01Who is responsible
The operator of montvo.com and montvo.link is the controller of the personal data described here.
The operator is established in the Czech Republic. Full identification — legal name, registration number and an address for service — is being added to this page and is available on request from [email protected] in the meantime.
For anything about your data, write to [email protected]. A person reads it.
02If you only opened a link
Most people who meet Montvo are visitors: somebody sent you a montvo.link link, you waited through the ad page, and you carried on. This section is about you, and it is short on purpose.
What is recorded about that visit:
- Your country, as a two-letter code. Not a city, not a region.
- Whether you were on a phone, a tablet or a desktop.
- The site you came from, if your browser said — the host name only, like reddit.com. Never the page, the path or anything after it, which is where a link normally carries a search term or an identifier.
- The time, the link, and what the visit was worth to the creator.
- Whether the visit passed the checks that decide if it counts.
Your IP address is used while the request is being handled — to work out the country, and to run the checks that keep automated traffic off the service. It is not written down as itself. Where we need to recognize the same visitor again, the address is put through a keyed one-way hash first and only the result is stored.
That hash cannot be turned back into your address. We hold the key that produced it, so the law still treats it as your personal data, and we treat it the same way — but nobody reading our database can see where you were.
Those hashes exist for two reasons and expire by themselves. One stops the same unlock being claimed twice. The other remembers, for 24 hours, that a visit from you already counted on a particular link — as a view, and as a paid visit — so it does not count again. Both are deleted after 24 hours.
The site you came from is shown to the creator whose link you opened, as a count of visits per site over a window — never beside your visit, your country or your time. They can see that forty people arrived from reddit.com; they cannot see that you were one of them.
Some links carry a reference the creator put on them: a code that means something in their own system — the account you hold with them, the order you are collecting, the step you are on. When a link carries one, and only then, we record it with the visit, so the creator can check that the person they sent is the person who came through. That is how a site releases a download to somebody who waited through the ad page rather than to anybody who guessed the address.
We do not know what a reference means. It is theirs, we store it exactly as it arrived, and we give it back only to them. The answer they get also carries the country, the device and the time of that one visit — which is more than a creator can see about a visit with no reference on it, where they get counts and never a row about you. It carries no address, and nothing that identifies you to us.
That record is deleted 24 hours after the visit. Afterwards nobody can ask about it, the creator included.
Google Analytics runs on this page. It counts that a visit happened, which link page it was and roughly where you arrived from. It is Google's script and it sets Google's cookies in your browser, so Google receives your IP address and what a script running in your browser can ordinarily see; what they do with that beyond reporting it back to us is their decision rather than ours, which is why they appear further down as something other than a processor acting only for us.
You are not asked first, and we would rather write that down than let you assume otherwise. There is a cookie question on montvo.com, and it is about advertising — the measurement described here is not part of it and is not asked about on either site. Blocking Google Analytics in your browser stops it, and nothing here works differently when it is blocked — the wait is the same and your link opens the same way.
One thing is held back from it deliberately. Where a link carries a creator's reference, the address reported to Google is trimmed of that reference first. It is their code for you, we said it goes back to them and to nobody else, and a measurement tag is not an exception to that.
The advertising side of Google is not on this page at all. montvo.com carries a tag that recognizes a browser one of our own adverts brought in; this page does not carry it, the cookie behind it is never set on montvo.link, and opening somebody's link puts you in no advertising audience. That is a consequence of which tag is mounted where rather than a promise about how one behaves. The next section says what they do where they are.
Montvo itself sets no cookie on the ad page, does not follow you to other websites, and builds no profile of you. The measurement cookies described above are Google's, set by Google's script rather than by us — which does not make them less real, and the section on cookies lists them. What is described above is the whole of what we hold about a visit.
Two advertising networks are involved on that page, and they work in opposite ways. It is worth reading both, because the difference is the difference between a company that only knows what we told it and one that meets you directly.
The offers you are asked to complete come from Linkvertise GmbH (Germany), and they are requested by our server rather than by your browser. Choosing which to show means telling them something about you, and this is the whole of it: your IP address, the language your browser asks for, your country, and the words the creator titled their link with. The pictures are fetched by us and served from this site for the same reason. Linkvertise GmbH (Germany) is handed nothing else your browser would otherwise have told them.
