How we use your information

Who's responsible

BeenThere Expats is run by Jamie Verner, who is responsible for your data (the "data controller"). Contact details are at the end of this page and on the legal notice.

If you register interest

We store your email address, whether you're looking for help or can help, your country and city, the language you used, and (if you choose one) the procedure you're interested in. If you arrived from a link with a tag (for example from a social media post), we store that tag so we know which channels work.

We use this only to send you one email to confirm your address and then emails about our launch. We never sell it or share it for anyone else's marketing.

We keep it until we launch in your city and you've had your invitation, or until you remove it. Every email has a link to remove your address straight away.

If you report a mistake in a guide

We store your message and which guide it's about. If you give an email address, we store it only so we can reply, and delete it with the report. Please don't include personal details or document numbers in the message.

If you create an account

We store your email, a securely hashed password, a display name, your nationality and the province you live in, and what you do on BeenThere Expats (questions you ask the assistant are not stored; requests and chat messages are). We use these to run the service: matching you with helpers, showing guides for your province and keeping your requests.

If you switch your account off, it's deleted after 7 days unless you switch it back on. If you have requests, chats or payments, we keep those records (with your name and messages removed) because helpers' payments and our accounts depend on them.

Language

When you choose a language, we remember it in a small cookie on your device for one year, so the site opens in that language next time. It contains only the language code.

Ratings

After a request is resolved, you and the other person can rate each other with 1 to 5 stars and an optional comment. Your average is shown to the people you might work with; comments are seen only by the person they're about and by our team. If your account is deleted, the comments you wrote are removed and only the stars are kept.

Payments and identity checks

Subscriptions, helper identity checks and helper payouts are handled by Stripe. Stripe collects your card, ID document or bank details on its own pages; we never see or store them. We keep only Stripe's reference numbers and the status (for example "verified" or "active").

Visitor statistics

We count visits with Plausible Analytics, which uses no cookies and stores no personal data: no IP addresses, no tracking across sites. We see totals such as how many people visited a page, which country they were in and which site they came from, and how many registered interest. That's why there's no cookie banner.

Who processes your data for us

• Supabase (database, hosted in the EU)
• Railway (hosting, EU region)
• Resend (sending our emails)
• Stripe (payments, identity checks, payouts)
• Plausible Analytics (visitor statistics without cookies, hosted in the EU)
• Google Gemini (the assistant: your question is sent to answer it, and we don't store it)

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. You can also complain to the Spanish data protection authority (AEPD).

Contact:info@beenthere-expats.com

Last updated 3 October 2026 (language choice added).