Privacy Policy

What this policy covers

This policy explains what happens to personal data in connection with the website at https://www.shepherdstudios.ch and with enquiries made through it. It is written to satisfy the duty to inform in Article 19 revFADP, which has applied since 1 September 2023 and requires a controller to tell you, as a minimum, who it is, why it is processing your data, and who else receives it.

Swiss data protection law works differently from the EU’s in one respect worth stating up front: processing personal data does not generally require your consent. It requires that the processing be lawful, proportionate, done in good faith and for a purpose you can recognise (Art. 6 revFADP), and that you be told about it. That is what this page is for. See the section on the GDPR below for when EU law applies as well.

What this website is, technically

It is a static marketing site. Every page is built in advance and served as a finished file. There are no user accounts, no login, no shop, no payments and no comment system. Nothing you do on this site is stored on a server. The one part that is not a finished file is the enquiry form: when you press send, a small function at the host passes your message straight on as an e-mail, as described below, and keeps no copy.

No tracking, and no analytics of any kind

This site loads no analytics, no tag manager, no advertising or conversion pixel, no session recorder or heatmap, and no error-reporting service. It embeds nothing from a third party — no maps, no video player, no social widgets, no external comment or booking tool. The typeface is served from this site’s own domain rather than from a font service, so opening a page does not announce your visit to anyone else. Your visit is not measured, profiled or compared with anyone else’s.

Cookies, and the one thing that is stored in your browser

This site sets no cookies. There is nothing to consent to and no banner, which is why you have not been shown one.

There is exactly one item of browser storage. When you first open the home page in a tab, the page writes a single value — shepherd:intro-seen — to that tab’s session storage, so that the opening animation plays once and not again every time you come back to the home page. It contains the character “1”. It identifies nothing and nobody, it is deleted when you close the tab, and it is never sent anywhere: it is read only by the page that wrote it, in your own browser.

The enquiry form

The form at the foot of every page asks for your name, your e-mail address, the kind of session you are interested in, and your message. Your phone number is optional: give it if you would like the studio to call you back.

When you press send, what you typed is sent to this website’s server, which passes it straight on as an e-mail to the studio’s mailbox and keeps no copy of its own. The e-mail is delivered by Resend, Inc. (United States), a service that sends e-mail on the studio’s behalf. Your e-mail address is set as the reply address, so the studio can answer you directly. Nothing is sent until you press send, and a form you leave half filled in never leaves your device.

If sending fails, the form offers to open your own e-mail program instead, with a message to the studio already written. In that case your details reach the studio only as an ordinary e-mail from your own account, and only if you send it.

Why, and on what basis

The purpose is answering you: assessing the enquiry, replying, and if it turns into a commission, planning and running the work and invoicing it. That is processing in direct connection with the conclusion or performance of a contract, and it is the reason you sent the message. No profiling is done, no automated decision is taken about you, and nothing you send is used for advertising or sold to anyone.

How long it is kept

An enquiry that does not lead to work is kept in the studio’s mailbox for as long as it is plausibly still a live conversation, and then deleted — in practice a matter of months, not years. Correspondence that becomes part of a commission is kept with that job’s records, because Swiss law requires the accounting records and the vouchers behind them to be kept for ten years (Art. 958f of the Code of Obligations). You may ask at any time what is held and ask for it to be deleted, subject to that retention duty.

Hosting, and what the server sees

The site is hosted on the infrastructure of Vercel Inc. (United States), which serves it from edge locations around the world. Delivering a page necessarily involves the host receiving the request: your IP address, the page requested, the time, and the browser and operating system your browser announces. Hosts keep such records for a short period for operations and security — delivering pages, absorbing attacks, diagnosing faults. That processing is the host’s, under its own terms, and the studio does not receive those logs, does not analyse them and does not use them to identify visitors.

E-mail sent to the studio, including enquiries from the form, is delivered to the studio’s mailbox at Hostpoint AG (Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland), which hosts the studio’s domain and keeps its mail on servers in Switzerland.

