Last updated: 20 October 2026 · Applies to the iOS app “The Collectors Finest” and this website.
The short version. This app sells nothing, shows no ad banners, and uses no third-party tracking or analytics. There is no advertising identifier, no advertising profile, and nothing is passed to data brokers. You can use the app without signing in and without giving a name or an email address. Everything stored about you can be exported and deleted from inside the app at any time.
The controller under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is:
Johannes Kloda
Rissener Landstr. 78
22587 Hamburg, Germany
Email: contact@thecollectorsfinest.com
No data protection officer has been appointed; the legal requirements for appointing one (§ 38 BDSG) are not met.
On first launch the app automatically creates an anonymous account on our server. That account is a random access token — it contains no name, no email address and no advertising identifier. The token is stored in the iOS keychain on your device and sent with each request; our server only holds a one-way hash of it.
Purpose: without an account we could not tie your collection, your purchases and your photos to you, nor protect them from others. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (performance of the user relationship).
When the account is created we also store your IP address once, to limit automated mass creation of accounts. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; our legitimate interest is protecting the service from abusive automation.
| Data | Purpose | Legal basis | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| Access token (hashed), time of account creation | attributing and protecting your data | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| IP address at account creation | protection against mass creation | Art. 6(1)(f) | until account deletion |
| Alias and avatar, if you set one | how you appear to other collectors | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Purchases: card, search text, price, currency, date | your personal purchase log | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Registered cards (“pulls”): card, serial number, grade, photo | your collection | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Card photos you upload | the shown image of that card | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Uploaded clips (“Pulls feed”): video, preview image, box, linked cards, time | your post in the feed | Art. 6(1)(b) | until you delete the clip, at the latest at account deletion |
| Comments and reactions under clips | conversation in the feed | Art. 6(1)(b) | until you delete them, at the latest at account deletion |
| Showcase entries (with alias or anonymous) | the public ranking | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Collectors you follow or block | your lists | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Price alerts: search pattern, maximum price, note | notifying you of matches | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Likes on cards and lists | the count on the card, the cards you saved | Art. 6(1)(b) | until you remove the like, at the latest at account deletion |
| Lists: title, cards, public or private setting | wishlists and collecting goals | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Weekly goal counters: day, type of action, count | showing your weekly goals | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Players you picked during onboarding | cards and notifications about your players | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Bids: card, amount, currency, note | a combined community price on the card | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Sightings you report: card, serial number, optionally a link to where you saw it | the collector registry; with a link, after our review, a post in the feed | Art. 6(1)(b) | the serial number stays as catalogue knowledge; the connection to you and the link are removed at account deletion |
| Notification setting: allowed or not, which kinds are on | counting how many accounts use notifications | Art. 6(1)(f) | until account deletion |
| Time up to which you saw “Since your last visit” | showing what is new since then | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Your players for “Since your last visit”: player name from the manufacturer checklists, origin (scan, onboarding pick, followed, search), number of searches and time of the last one; no search text | showing what sold and what was newly listed for your players since your last visit | Art. 6(1)(b) | until account deletion |
| Counters for “Since your last visit”: day, whether the card showed anything, number of views and taps | counting whether the card is used and how often it is empty | Art. 6(1)(f) | until account deletion |
| Reports: reported content, reason | reviewing reported content (Art. 16 DSA) | Art. 6(1)(c) | until the reporter’s account is deleted |
| Voluntary training samples (photo of a card surface with your verdict) | improving surface detection | Art. 6(1)(a) | until account deletion |
| Server logs: IP address, time, requested address, status code, user agent | operation, debugging, defence against attacks | Art. 6(1)(f) | see section 7 |
Providing this data is neither required by law nor by contract. You do not have to provide anything — but without an account the app cannot technically function, and without the respective entries the related features (collection, purchase log, alerts) are not available. No further disadvantage arises for you.
This is the most important section of this policy, which is why it is spelled out:
Your purchases and prices paid, your registered cards including grades, your price alerts, your following and block lists, your reports, your private lists, your weekly goals and the players you picked. Of your likes and bids, others only see numbers without names: how often a card was liked, and a price combined from several bids.
The app never shows real names. Only the pseudonym is ever public.
