Privacy policy

This policy explains which personal data we process when you use rentroomgermany.com, why we do so and on what legal basis. Analytics runs only with your consent (section 13).

1. Controller

Future Gate Company LLC
30 N. Gould St.
Sheridan, WY 82801
USA
Email: info@rentroomgermany.com

Rent Room Germany is a brand of Future Gate Company LLC. For any question about data protection and to exercise your rights, write to us at this address.

2. Hosting and server log files

The site is hosted by SmarterASP.NET. The data centre network belongs to Sharktech Inc., USA; by our measurement the server is located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. With every request the server processes the access data that is technically necessary: IP address, time, the address requested, referrer, amount of data transferred, status code, and browser and operating system identifiers. The hosting provider keeps these logs on our behalf and deletes them after a short period. The accounts (section 4) are stored on the same server.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest is the secure and stable operation of the site.

3. Cookies and browser storage

We set the cookie rrg_member. It is only created when you open the sign-in or registration page, ask for a sign-in code or are signed in, and it contains nothing but a random session identifier. It lets our server recognise that you are signed in and protects the account forms against forged submissions. It is a session cookie and expires when you close your browser; when you sign out, we delete the session on our server.

In your browser's storage we keep one entry that exists only in the open tab: rrg-chat-next remembers for at most two minutes that the live chat is continuing an action on the next page. The live chat itself stores the entries described in section 7.

The legal basis for the cookie and these entries is Section 25(2) no. 2 of the German Telecommunications Digital Services Data Protection Act (TDDDG), because they are strictly necessary for the service you are using, and for the processing Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR. We set analytics cookies only if you agree to them in the cookie banner (section 13); advertising cookies we do not set at all.

4. Account

You send contact requests about an apartment through a free account. For it we store your name and your email address, together with the time you registered, the number of free requests used, your sent requests (apartment, time, with or without a subscription, the last 100) and a request waiting for a payment until it has been sent. With a subscription, the plan, its term and the identifier of the subscription at Stripe are added.

There is no password. You sign in with a code that we send to your email address and that you enter in the form. The code is kept, hashed, in your session on our server for 15 minutes, works once and stops working after 5 wrong entries; to prevent abuse we also count, for one hour, how many codes went to an address (in a file named after a hash of the address). If you send a request about an apartment without being signed in, we create the account for you from the name and the email address in the form once the code has shown that the address is yours, and you are signed in. Accounts from before this change had a password stored as a hash; it is deleted at the first sign-in with a code.

To stop one account after another being opened to receive the free requests again, we store, when an account is created, the IP address of the connection (for an IPv6 address, its network part) and a fingerprint of your browser. The fingerprint is a value your browser computes from technical characteristics such as screen size, time zone, language, fonts and graphics settings; the script (FingerprintJS, served from our own server) sends the value to us with the form and to nobody else. We store the IP address with the account and the fingerprint only as a hash. If the same fingerprint already belongs to an account, or the IP address has already opened 2 accounts within the last 30 days, no new account is created and we point to the subscription; whoever already has an account with their email address can still sign in. Reading these characteristics is, in our view, strictly necessary to provide the free account with its limit that you request (Section 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG); the processing rests on Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in preventing abuse of the free offer. Both values are deleted with the account.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR and the consent you gave when registering or by sending a request (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR); for the code and its limits it is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in protecting your account. We keep the data for as long as your account exists. To have it deleted, an email to info@rentroomgermany.com is enough; whatever we must keep for tax or commercial law reasons is deleted when those periods end.

After you register we send you up to four emails with tips and an offer for our subscription: one on the day of registration, one the next day and one a few days later, the last with a discount code for new customers, and one when you have used up your free requests, telling you that a subscription is needed to write to more landlords. For this we use your name, your email address, the language of the page you registered on, the time of registration, the time your last free request was used and a note of which of these emails we have sent. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in advertising our own services (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). You can object at any time, with the unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email or by an email to info@rentroomgermany.com; we then send you none of these emails. Whoever takes out a subscription does not receive them any more. The emails are sent through the mail service named in section 5.