The other adverts on the page come from Monetag, and that one runs in your browser. Their script is loaded from their servers, so it sees your address, your browser and your screen directly rather than through us; it can store things in your browser; it may open advertising of its own; and it may ask your permission to send you notifications. We do not choose what it shows you, we do not receive what it records, and we cannot promise what it does — it is their code, and it can change without this site changing.
Pressing Continue also opens one of Monetag's own advertising pages in a new window. That window is opened by this site rather than by their script, and it is the main thing paying for the ad page. From the moment it opens you are on their site under their rules, exactly as the paragraph below describes. If your browser refuses to open it nothing is held against you — your link opens the same way, and the visit simply earns the creator nothing.
Monetag runs on the ad page and nowhere else. It is not on the marketing site, not on the dashboard, and not on any page you reach by signing in.
Opening an advert is different again, and it is your choice: you leave for the advertiser's own website, and from that point you are under their rules. An advertising network does normally set its own cookies and does follow people between the sites it appears on.
03If you looked round the site
Montvo buys advertising. When somebody arrives on montvo.com from one of those adverts and goes on to create an account, we would like to know which advert it was — the alternative is to keep paying for all of them and guess.
That is what Google's advertising tag is for here, and the whole of what it is for. It runs on the open pages of montvo.com — the pages about the product, the documentation, the sign-up form — and nowhere else. It does not run on montvo.link, which is the subject of the section above: nobody who opened somebody else's link came here to be advertised to later. It does not run on the dashboard or on any other page you reach by signing in either: by then you have an account, and there is nothing left for it to work out.
Google's measurement tag is the other one, and it is a plainer thing: it counts visits — how many, to which page, roughly from where. That one runs on the open pages of montvo.com and on montvo.link alike, for everybody, and it is not asked about on either. We would rather know how many people read this site than know only about the ones who agreed to be counted, and that is the whole of the reason. It is not on the dashboard or anywhere else you reach by signing in. Blocking Google Analytics in your browser stops it, and nothing on the site changes when you do.
Nothing of Google's advertising loads until you say yes. Not the cookie, not the tag, not a request that would tell them an advert of ours brought you here: decline, or simply leave the question alone, and nothing of it is ever configured. Nothing on the site needs it to work, and nothing about the site changes if you say no.
We ask once and remember the answer in your browser. The "Cookies" link at the bottom of any page reopens the question, and choosing differently there takes effect immediately.
Once you have agreed, what the advertising tag reports is that a visit happened and whether it turned into a sign-up. Google receives your IP address and what a script running in your browser can ordinarily see, and it decides for itself what else it does with that — it is their code and their cookie, and we can no more promise what they do with it than we can for any other network. What comes back to us is counts of adverts and sign-ups, and nothing that names you.
04If you have an account
Creating an account means we hold rather more, because an account is a relationship and a payout needs somewhere to go.
- Your email address, your display name and the handle your referral link is built from.
- Your password, stored only as a hash we cannot reverse — or, if you signed in with Google, the name, email address and profile picture Google returns and a token to confirm it is still you.
- The Bitcoin address you gave us, and your payout history.
- Your links, their destinations, and the day-by-day counts behind them.
- The IP address and browser of each sign-in, kept with the session. This one is stored as itself: it is what lets you see where your account is signed in and what lets us notice somebody else signing in as you.
- If somebody referred you, who.
- Anything you write to us, and what we wrote back.
If you use the API, the calls you make are logged — method, path, result and how long it took — for 7 days. Bodies are not stored; what you send us is not kept.
05Why we are allowed to
Under the GDPR every use of personal data needs a basis. Ours are:
- To perform our contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b)): running your account, serving your links, counting what they earned and paying it out.
- Our legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)): keeping automated and fraudulent traffic off the service, keeping the service secure, and not paying twice for the same visitor. We take the view that somebody opening a link expects the service to be defended against abuse, and the data used for it is the least that answers the question.
- Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)): keeping accounting records, and responding when the law requires it.
- Your consent (Art. 6(1)(a)): Google's advertising tag on montvo.com, which measures what our advertising brought in. Consent is the basis because a cookie that is not needed to deliver what you came for is not something a service may assume — so it is asked for before anything of it loads rather than after, and you can take it back at any time from the footer without losing anything you came for.