When you register a card, an ownership code is created (e.g. “K7M2-P9XR-4TWB”). It is computed from your registration photo and the moment of registration, and it proves that this card was photographed by you at that date. The code itself reveals neither your alias nor the card’s value nor anything else you own. It only becomes public if you share it yourself — via the share button or a shared seal image; anyone who knows the code can look up the registration date and card description on our verification page. For cards registered before this feature existed, we generated the code retroactively from the original registration date and the photo stored at that time — the date is your real registration date; only the code itself is new. When you delete your account, your ownership codes are deleted with it; links you already shared then resolve to nothing.
The computation runs on your iPhone. Centering measurement, text recognition on the card and edge analysis all happen there. We see neither the calculation nor its intermediate steps, and a photo you take only to measure and then discard never reaches us.
But when you add the card to your collection, two things reach us: the photo of the card and the result of the measurement, that is the grade as a range. Without both there would be no collection that outlives your device, and no reference image of the card. If a photo isn't good enough for a dependable judgement, no grade is stored — and then we transmit none.
Until 5 August 2026 this section claimed these results were not transmitted. That was wrong, and we found it ourselves while auditing our own data flow. The section now says what actually happens.
Kept locally on the device: your access token in the keychain, your recent search terms, a cache of your purchases, your binder ordering, your selected sports, the players you picked and follow, your notification settings and your favourite card for the Dynamic Island. To keep the app fast, the last successfully loaded feed, drops list and binder state are also cached on the device, along with card images you've viewed. All of it is removed when you delete your account or uninstall the app.
When a card is recognised, your device reads the text on the card itself (on-device text recognition). Since version 2.2 the app sends these text lines — player name, set, number, print run, never the photo — to our server, which matches them against our player database and returns the correct spelling. The lines are not stored.
If you upload a clip to the Pulls feed, the video file reaches us. We re-encode it on our server to 720p and create a preview image; capture location and camera metadata are removed in the process. The original file is deleted after re-encoding.
Notifications. If you allowed notifications, the app asks our server, whenever iOS briefly wakes it in the background, whether there is a reason: new cards of your players, likes on your lists, new listings from your wishlist, or sightings of your cards. It sends the names of the players you follow and the time of the last check. The server keeps only the player names, as your players for “Since your last visit” (section 3); as part of the requested address they can appear in the server log (section 7). The app sends the same names when it shows what is new since your last visit at the top of Home. This notification is created by your iPhone itself, at most one a day and in the evening between 18:30 and 21:00; on a release day you set a reminder for, that reminder at 9:00 is the notification of the day. We use no push service. The app reports to our server whether you allowed notifications and which kinds are on, so we can count how many accounts use them.
Player picks. You follow the players you pick during onboarding in the app. The selection is also sent to our server so that the “First steps” card can mark the step as done and we can count how many new accounts complete onboarding.
Camera — only when you scan or photograph a card. The image is measured on the device; it is only uploaded if you explicitly save or upload it.
Photo library — only when you pick an image yourself. The app receives only the image you selected, not access to the rest of your library.
Notifications — only if you agree. You can turn off individual kinds in the app’s settings, or all of them in iOS Settings.
Background App Refresh — so the app can check in the background whether there is a reason for a notification. You can turn it off in iOS Settings.
Live Activities — for your favourite card in the Dynamic Island and on the Lock Screen. The display is created on the device; no data is sent to us for it.
Local network — used exclusively for a developer mode that lets the operator test the app against their own machine on the same Wi-Fi. It is not used in normal operation.
Before any image leaves your device we strip its metadata (EXIF), in particular the location and time of capture.
Our server and the web server in front of it log every request with IP address, time, requested address, status code and user agent. For searches, the search term can be part of the requested address and therefore appear in the log; the same applies to the names of the players you follow when the app checks for notifications. The purpose is technical operation, finding faults and defending against attacks; the legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR with our legitimate interest in a functioning and secure service.
Logs are overwritten on a rolling basis and deleted after 30 days at the latest. These logs are not combined with your account.
We back up the databases hourly so that a defect does not cost you your collection. These backups roll over: hourly states for 48 hours, daily states for 30 days. If you delete your account, your data disappears from live operation immediately; it falls out of the backups as those periods expire. Should a backup ever have to be restored, deletions made in the meantime are re-applied.
The server is operated at Hetzner Online GmbH, Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen, Germany, in the Nuremberg data centre. Hetzner processes the data solely on our behalf; a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR is in place. The data does not leave Germany.
