Privacy policy

The controller for data processing on this site is the provider named in the legal notice. No data protection officer has been appointed, as the legal requirements for one are not met.

To the legal notice

This site runs an anonymous survey of collectors and dealers on the European trading card and sports card market. Results are published only in aggregate — never individual answers.

Alongside your answers we store:

• —the answers themselves and the language you chose
• —how far you got, when you started and finished, and how long you took
• —which link brought you here (channel and campaign markers from the address bar) and the referring page
• —the device class — only “mobile”, “tablet” or “desktop”, not the full browser identifier
• —quality markers, for example when an answer was submitted unusually quickly

None of this contains your name, and none of it lets us identify you.

In the dealer questionnaire this comes with a caveat: country, type of business, company size and revenue band together may make an individual business identifiable. We therefore publish only aggregated figures from this questionnaire and never report a group with fewer than 30 respondents separately.

Your IP address is never stored in plain text. We derive an irreversible check value from it that also includes a value which changes daily. This lets us check submissions from the same day for unusual clustering, while making them impossible to link from the next day onwards. The sole purpose is to prevent abuse and multiple entries. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in a usable survey, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.

After completing the survey you may voluntarily enter your email address. What we use it for depends on which questionnaire you filled in: in the collector questionnaire we send you the free report before it goes public; in the dealer questionnaire the light edition of the detailed report. There is no prize draw. We record which purpose applies alongside your entry. In both cases we first send you a confirmation email; your registration only takes effect once you click the link in it (double opt-in). If you do not confirm, we delete the address after 14 days.

Importantly, your email address is stored in a separate data set that holds no link to your answers — neither technically nor reconstructable after the fact. Your response record merely notes that a registration took place, not which one. Residual risk: the closeness in time of two entries could in theory support a guess; we do not evaluate this.

The legal basis is your consent, Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR. You may withdraw it at any time with future effect — via the unsubscribe link in every email or informally to the address in the legal notice.

Separately from that, you may consent to the Das Hobby newsletter — a second, optional checkbox. Neither taking part in the survey nor receiving the report depends on it; all of it remains fully available without the newsletter.

If you consent, we add your address to our newsletter list. That list is kept independently of the study and remains in place when the answers of a survey round are cleaned up after 24 months — a newsletter is meant to last, a single round is not. The confirmation procedure applies here too: without your click in the confirmation email we send nothing.

The legal basis is your consent, Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR. Every newsletter email carries an unsubscribe link through which you may withdraw it at any time with future effect. After you unsubscribe we keep your address in a blocked state — solely so that you are not contacted again by mistake.

If you contact us via the enquiry form, we process the details you provide — company, contact person, email address and, optionally, phone number, position, type of company, areas of interest and your message — solely to handle your enquiry. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (pre-contractual measures).

We set exactly one cookie: a random session identifier that links your questionnaire to the answers you have given so far. Without it, resuming after an interruption would be impossible. It is therefore strictly necessary within the meaning of § 25(2) TDDDG and requires no consent. For the same reason there is no cookie banner here.

We use no audience measurement, no analytics services and no tracking pixels — no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no tag manager. What we need to know about how the survey is going is already in the response data.

We use the following service providers as processors. Agreements under Art. 28 GDPR are in place with all of them; where processing may take place outside the EU, it is covered by the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.

• Supabase Inc., San Francisco, USASurvey databaseData centre: Frankfurt am Main
• Supabase Inc., San Francisco, USANewsletter list database, held separately from the surveyData centre: Paris
• Vercel Inc., San Francisco, USAWebsite hostingData centre: Frankfurt am Main
• Resend, Inc., USASending confirmation and information emails, and holding the newsletter contact list

• —Survey answers: 24 months after the respective survey closes. The survey is repeated annually; we record when each round was closed.
• —Once that period has passed, we permanently coarsen the answers: the technical data collected alongside the survey is removed, and the remaining details are grouped more broadly — countries into regions, for example. Where a group stays too small to report meaningfully, we delete the individual answers and keep only the published figures. This also removes the residual risk noted above. What remains after that, remains indefinitely: it is the only way the surveys of following years can be compared with one another.
• —Unconfirmed email addresses: 14 days
• —Email addresses after unsubscribing: we keep the record of the unsubscription so that you are not contacted again by mistake
• —Newsletter list: until you unsubscribe — it explicitly does NOT end with the study. After that only the block record remains
• —Enquiries about the paid report: until the matter is closed, then within the statutory commercial and tax retention periods

You have the right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability and objection. You may also lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority.

We must disclose one limitation: your survey answers cannot be attributed to any person by us. We can therefore neither hand them over nor delete them selectively, because we could not find them again (Art. 11 GDPR). This does not apply to your email address or to report enquiries — there your rights apply without restriction.

Participation is voluntary. You may abandon the questionnaire at any time without any disadvantage. Participation requires a minimum age of 16.

We update this policy when the processing changes. The version published here at the time applies.