Disclosure abroad

Because the host and the form’s e-mail delivery service are United States companies, serving this site and delivering an enquiry involve personal data being processed outside Switzerland, which Article 19 paragraph 4 revFADP requires us to tell you. Transfers of this kind must rest on one of the safeguards in Articles 16 and 17 revFADP — an adequacy decision by the Federal Council, contractual clauses, or a statutory exception. Which of those the arrangements with these providers rely on is being confirmed, and this section will name it once it has been; it is not stated here because stating an unverified safeguard would be worse than admitting the gap.

Who else receives your data

Nobody, other than the service providers needed to run the studio: the website host, the e-mail delivery service for the enquiry form and the mail provider described above, and, where a commission goes ahead, the studio’s bank and its accountant, for invoicing and bookkeeping. Personal data is not sold, rented, shared for advertising or passed to data brokers, and there is no advertising network involved in this site at all.

Photographs of people

The studio photographs people. A photograph of an identifiable person is personal data, and a person’s image is protected in its own right under Article 28 of the Civil Code.

Two different roles are involved, and they are worth separating. On a commissioned shoot it is the client that decides the purpose and the means — whose event it is, who is photographed, where the pictures will run — so the client is the controller for that processing and carries the duty to inform the people in front of the camera. The studio works to that brief. This is dealt with in the Terms of Service.

Where the studio publishes a frame for itself — on this site, in its portfolio, on its own channels — it has chosen that purpose, so it is the controller for that, and no arrangement with a client changes it. It therefore asks first, and does not rely on a permission somebody else obtained for a different purpose.

If you appear in a photograph on this site and would rather not, write to the studio and it will be removed — you do not need to give a reason, and processing personal data against someone’s express wishes is in any case a breach of their personality rights under Article 30 paragraph 2 letter b.

Your rights

Under the revised Federal Act on Data Protection you may:

• Ask what is held about you and receive it, together with the purpose, the retention period, where it came from and who it has been disclosed to (Art. 25). This is free of charge, and you cannot waive it in advance.
• Have incorrect data corrected (Art. 32 para. 1).
• Ask that data be deleted, or that a particular processing or disclosure stop (Art. 32 para. 2), subject to the ten-year retention duty on accounting records described above.
• Object to processing. Processing personal data against your express wishes is itself a breach of personality rights under Article 30 paragraph 2 letter b.
• Receive data you provided in a common electronic format, or have it transferred to another controller, where the conditions in Article 28 are met.

To exercise any of these, write to the studio at the address in the block at the top of this page. We may need to establish who you are before answering — sending the details of one person to another on request would be its own breach.

If you are not satisfied, you can report the matter to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC / EDÖB) in Bern, which supervises private controllers and may open an investigation of its own motion or on a report (Art. 49 revFADP).

If you are in the EU or the EEA

Switzerland is not in the EU, and the GDPR does not apply to a Swiss business merely because its website can be opened from Munich. It applies where a business deliberately offers goods or services to people in the Union, or monitors their behaviour there (Article 3(2) GDPR). The studio works internationally, so where the GDPR does apply to a particular commission the lawful bases are Article 6(1)(b) — steps taken at your request before entering a contract, and performance of that contract — and Article 6(1)(f), the studio’s legitimate interest in answering an enquiry addressed to it.

The rights set out above have close counterparts in Articles 15 to 21 GDPR, and the studio handles a request under either law the same way. Because this site does no tracking of any kind, the question of consent for analytics or advertising cookies does not arise.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS. Because nothing is stored in it, and an enquiry only passes through it on its way to the studio as an e-mail, the surface that could be breached is the studio’s mailbox and its own machines rather than this website. E-mail is not an encrypted medium end to end; if you need to send something genuinely sensitive, say so and we will agree another way.

Changes

This policy describes the site as it is built today. If the site gains an analytics tool, an embedded booking calendar, another route for the enquiry form or any other third-party component, this page has to be updated in the same change — a policy describing a site that no longer exists is not a policy. The date at the top says when it was last revised.

Status of this document

This policy is a draft prepared for Benjamin Juhasz. The technical description of the site is accurate and was checked against the source code; the legal framing has not been reviewed by a lawyer and should be before it is relied on.