You may voluntarily sign in with your Apple ID. We request neither your name nor your email address — the sign-in only serves as a confirmation towards your device and is recorded locally only. Nothing is transmitted to our server. The provider is Apple Distribution International Ltd., Hollyhill, Cork, Ireland.
The app displays images from public eBay listings. Those images are loaded directly from eBay’s servers. In doing so, eBay learns your IP address and technical details of your device — just as if you had opened an eBay page. We transmit no data from your account to eBay; links to listings carry only our partner ID (section 10). When you open a listing you leave our app for eBay; from that point eBay’s privacy policy applies. eBay also processes data in the United States.
The legal basis for loading those images is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR — without the image the market view would lose its purpose.
Obtaining the app itself happens through the App Store. What data Apple processes in that context is outside our control; Apple’s privacy policy applies.
There are no other recipients. In particular we use no analytics, crash-reporting or advertising services, and we pass no data to third parties.
The app contains no ad banners and no advertising network. It does not ask for permission to track you across apps and uses no advertising identifier (IDFA). No third-party packages or SDKs are embedded at all.
Partner links to eBay. Since August 2026 we take part in the eBay Partner Network. Links to eBay listings therefore carry our partner ID and are labelled as an ad in the app. If you buy on eBay after such a click, we may receive a commission; the price does not change for you. The ID only identifies us as a partner, not you: we attach no account, device or advertising identifier. What eBay collects after the click is governed by eBay’s privacy policy.
Until 12 September 2026 this section said we earned nothing from these links. That had no longer been true since 6 August 2026; we found it while checking our own documents.
All data named in section 3 is stored until you delete your account. There is no retention beyond that; we deliberately did not introduce automatic deletion periods for individual data types, so that your collection does not vanish unasked.
Delete your account: in the app under Settings → Delete account & data. We distinguish between what describes you and what describes a card.
Everything that points to you is deleted: your account, your profile, your alias, your avatar, your Showcase entries, your clips including the video files, your comments and reactions, your following and block lists, your reports, your price alerts, your likes, your lists, your bids, your weekly goal counters and the players you picked. Your access token becomes invalid, and all local data on the device is removed.
The card observations remain — that a card was pulled, which copy has been sighted, what price a card changed hands for, and card photos you contributed. These records are fully severed from you: the link to your account is removed irreversibly, and because the account row itself is deleted there is no path back to you — not for us either. They are therefore anonymous data within the meaning of Recital 26 GDPR, to which the right to erasure under Art. 17 does not apply. For sightings you reported in the app, we also remove the link you gave.
Why we do this: the population registry (“7 of 10 copies of this card are known”) and the price picture exist only collectively. If every departure took those observations along, the remaining collectors would lose what they contributed to. The photos remain for the same reason: an uploaded card photo is — as described in section 3 — the publicly shown image of that card; were it to vanish, the card would be imageless for everyone else. Capture location and camera data are stripped at upload time; the image shows a card and carries nothing that leads back to a person.
Export your data: in the app under Settings → Export my data. You receive everything stored about you as a JSON file.
You have the right of access (Art. 15), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction of processing (Art. 18) and data portability (Art. 20 GDPR). Access and portability you can exercise yourself right away using the export function; for anything else an informal email to us is enough.
Where we base processing on your consent (voluntary training samples), you may withdraw it at any time. The lawfulness of processing carried out before the withdrawal remains unaffected.
You have the right to object at any time, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to processing of your data that we base on a legitimate interest under Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (in our case: the IP address at account creation, the server logs, your notification setting and the counters of the Home card). We will then stop processing that data unless we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds which override your interests (Art. 21 GDPR). An informal email suffices.
You may lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. The authority responsible for us is:
Der Hamburgische Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit
Ludwig-Erhard-Str. 22, 20459 Hamburg, Germany
Phone +49 40 428 54-4040 · mailbox@datenschutz.hamburg.de
You may instead turn to the supervisory authority of your place of residence or of your workplace (Art. 77 GDPR).
No automated decision-making or profiling producing legal effects concerning you within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR takes place. The app does compute assessments about cards (such as a centering range or a price range), but those concern objects, not people.
The app is not directed at children. For the optional sign-in with Apple you confirm that you are at least 16 years old. Use without that sign-in is equally possible; it creates the anonymous account described in section 2, which contains no information about your person.
As the app develops we will adapt this policy. The version published here, with the date given above, is the applicable one. We will point out substantial changes in the app.