5. Requests through the forms

You can write to us through the forms on an apartment page, on the contact page and on the page for owners. We process your name, your email address, your phone number if you give it, your message and the apartment concerned, and for owners also the location of the apartment. The request reaches our mailbox as an email. Our email runs on Zoho Mail of Zoho Corporation, 4141 Hacienda Drive, Pleasanton, CA 94588, USA, which processes it on our behalf.

We use the details to answer your request and to help you get the apartment. We pass them to an owner, agent or property manager only if you instruct us to apply there on your behalf. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR and your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR), which you may withdraw at any time with effect for the future. Without your name, email address and message we cannot deal with a request. Once it has been dealt with we delete it, unless a statutory retention period applies.

6. Subscription and payment

You pay for the subscription through Stripe, a payment service of Stripe, Inc., 354 Oyster Point Boulevard, South San Francisco, CA 94080, USA. When you choose a plan, we send you to Stripe's payment page and pass on your email address, the plan and an identifier of your account. You enter your payment details directly with Stripe; we never receive them. Stripe tells us whether the payment succeeded, until when the subscription runs and whether it was renewed or ended.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR, and Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR for keeping the payment records. Stripe also processes data under its own responsibility to prevent fraud and to meet its own legal obligations. Stripe's privacy policy applies on the payment page: stripe.com/privacy.

Before paying you confirm that we should begin the service at once. We store this declaration with its time, plan, language and wording on your account and pass its time on to Stripe with the payment, as proof regarding your right of withdrawal (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR). If you cancel through »Cancel contract here«, we process the details you give there (name, email address, contract, type and reason of the cancellation, requested time) together with the time of receipt, set the end of the subscription at Stripe and send you the confirmation of receipt by email (Art. 6(1)(b) and (c) GDPR). We keep the cancellation as proof for as long as claims under the contract are possible. To prevent abuse we count cancellations per IP address and minute; the count contains only a hash of the address and is deleted regularly (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

7. Live chat

For questions about the site, the apartments and renting we offer a live chat in which an AI assistant answers. It runs on fonella, a service of WBA Systems GmbH, Kienberger Allee 4, 12529 Schönefeld, Germany, which operates the chat on our behalf (Art. 28 GDPR). So that the page loads quickly, your browser fetches the chat window from fonella.ai only after your first input on the page or three seconds after loading; fonella receives your IP address and the details your browser sends with every request. The chat sets no cookies. In your browser's storage it keeps a random identifier (fonella-chat-session) that links your chats across tabs and later visits and stays there until you delete it; the history of the current conversation and whether the chat window was already open are kept only until you close the tab. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in answering your questions directly on the page and without waiting (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR); you can delete these entries at any time in your browser settings.

When you write, we process your messages with everything you say in them, together with the identifier, the language, the address and title of the page you are writing on, the apartment you are looking at there, the search you have set, whether a request on that page needs an account or a subscription, your IP address, details about your browser and the time, in order to answer your question (Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR). The chat searches for apartments in our own stock; fonella's servers send it only the search criteria (city, rent, rooms, floor area, sort order) or the chosen apartment, the language and an identifier of the conversation, never your messages and never your IP address. At your request the chat sets the search on the page, fills in the page's request form with what you told it (you read it and send it yourself with the button of the form), or sends a request through that form, the latter only after you have confirmed this in the chat; section 5 applies to such a request.

The answers are generated automatically by a language model, as is the short summary we receive by email and push notification after the chat. For this your messages, with the conversation so far, go to OpenRouter, Inc. in the USA, which passes them on, depending on availability, to a language model from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Meta. The transfer to the USA is based on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR). The chat is stored on servers of Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL, 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy, L-1855 Luxembourg, in the Frankfurt region, and deleted once your matter has been dealt with and no retention obligation applies. To prevent abuse, messages are counted per IP address and minute, and this count is deleted after about one day (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Where we rely on our legitimate interest, you may object at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation (Art. 21(1) GDPR). OpenRouter's privacy policy: openrouter.ai/privacy.

