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Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 13, 2026

This privacy policy explains what personal data is processed when you visit front-matter.de, why, and what rights you have. We keep the data we process to a minimum: the website sets no cookies, shows no ads, doesn’t track you across other websites, and loads fonts, images and scripts only from this website and our own analytics server, not from third-party services.

Who is responsible

Front Matter
Martin Fenner
Redigerstrasse 16
48149 Münster
Germany

Email: info@front-matter.de

Hosting

This website is a static website hosted on Codeberg Pages by Codeberg e.V., Arminiusstraße 2-4, 10551 Berlin, Germany. When you visit the website, your browser sends technical data to Codeberg’s servers, which they need to deliver the pages: your IP address, the date and time of the request, the page requested, the referring page, and your browser and operating system. Codeberg truncates IP addresses when storing them in logs and keeps technical metadata for no more than 7 days. See Codeberg’s privacy policy for details.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in delivering the website securely and reliably (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Web analytics

To understand how the website is used and to improve it, we use HitKeep, a privacy-friendly web analytics software that we host ourselves at analytics.front-matter.de, on servers of Hetzner Online GmbH in Germany. No data is shared with third parties.

HitKeep doesn’t use cookies. When you visit a page, it records the page address, the referring page, the campaign parameters in the address (such as utm_source), your browser’s user agent and language, the size of your screen and browser window, and page load performance (Core Web Vitals). To count visits rather than page views, your browser keeps a random session ID in its session storage, which is deleted when you close the browser tab. This data doesn’t identify you, and we don’t combine it with other data.

If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, HitKeep collects no data at all.

Analytics data is kept in the analytics database for 365 days. Older data is then moved to an archive file on the same server.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in understanding and improving the use of our website (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Contacting us

When you contact us by email, we process the data you send us, such as your name, email address, and message, to answer your request. We delete it when it is no longer needed, unless we are required by law to keep it.

Legal basis: taking steps at your request before entering into a contract, or performing a contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR), and otherwise our legitimate interest in answering your request (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Profile and publications

The profile pages show information we publish about our team members, such as their biography and publications. This information is retrieved from our publication service defter when the website is built, not when you visit it, so visiting these pages sends no data to defter.

Links to other websites

This website links to other websites, such as Codeberg, GitHub, ORCID, Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and DOI links to publications. No data is sent to these websites until you follow a link. Their own privacy policies then apply.

Your rights

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you have the right to:

  • access the personal data we process about you (Art. 15 GDPR),
  • have incorrect data corrected (Art. 16 GDPR),
  • have your data deleted (Art. 17 GDPR),
  • restrict the processing of your data (Art. 18 GDPR),
  • receive your data in a portable format (Art. 20 GDPR),
  • object to processing based on our legitimate interest, on grounds relating to your particular situation (Art. 21 GDPR).

To exercise these rights, contact us at info@front-matter.de.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR). The authority responsible for us is the Landesbeauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit Nordrhein-Westfalen, Kavalleriestraße 2-4, 40213 Düsseldorf, Germany.

Changes to this policy

We update this privacy policy when the website or the services it uses change. The current version is always available on this page.