Privacy notice
Who is responsible
Donald Murre, operator of Swiss Tax Atlas (see the imprint). Contact for privacy questions: [contact email].
In short
- No cookies, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking scripts. The site does not store anything in your browser (no local storage).
- Tax inputs you enter are sent to our server, which asks the ESTV tax calculator to compute the result.
- Questions you type in Ask (and, only if you leave the option on, your simulator profile) are sent to OpenAI to produce the answer.
What is processed, why and where it goes
1. Visiting the site (technical data)
When you load a page, the infrastructure that delivers it processes your IP address, the time, the requested address and your browser's user agent. This is needed to deliver the site and keep it secure. The site is served from a server rented from Hetzner, behind Cloudflare (which relays requests and may add its own security logs). Retention of these technical logs: [log retention period]. Our own application code does not write visitor logs. Fonts are hosted on this site; no request is made to Google Fonts.
2. Simulator, map and compare
The inputs you enter (commune, civil status, number and ages of children, age, income, wealth, church affiliation, tax year and similar) are sent to our server, which forwards them to the official ESTV tax calculator and returns the result. Results are kept in a cache on the server, keyed by the calculation inputs only, without your IP address or any identifier, so repeat calculations are faster. The simulator also writes your inputs into the page address (the part after the question mark) so that you can share or bookmark a scenario; anyone who gets that link sees those inputs. Nothing is stored in your browser.
3. Ask (AI assistant)
When you send a question, the conversation so far and, if the option "use my simulator profile" is on, your profile (for example canton or commune, income, wealth, civil status) are sent from our server to OpenAI (United States) through its API to generate the answer. The assistant may call our tax tools, which in turn query the ESTV calculator. We ask OpenAI not to store the request (store: false); OpenAI processes data under its own API terms and may retain API logs for a limited time for abuse monitoring. We do not keep a copy of your questions. To limit abuse, our server keeps your IP address in memory only, to count requests per hour; these counters are not written to disk and disappear on restart. Do not enter names, addresses or other personal data into Ask that are not needed for a tax question.
4. External libraries
The map loads two open-source libraries (d3 and topojson-client) from the jsDelivr content delivery network when the page loads, so your IP address and browser details are visible to jsDelivr. No other third-party resources are loaded. Links to external sites (ESTV, fedlex and others) lead to services with their own privacy notices.
Legal basis
Processing is based on our legitimate interest in running the site securely and providing the calculator and assistant you ask for (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, where it applies; under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) no consent is required for this kind of processing). The transfer to OpenAI in the United States happens only when you use Ask, at your request.
Your rights
You can ask for information about, correction or deletion of personal data we hold about you, and object to processing. Because we do not keep questions or profiles and have no accounts, there is usually little to retrieve; write to [contact email]. You may also complain to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) or, in the EU, to your local data protection authority.
Changes
If the site changes how it processes data, this notice is updated and the date above changes.