8. Telephone enquiries

Calls to the phone number shown on this website are answered by an AI-powered phone assistant. At the start of the call you are told that you are speaking with an AI-powered phone assistant.

The controller is Future Gate Company LLC, 30 N. Gould St., Sheridan, WY, USA (see imprint). The telephony platform is operated as a technical service provider by WBA Systems GmbH, Kienberger Allee 4, 12529 Schönefeld, Germany, with its service fonella.

We process your phone number, if it is transmitted, the number you called, the date, time and duration of the call, the content of the conversation as speech and as text (transcript), an automatically generated summary, and any details you give during the call, for example your name, email address or a callback number.

During the call your speech is converted into text. An AI language model generates a reply, which is read out by speech synthesis. After the call a summary is created, the transcript and summary are translated, and contact details you mentioned are identified. We are notified of the call by email and, where enabled, by push notification. The call is not recorded as audio.

The following service providers are used:

sipgate GmbH, Düsseldorf, Germany: phone number and call routing.

Vapi Inc., 150 Spear Street, Suite 1000, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA: handling of the conversation and the summary. For this Vapi uses Deepgram, Inc., San Francisco, USA (speech recognition), Google LLC, Mountain View, USA (Gemini language model) and ElevenLabs, Inc., New York, USA (speech synthesis).

OpenRouter, Inc., USA: translation of transcript and summary and identification of contact details, using models from Google, with OpenAI or Meta as fallback.

Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL, Luxembourg: storage in data centres in Frankfurt am Main.

Mailgun Technologies, Inc. (Sinch), USA: sending the notification email via its EU region.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR where your call relates to entering into or performing a contract, and Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR otherwise. Our legitimate interest is to receive and answer enquiries at any time, including outside business hours.

Data is transferred to the USA in the process. Vapi bases transfers from the EU on the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR).

We delete the data as soon as it is no longer needed for the purpose described, or at your request, unless statutory retention obligations apply. Vapi also stores the transcript, the course of the conversation, the summary and technical logs and deletes them on request. According to WBA Systems GmbH, the call data is not used to train AI models. Under its terms of service Vapi does not pass it on to third parties for their model training, but may use it, without reference to us or to you, to improve its own service, for example speech recognition.

If you prefer not to speak with the AI assistant, you can also reach us by email at the address given in the imprint. Your rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability and objection, and your right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority (Art. 15 to 21 and 77 GDPR), also apply to this data.

9. Adverts

Between the search results we show adverts, marked as such. They come from the ad server bamg.ae of B A Media Group FZE LLC, Business Centre, Sharjah Publishing City Free Zone, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Your browser fetches the adverts from there when a page of results is shown, and loads the image of an advert from cdn.bamg.ae; in doing so the ad server receives, for technical reasons, your IP address, the time, your browser identifier and the address of this page. It also learns when an advert has been at least half visible for a second. If you click an advert, the link takes you to the advertiser via bamg.ae. The display and the click are counted there and stored for up to 90 days together with your IP address, the time, the advert and the location derived from it (town, region, country). We set no cookies for this.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest is financing the site through advertising and proving the clicks to the advertisers.

10. Our stock on alle-wohnungen.de

The site alle-wohnungen.de shows our apartments in its own search. For this, the browser of its visitors queries our stock directly through a public interface and loads the preview photos from our server. Our server therefore receives, for technical reasons, the IP address, the time, the search criteria, the browser identifier and the address of the page the query comes from. To prevent abuse we count the queries per IP address and minute; the count contains only a hash of the address and is deleted regularly. The interface itself discloses no personal data: no providers, no contact details and nothing about members.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest is showing our apartments there as well without creating a second copy of the stock.

