Virtual Smart Home™ • Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Virtual Smart Home™ provides software and services for your smart home, especially skills and backend services for your Amazon Alexa smart home environment. This software enables you to interact more effectively with your smart home devices and existing Internet-based services.

Virtual Smart Home™ is highly sensitised to privacy in context of smart home environments. Your data are valuable and sensitive at the same time. Therefore everything we do is based on a privacy by design approach. We only collect and process the data that are required for offering you our software and services. While identification and personalisation of you as a user is required for the functionality of the software and services provided, we will not use your personal data for any other purposes.

This privacy policy describes how we deal with the information we receive from, and about, you. Please read this privacy policy carefully. If you have and questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Information We Store and Process

Website, Cookies and Links

On the website virtualsmarthome.xyz as such we do not collect or process any information about you. We do not use cookies and do not track your website usage, we do not include any advertising and do not even run any personalised statistics on this website.

Please note, however, that for the software and services offered by Virtual Smart Home™, for which you have to log in, we have to collect, store, and process a minimum amount of personal data. Please read the sections below for details.

We may use links to websites, content and resources from third parties and may include these links into our website or any software or services provided by us. We are not responsible for the content or resoures provided by these third parties, particularly not for their timeliness, quality and accuracy. These resources are not subject to our privacy policy and may provide their individual privacy policies. We recommend that you review the privacy policy for each such third party in order to determine how they protect your privacy.

E-mail

If you contact us by e-mail we store the e-mails received from you together with the answers we send you. We keep these e-mails for improving the software and service quality in the future. If you wish to have all of your e-mails and our responses deleted, please contact us.

Support

If you contact our support (i) through our support system, Freshdesk, or (ii) by e-mail, e.g., for reporting issues, for sending us your feature requests etc. we store the messages received from you together with your contact details, any file attachments, and the answers we send you. We keep these messages for analysing any potential future issues and for improving the software and service quality in the future. If you wish to have all of your messages and our responses deleted, please contact us.

Virtual Routine Trigger

Virtual Routine Trigger is a smart home skill for Amazon Alexa that allows you to use any website, information on the web or web-service API as trigger for your Alexa routines. It is a very powerful tool for automatically starting and stopping Alexa routines with data on the web.

The Virtual Routine Trigger consists of two components: (i) an Alexa smart home skill that will provide smart home devices (doorbells) in your Alexa environment; and (ii) a web-based backend for configuring your triggers.

Both components use Login with Amazon for identifying you as an Alexa user. We store the following data about you as a user: your name, your e-mail address, your automatically generated Amazon user ID and your access tokens. We use your name in the web-based backend to welcome you with your name. Your e-mail address will be used to contact you in case there are any relevant changes to the software or the service offered, to inform you about major changes to the terms of use or to any of our policies, to inform you about relevant news, to inform you that the Alexa skill or the corresponding backend was newly activated or to ask you about your usage of the software and services provided by Virtual Smart Home™. By Amazon's design, your user ID and access tokens are required for the communication between the Alexa skill and the web-based backend.

For every trigger you configure, we store a randomly generated trigger ID, all the information about the trigger and the last known state of the trigger (if it was activated or deactivated).

In order for the web-based backend to work properly, two functional cookies are required: (i) a session ID for the web-based backend on virtualsmarthome.xyz; and (ii) a session cookie for your Login with Amazon session. No further cookies are used.

The Alexa skill uses Login with Amazon for identifying you as an Alexa user. It stores, retrieves and processes your data in the web-based backend described above and does not collect, store or process any additional data.

The services for this Alexa skill and its web-based backend are hosted by dogado GmbH in Germany and by Amazon AWS. Amazon AWS is is hosted in a location close to its users. For all users, Amazon AWS is used for data storage in Ireland. Moreover, Amazon AWS is used for processing smart home requests. For this purpose and for users in Europe and India, a Amazon AWS in Ireland is utilised; for users in North America, Amazon AWS in the United States (North Virginia); for users in the Far East, Amazon AWS in the United States (Oregon).

URL Routine Trigger

URL Routine Trigger is a smart home skill for Amazon Alexa that allows you to trigger your Alexa routines by opening a URL that is provided by the URL Routine Trigger. It is a very powerful tool for starting and stopping Alexa routines either manually by opening the URL provided or by using the URL from within a script or any other software that can open URLs.

The URL Routine Trigger consists of two components: (i) an Alexa smart home skill that will provide smart home devices (doorbells) in your Alexa environment; and (ii) a web-based backend for configuring your triggers.

For every trigger you configure, we store a randomly generated trigger ID, a randomly generated security token, the name of the trigger and the number of times the trigger was called.

The services for this Alexa skill and its web-based backend are hosted by dogado GmbH in Germany and by Amazon AWS. Amazon AWS is is hosted in a location close to its users. Amazon AWS is used for processing smart home requests. For this purpose and for users in Europe and India, a Amazon AWS in Ireland is utilised; for users in North America, Amazon AWS in the United States (North Virginia); for users in the Far East, Amazon AWS in the United States (Oregon). For all users, dogado in Germany is used for data storage.

