law.

For anything about your data, write to volnyja@volnyja.com. No data is stored on the territory of Belarus; everyone on the team is abroad.

The site has four forms. Each collects only what it needs for its purpose, and each asks for your consent before it is sent.

• Help request — a name or pseudonym, a way to contact you, and whatever you choose to tell us about your situation, including health and persecution. This is what we need to understand how to help and to reach you.
• Mentor application — name, role, skills, Telegram and email, and how you heard of us. To review the application and invite you to training.
• Response-volunteer application — name, skills, Telegram, a social-media link for verification, and the country you are in. To review the application and understand where you can help.
• Anonymous feedback — only the text you write. We add neither your IP address nor anything about your device, and we ask you not to include names.

A donation through the form on the «Support» page sends the amount, the frequency and your email address to the initiative's payment service, which opens a Stripe checkout. Only Stripe sees your card. Buy Me a Coffee and Patreon are separate services with their own privacy rules.

If you email us, we keep the message for as long as it takes to answer and see the matter through.

Consultations with specialists are booked through a separate Google Form. Those requests do not pass through this site, and Google's privacy policy applies to them.

Forms are sent to our own server and from there to our tables in Airtable (USA). Each form goes into its own table. The site can only add new records: it cannot read them, nor the team's working tables. Only the people on the team who need the data for their work see it. We do not pass it to third parties and we do not sell it.

The site is hosted on Cloudflare. To serve a page and protect it from automated requests, Cloudflare processes the technical details of the request — IP address, browser type. We do not write your IP address into our tables; rate limiting uses a hash only in server memory. Some forms carry a Cloudflare Turnstile check that tells a person from a bot without a captcha. Cookie use by these services follows Cloudflare’s rules.

Links from our site do not tell other sites which page you came from.

The period for each form is written into the site itself, and the site stamps every record with its deletion date. A person on the team deletes the records whose date has passed:

• Help request — 180 days from submission.
• Mentor or volunteer application — 365 days.
• Anonymous feedback — 30 days.

If we take your case on, the details needed to help are kept separately, for as long as the help lasts. If you ask us to delete your data sooner, we do.

You choose analytics and advertising separately. Each service loads only with consent for its purpose. The volnyja_consent cookie keeps a random decision ID, the policy version, your choices and the decision date for 365 days, so we do not ask again.

Each decision is sent to our server for recording in Cloudflare: a random decision ID, the policy version, the choice for each purpose and the recording time. The record contains no IP address, browser details or visited pages. We keep it for 365 days.

The two consent purposes:

• Analytics — Google Analytics shows us which pages are read, where visitors come from and from which countries. Sets the cookies _ga and _ga_… for up to two years. Outside the EU, UK and Switzerland, Google uses the IP address to derive coarse location, then discards the raw IP address.
• Advertising — Meta Pixel helps show Volnyja’s adverts on Facebook and Instagram to people who have visited the site, and measure their results. Sets the cookie _fbp for 90 days; Meta may set its own cookies on its own domains. The pixel runs only on pages for supporters, mentors and volunteers. This choice also allows Google Analytics advertising features when you enable analytics.

The help-request page and anonymous feedback page never load analytics or advertising, even with consent.

The reports on the «About us» page are plain links to Instagram. Instagram opens only when you follow a link.

You can change your choices at any time. Withdrawing consent stops the relevant service and removes its cookies on our domain. If the service has already loaded, the page reloads; unsaved form answers are lost. Your choices do not limit access to the site.

At any time you can:

• find out what data we hold about you and receive a copy;
• ask us to correct or delete it;
• restrict its processing or object to it;
• withdraw consent — this does not affect the lawfulness of what was done before;
• lodge a complaint with the Lithuanian State Data Protection Inspectorate (Valstybinė duomenų apsaugos inspekcija).

Writing to volnyja@volnyja.com is enough. We answer within a month at the latest.