11. The apartment listings

The apartments on this site come from publicly accessible rental listings. We take over the title, description, photos, location, rent and features and, where given, whether the landlord is private or commercial and the provider's name, which we do not display. We use these details to show the apartments and, after a request, to get in touch with the provider. The photos are stored on our server and your browser loads them from there. Titles and descriptions are translated into English and Arabic once, when they are fetched, by a language model through OpenRouter, Inc., USA; the translation service receives no visitor data. We keep the details for as long as the apartment's page exists; once a listing can no longer be found, we take the apartment out of the search.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest is making the rental market accessible in their own language to people moving to Germany. A provider who does not want their apartment to appear here may object at any time; an email to info@rentroomgermany.com is enough.

12. Reviews

On the front page and on every apartment page we show reviews from Trustportal, a review portal of B A Media Group FZE LLC, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Trustportal is a third party and does not belong to Future Gate Company LLC. When you open such a page, your browser fetches the script and the reviews from trustportal.biz, a server in Germany; your IP address, the time, the page and details of your browser reach Trustportal in doing so. The widget sets no cookie and stores nothing in your browser, which is why the cookie banner does not ask for it. The score in the footer, which stands on every page, is fetched from trustportal.biz by your browser in the same way, with the same details and the same absence of cookies.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest is showing you genuine ratings of our service. You may object at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation (Art. 21(1) GDPR); an email to info@rentroomgermany.com is enough.

13. Google Analytics

With your consent we use Google Analytics 4, a web analytics service of Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland. The controller is Future Gate Company LLC. Google Analytics is loaded only after you have agreed to »Statistics« in the cookie banner; until then your browser makes no request to Google. It sets the cookies _ga and _ga_MQ78533YKZ (lifetime up to 2 years) and measures which pages are visited and how, together with the approximate location, the type of device, browser and the page you came from; the data is linked to a random identifier. We use no advertising features: Google signals and ad personalisation are switched off, and the signals ad_storage, ad_user_data and ad_personalization stay denied (Consent Mode v2). Google Analytics does not store your IP address.

The legal basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR and Section 25(1) TDDDG). The data is deleted after 14 months at the latest. Google Ireland Limited processes it on our behalf; Google may transfer it to Google LLC in the USA. This transfer is based on the adequacy decision of the European Commission of 10 July 2023 (EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework), under which Google LLC is certified (Art. 45 GDPR). The banner stores your choice for 6 months in the cookie rrg_consent; that is strictly necessary to respect your choice (Section 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG, Art. 6(1)(c) and (f) GDPR).

You can withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future, using »Cookie settings« at the bottom of every page: the Google cookies are then deleted and nothing more is sent to Google. Refusing has no disadvantage, the site works fully without. Google's privacy policy: policies.google.com/privacy.

14. Map

On an apartment page we show a map of the location from Google Maps, a service of Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland. The map is loaded only after you have switched on »Maps« in the cookie banner or pressed »Show map« on the page; until then your browser makes no request to Google. Once it is loaded, your browser connects to google.com, and Google receives your IP address and technical details of your browser; the address of our page is not sent. Google may set its own cookies in the map frame and read them. On our side the cookie im_googlemaps (lifetime 6 months) remembers that you showed the map.

The legal basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR and Section 25(1) TDDDG). You can withdraw it at any time with effect for the future, using »Cookie settings« at the bottom of every page: the map is then removed from the page and our cookie is deleted. Refusing has no disadvantage, the address of the apartment is shown as text in any case. Google Ireland Limited may transfer the data to Google LLC in the USA; this transfer is based on the adequacy decision of the European Commission of 10 July 2023 (EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework), under which Google LLC is certified (Art. 45 GDPR). Google's privacy policy: policies.google.com/privacy.

15. Your rights

You have the right of access (Art. 15 GDPR), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction of processing (Art. 18), data portability (Art. 20) and to object to processing based on our legitimate interest (Art. 21). You may withdraw consent at any time with effect for the future. Write to us at info@rentroomgermany.com.

You may also lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, in particular in the Member State of your habitual residence. We do not make automated individual decisions within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR.

Last updated: 31 October 2026