- Our legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) again, for counting visits with Google Analytics on montvo.com and montvo.link: how many people arrive, and where from, is how the service is sized and what tells us which half of it is worth running. That one is not asked about first, which is the plain difference between it and the line above. Blocking Google Analytics in your browser stops it, and nothing about either site changes when you do.
We do not sell personal data, and we hand nothing we hold to anybody for their advertising. An advertising partner on the ad page collects from a visitor directly, through their own code in their own ad — it does not receive our records, and it never sees who holds an account.
No decision that produces a legal effect for you is made purely automatically. The traffic checks decide whether a single visit counts, which is not a decision about a person; a decision to suspend an account or withhold a balance is taken by a person, and you can reply to it.
07Who else sees it
The companies that run parts of the service on our behalf, and only for that:
- netcup GmbH (Germany) — the servers the application, the database and the cache run on.
- Cloudflare, Inc. (United States) — DNS and the proxy every request passes through. Traffic is inspected there to place visitors by country and to keep bots off the gate.
- Seznam.cz, a.s. (Czech Republic) — outgoing email, such as a password reset.
- Google LLC (United States) — for creators who choose to sign in with Google, and only the name, email address and profile picture that Google returns. Google also counts visits to montvo.com and montvo.link, for every visitor and without being asked, and is not acting only for us when it does; the section on cookies says what it sets and the sections above say why. Google Ads is a third arrangement again, on montvo.com alone and only for visitors who agree to it.
Google is on that list for more than one reason, and only the first is a processor. Signing in with Google is something you asked for and Google acts for us in doing it. Their tags are not: Google decides for itself what else it does with what it sees, whatever we asked it for. The advertising tag is the one thing here that waits for your agreement and the one thing you can switch off from the footer without losing anything. The measurement tag is not asked about and runs on both sites; the sections above say so rather than leaving you to find it.
The application, the database and the cache all run on servers in Germany. Cloudflare and Google are in the United States, and data reaching them is transferred on the basis of the European Commission's standard contractual clauses and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.
Linkvertise GmbH (Germany) and Monetag are the advertising partners on the ad page, and they are deliberately not in the list above. A network is not a processor acting only for us: it decides for itself what it does with what it learns. Linkvertise GmbH (Germany) receives what the section on visits sets out, which is the least a targeted advert can be chosen with. Monetag receives whatever a script running in your browser can see, which is more, and is the price of the adverts that pay for that page.
Beyond that, we disclose personal data only where the law requires it, and we will tell you when we are permitted to.
08How long we keep it
- Visitor hashes: 24 hours, then deleted automatically.
- Individual unlock records: a recent window, after which only the daily totals per link remain. Those totals identify nobody.
- Checked unlocks, where the link carried a creator's reference: 24 hours, then deleted automatically.
- API call logs and webhook delivery logs: 7 days.
- Support conversations: for as long as the account they belong to. They are kept so you can read back what was agreed, and closing your account deletes them with it.
- Your account and its links: until you delete them. Closing your account deletes your links and their history.
- Payout records: kept as long as accounting law requires, which is longer than your account, and is the one thing deleting an account does not remove.
09Your rights
You can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, hand it over in a portable form, restrict what we do with it, or object to us relying on legitimate interests. Most of it you can do yourself from your settings, and the rest by writing to us.
Write to [email protected]. We answer within 30 days. We may need to confirm who you are first, which for an account holder normally means writing from the address on it.
For a visitor with no account there is usually nothing we can look up: what is stored about a visit is a hash we cannot search back to a person, and it is gone within a day. The exception is a link that carried a creator's reference — tell us what the reference was and there is a row to show you, for the 24 hours it exists. Either way it is a consequence of collecting little, not a refusal.
If you think we have got it wrong you can complain to your data protection authority. In the Czech Republic that is the Office for Personal Data Protection (Úřad pro ochranu osobních údajů, uoou.cz).
10Children
Montvo is not for children. You must be 18 to hold an account, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger.
If you believe a child has an account, tell us at [email protected] and we will remove it.
11Security and changes
Passwords are stored hashed, API keys are stored hashed, and a secret key is shown to you once and never again — we keep only a fingerprint of it. Traffic to the site is encrypted. None of that makes a service impossible to breach, and we will tell you and the authority if one happens to us, as the law requires.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. For a change that materially affects what we collect or why, we will email account holders before it takes effect.