The protection of your privacy is extremely important to us. This data protection declaration provides information on how and for what purpose we process personal data and explains the rights to which you are entitled. We are aware of how important personal data is to our users and we uphold all German and European data protection provisions.
Ecosia is committed to protecting your privacy and personal data. In order to provide essential services like language settings and spam protection (see below), we collect your IP address for no more than seven days before deleting it. We never sell or purchase personal data, create a personal profile of you or store your personal search history.
We use elements of Microsoft Bing’s search index to deliver results. We never communicate IP addresses along with search queries. We only send IP addresses to Microsoft in obfuscated form, meaning we remove parts of the IP address when we store it. For example 192.168.152.223 becomes 192.168.XXX.XXX. These obfuscated addresses cannot be linked either to you or your searches, and are deleted from Microsoft’s system after 90 days. Microsoft uses the IP address for spam protection. For more information, please refer to their Privacy Statement.
Personalized search is optional, and you can change your preference via our settings menu any time. If you use personalized search results, you get a unique identifier assigned from Microsoft Bing, which can tailor your search results based on your previous search history. This data gets deleted after 18 months. For further details, please refer to Microsoft’s Privacy Policy.
In some countries outside our core markets and contract areas, namely in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, partner with Yahoo in order to deliver search results to you. When you search with Ecosia, Yahoo and their partners receive your IP address along with your search query, and delete both after no more than 90 days. For further information, please refer to Yahoo’s Privacy Policy.
To keep out eavesdroppers, we only allow secure HTTPS connections to Ecosia and don’t use external tracking tools (see below).
We do not use Google Analytics nor any other external tracking tool. Instead, we use a self-hosted, safe and fully encrypted web analysis tool that doesn’t track any personal data. You can also opt-out of any tracking by selecting “do not track” in your browser settings.
Since we do not store any personal data, we also do not (and cannot) sell your data to other parties. Nor do we buy personal data from others.
Spam attacks are expensive and can divert significant funds from our tree planting efforts. Therefore, we run our own spam protection intelligence, but also seek help from the spam protection specialist Cloudflare. Internally, we keep IP addresses for a maximum of 7 days before they are either anonymized or deleted. Cloudflare receives anonymized and obfuscated IP addresses, most of which are deleted within days. Only a small sample of anonymized metadata remains with Cloudflare for up to 12 months. This sample is retained in order to diagnose malicious activity and improve the effectiveness of security measures. For further information please refer to Cloudflare’s privacy policy.
To improve our browser apps, we collect usage statistics such as the name of the device, its manufacturer, model, operating system number and app number or SDK version.
We use a 3rd party service called “App Center” to collect and analyze crash reports of our Android app. This includes data that helps us fix bugs, such as app number, device model, and operating system.
For more information on how “App Center” handles your data, see Microsoft’s Privacy Statement.
To plant more trees, we use external ad platforms to reach new users. On first installing the Ecosia extension new desktop users see a page that pings back that you have installed Ecosia to our advertising partners. To protect the privacy of your queries this page is not connected to our search service. This page allows us to know which ads helped us plant trees, and we can stop spending money on those that don’t. We regularly test new platforms and remove those whose services are not effective. Currently we are using, or planning to test, Google Ads, Apple’s App Store, Facebook, Microsoft Bing, Twitch and TikTok.
We never share your search data with ad services. You can see how much we spend on spreading the word in our monthly financial reports.
You have the following rights with respect to your personal data:
- Right to information
- Right to correction or deletion
- Right to restriction of processing
- Right to refuse processing
- Right to data transferability
- In addition, you have the right to complain to a data protection supervisory authority regarding our processing of your personal data.
In relation to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the organisation responsible is:
Ecosia GmbH, Gerichtstraße 23, 13347 Berlin, Germany
Our Data Protection Officer can be contacted at privacy@ecosia.org or our postal address with the addition of "data protection".
Last modified: August 1st, 2022