Privacy policy

Starna (this site) is designed to work without knowing who you are. It provides no accounts, no logins and no saved browsing history. Running a website nonetheless leaves records. This policy sets out what those records are and how they are handled.

Operator

• Operator: Starna Studio, the trade name of an individual sole proprietor based in Japan
• Contact: [email protected]

The operator's personal name and postal address are not published on this page. Where the data subject makes a disclosure request, or a lawful enquiry is made, they will be provided without delay (Act on the Protection of Personal Information, Article 32(1)).

Information collected

Starna collects four categories of information, and no others.

Information you provide when contacting us

If you write to us via the form or by email on Contact, we receive your email address and your message (and, for the form, the topic you selected and any page URL you chose to include). We do not ask for your name, with one exception: partnership enquiries, for which we ask for your name and your company or organisation. The content of the message is at your discretion; for a correction to our content, the city, the page concerned and what you actually observed are sufficient.

Messages sent through the form reach the operator's mailbox as email. They are not stored in Starna's database. To help address automated submissions, the country your request came from (a two-letter code derived from the IP address; the IP address itself is not included) and your User-Agent are included in the body of that email.

Information sent by the error report form

The "Report an error" form on each guide page sends your report text, the page it concerns, the section you optionally selected, and your display language. There is no field for your name or email address. In order to address automated submissions and to give reports context, we also record the country your request came from (a two-letter country code derived from the IP address; the IP address itself is not stored) and your User-Agent (browser or device type).

Server logs

The server that delivers this site automatically records requests. Those records contain your IP address, User-Agent (browser or device type), referrer (the page you were previously viewing) and the time of the request. This is standard behaviour on the part of the hosting provider; Starna operates no separate mechanism to collect or analyse individual logs.

The display-preference cookie

Starna uses exactly one cookie, for a display setting (textsize). It is set only where you change the text size away from its default, and is deleted where you set it back. Its lifetime is 365 days. Your display language is not stored in a cookie; it is determined by the URL (Japanese at the plain address, English under /en). The cookie serves only to retain your display setting for subsequent visits and is never used for advertising or behavioural tracking. Full detail is set out on Cookies and third-party requests.

Information not collected

The following are technically available to us but are deliberately not collected.

• Accounts, logins, saved favourites and similar functions (no such function exists)
• Names (other than for partnership enquiries), dates of birth, gender, telephone numbers and postal addresses
• Analytics tools that rely on cookies or identifiers stored on your device (no Google Analytics or equivalent)
• Advertising cookies, behavioural targeting and cross-site tracking
• Location data (this site never asks your browser for your location)

To improve content and page speed, Starna uses aggregate traffic measurement that does not identify readers (Cloudflare Web Analytics). It uses no cookies or device-stored identifiers and assigns no per-reader ID. The recipient and the information transmitted are disclosed on Cookies and third-party requests.

Purposes of use

The information collected is used only for the following purposes.

• Responding to your enquiry, and verifying and correcting the point raised (including points raised through the error report form)
• Delivering the site and maintaining its security — diagnosing display faults, and detecting and blocking attacks, unauthorised access and excessive traffic
• Retaining your display setting (the text size cookie)

It is used for no other purpose. We do not sell the information collected, nor do we provide it to third parties for advertising.

Legal bases for processing (EU and UK readers)

Where the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the UK GDPR applies, Starna relies on the following legal bases.

• Your message to us — processing necessary to respond to your enquiry (Art. 6(1)(b) and (f))
• Server logs — our legitimate interest in delivering the site securely (Art. 6(1)(f))
• The display-preference cookie — retaining a display setting (text size) you explicitly selected, which we regard as processing within the scope necessary to deliver the page (Art. 6(1)(f))

Because Starna uses no advertising or analytics cookies, there is no consent-based processing.

Recipients and processors

We do not sell or otherwise provide reader information to third parties. The following providers are used in the operation of the site.

Cloudflare, Inc. (United States)

Hosting and content delivery, planned from launch. Handles the server logs described above: IP address, User-Agent, referrer and request time. Messages sent through the contact form also pass through Cloudflare's email sending service on their way to the operator's mailbox. Cloudflare also receives the data of our traffic measurement (Cloudflare Web Analytics) and performs the anti-spam check on the contact page (Turnstile); neither identifies readers. See Cookies and third-party requests.

Hyperknot Software Kft. (Hungary / OpenFreeMap)

Delivery of the base map tiles underlying our route maps. Your browser connects to them directly, so your IP address and User-Agent reach them. This, the traffic-measurement beacon and the anti-spam check on the contact page are the only routes by which reader information leaves Starna's own infrastructure, and the map request occurs only where you open a page containing a map (the route map on a transport page). In addition, only if a map tile fails to load will your browser send details of that error to an endpoint operated by Cloudflare, Inc. Full detail is set out on Cookies and third-party requests.

Supabase (content database)

Storage of the guides, timetables and route data we publish. It is accessed only from our servers; your browser never connects to it, and no personal data about readers is sent there.

We may disclose information where legally required to do so, limited to what is required.

Retention

• Your message — retained for up to two years so that recurring corrections can be re-checked, and then deleted. Where you ask us to delete it sooner, we will do so
• Error reports — as above (retained for up to two years, then deleted)
• Server logs — retained for the hosting provider's standard short retention period and then automatically discarded. Starna operates no mechanism to retain them long-term
• The display-preference cookie — 365 days. It can be deleted from your browser at any time

Access, correction and suspension of use

You may request access to, correction of, addition to, deletion of, or suspension of the use or third-party provision of the personal data we hold about you. Please write to [email protected].

In order to confirm that a request comes from you, we may ask you to respond from the address you originally used, or otherwise to confirm your identity. No fee is charged.

Readers in Japan may also complain to the Personal Information Protection Commission.

Rights of EU and UK readers

Where the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies, you have the right to:

• Access the data we hold about you
• Have inaccurate data corrected
• Have your data erased
• Object to processing
• Ask us to restrict processing
• Receive data you provided in a portable form

To exercise any of these, please write to [email protected]. We aim to respond within one month.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the data protection authority in your country or in the UK (in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office).

Starna is operated from Japan. Japan holds an adequacy decision under Art. 45 GDPR, and the UK likewise recognises Japan as adequate; transfers from the EU and the UK to Japan rest on that decision.

Readers elsewhere are welcome to make the same requests; they are handled in the same way regardless of where you live.

No automated decision-making

Starna carries out no profiling and no automated decision-making in relation to readers. The content shown is determined solely by the city, transport mode and language selected. Content is not varied from one reader to another.

Advertising and affiliate links

Starna uses no advertising network, and accordingly there is no mechanism by which advertising is targeted on the basis of what you read.

Starna may in future carry affiliate links in order to fund its operation. Even where it does, no mechanism to identify individual readers will be introduced on this site. Once you follow a link to a partner's site, that company's own privacy policy applies.

Changes to this policy

This policy may be amended as features are added or as the providers used change. Where it is amended, the date at the top of this page is updated. Where an amendment materially changes how reader information is handled, the change will be described so that it can be identified.

Questions about this policy may be sent to [email protected]. See also About Starna for how the site came about, How we verify for how our content is checked, and the Terms of use for the conditions of use.