URL Switch

URL Switch is a smart home skill for Amazon Alexa that allows you to call URLs from your Alexa environment. You can call your UR Switches using voice commands and embed them in Alexa routines.

The URL Switch consists of two components: (i) an Alexa smart home skill that will provide smart home devices (power controllers) in your Alexa environment; and (ii) a web-based backend for configuring your switches.

For every switch you configure, we store a randomly generated switch ID, the name of the switch, the URLs you provided, the URL retrieval methods (e.g., HTTP GET), and the number of times the switch was called.

Wetter in Wien Hietzing

Wetter in Wien Hietzing is a flash briefing skill for Amazon Alexa that offers the current weather in the Hietzing district of Vienna, Austria. This skill does not offer any personalised features. Therefore, identification of you as a user is not required. This skill and its backend services do not collect or store any data from, or about, you. The backend services for this flash briefing skill are hosted by dogado GmbH in Germany.

Further Uses

We may combine the data collect from, and about, you in order to offer you new software and services, which may enable us in the future to offer you more personalised services and content. We may use these data to contact you and offer you new software and services.

We may use the data collected from, and about, you in accordance with our terms of use or to provide information to (i) the issuer of a criminal or civil subpoena; (ii) governmental authorities when legally required to do so; or (iii) governmental authorities investigating a crime. We reserve the right to contact you at any time regarding software- or service-related issues or questions as well as changes to our terms of use or our privacy policy or any other policy that may affect you and your use of our software and services.

Payment

Virtual Smart Home™ makes use of Paddle as authorised reseller (merchant of record). I.e., if you purchase any software, products, or services from Virtual Smart Home™ or if you contribute financially to the further development any the software, products, and services offered by Virtual Smart Home™, you will enter into a contract with Paddle. All payments are processed by Paddle and you will receive an invoice from Paddle. The invoice will contain a reference to either Virtual Smart Home™ or to Josef Kolbitsch as the legal representative of Virtual Smart Home™.

For every payment process you intiate, we submit your IP Address, your name, your e-mail address, and a randomly generated customer ID to Paddle. The IP address is required to determine your location in order to offer you a suitable currency and tax conditions for the country you are located in. The remaining data are required to associate any successful payments with your Virtual Smart Home™ user account.

Security

The software developed by Virtual Smart Home™ is implemented according to the state-of-the-art standards in secure software architecture and secure development. The environment in which the software is developed adheres to the current standards in information security, e.g., encrypted filesystems, strong passwords etc. Virtual Smart Home™ permanently has its publicly facing services monitored for security issues by SecurityScorecoard. Virtual Smart Home™'s security results are actively published on securityscorecard.com.

Any information we collect, store and process is stored in IT infrastructures with limited, tightly controlled access and in the European Union. We will not use or intentionally disclose any personal information about you to any third parties without your consent.

dogado GmbH, a German IT provider, is ISO 27001 certified and runs its infrastructure in ISO 27001 certified datacentres. Moreover, Amazon AWS's services in Ireland, in the United States (North Virginia and Oregon) are used; they are ISO 27001 and ISO 27018 certified. Freshdesk, the support system used by Virtual Smart Home™, is ISO 27001 certified. Paddle, Virtual Smart Home™'s authorised reseller (merchant of record), is SOC 2 and PCI DSS compliant.

Opt-in and Opt-out

All software and services provided by Virtual Smart Home™ are opt-in. You are free to download and use the software. Your personal information will only be requested when they are essential for the usage of the software or services (privacy by design). If you do not wish to provide your personal information when we ask you for it, you will not be able to use the services.

Hence, opting out of a software or service, where you previously provided you personal information, means that you will no longer be able to use this software or services. In this case, please uninstall the software or stop using the services.

Correction and Deletion of your Data

If you wish to have all your data to be deleted, please contact us and provide (i) your username; (ii) a proof of identity; and (iii) the name of the software or service for which we should delete your data.

Please note that we pursue a strict privacy by design policy. I.e., we collect, store and process your data only if they are essential for offering a software or service. Hence, deletion of your data effectively means that you will not be able to use the corresponding software or service any longer.

Policy Modifications

Changes to the terms of use, this privacy policy or any other policy may occur from time to time. Changes will be made available on virtualsmarthome.xyz, so please be sure to check the information regularly for updates. In accordance with this privacy policy, we may inform you by e-mail about major changes to the terms of use or any of our policies if we store your e-mail address.

Comments, Questions and Contact

If you have any comments, questions or would like to report any issues, please contact us.

This version of the privacy policy was published on 9 July 2020 and last updated on 2 September 2024. Most recent change: Added Paddle as authorised reseller (merchant of record); minor corrections.

In order to foster transparency, you can also access the previous update of this privacy policy dated 30 January 2024.