Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 27.10.2026

This policy explains what personal data LakeBooking collects, why, who it is shared with, how long it is kept, and what you can do about it. It describes what the platform actually does. If you find something here that does not match your experience of the service, please tell us at contact@lakebooking.com.

1. Who we are

LakeBooking S.R.L. is the data controller for the processing described here.

• Registered office: Strada Dr. Leonte Anastasievici, Nr. 9, Camera 2, Etaj 1, Ap. 2, Sector 5, Bucharest, Romania
• CUI: 55420249
• Trade Register: J2026049620005
• Email for privacy matters: contact@lakebooking.com

We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer. You can raise any privacy question at the address above.

2. What this policy covers

lakebooking.com and the LakeBooking booking service. It covers anglers who book a lake or a fishing experience, hosts who list a lake or run fishing experiences, and visitors who only browse.

Lake hosts and experience hosts decide things about their own venue or day and their own customers that we do not control. Where a host uses your booking details for their own purposes at the venue or on the day, they act as a controller in their own right for that use.

3. What we collect, why, and on what legal basis

We only collect what a given feature needs. Fields marked optional can be left empty, and the platform works without them.

Account and authentication

• Data: name, email address, username, password (stored only as a hash, never in readable form), and optionally a phone number, short bio, profile photo, address, country, county, city, postcode, language, currency and time zone.
• Also recorded: whether your email is verified, whether you have two-factor authentication enabled, when you accepted the Terms and which published version, and the sign-in sessions on your account (IP address, browser user agent, last activity) so you can see and end them.
• Why: to create and run your account, sign you in, keep the account secure, and show prices, dates and messages in the right language and currency.
• Legal basis: performance of a contract with you (art. 6(1)(b)). Keeping the account secure also rests on our legitimate interest in preventing unauthorised access (art. 6(1)(f)).

Signing in with Google or Facebook

Covered separately in section 4.

Finding lakes near you

• Data: an approximate country, worked out from your IP address, on your first visit. If you have granted your browser's location permission to this site, also your device's coordinates.
• Why: to pick a sensible default language, currency and search area, and to centre search results on where you are.
• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in showing you relevant results and the right language on a first visit (art. 6(1)(f)) for the country estimate; your consent (art. 6(1)(a)) for the precise device location, which your browser asks for separately and which you can revoke at any time in your browser's site settings.
• What happens to it: the country estimate is kept in a first-party cookie on your device. Device coordinates are used to centre the search and are sent to our own servers to run it. Neither is stored on your account, and neither is shared with an advertiser. If you pan the map or run a search, the coordinates appear in the page address, which is what makes a set of results shareable as a link.
• We never ask for location on page load. Without your permission the site falls back to the country estimate, and everything works.

Bookings

• Data: the lake, package, swims, dates, number of anglers, guests and rods, the price, the contact name, email and phone you enter for the booking, and any note you add for the host.
• Why: to make, confirm, change and cancel the reservation, and to let you and the host contact each other about it.
• Who sees it: the host sees your name and your booking from the moment you book. Your email address and phone number reach the host once your booking is confirmed, so that you can arrange the day. Until then you write to each other in the booking's message thread.
• The host's contact details: from the same moment, your ticket and your confirmation email show the lake's contact email, phone number and WhatsApp as the host saved them in Lake settings, and the reminder the evening before repeats them.
• Legal basis: performance of a contract with you (art. 6(1)(b)).

Fishing experiences you book

• Data: the experience and the date, the number of places, the contact name, email and phone you give for the booking (or those of your account), the names of the other participants if you choose to give them, any note for the host, your confirmation that every participant meets the age requirement, holds the licences the day needs and accepts the Experience Host Standards (with the version of that wording and when you confirmed it), and the cancellation window that applied when you booked.
• Why: to hold and confirm your places, apply the minimum-group rule and its refunds, tell you what happens to the date (confirmed, moved or cancelled, the reminder the evening before, the review request the morning after), and let you and the host write to each other.
• Legal basis: performance of a contract with you (art. 6(1)(b)).
• Who sees it: for a paid booking that stands, the host of the experience sees the contact name, email and phone, the participants' names, your note, the number of places and the amount to collect on the day, together with your account name and profile photo. A hold that was never paid is not shown to the host. Other participants never see your details. If you book places for other people, tell them that their names go to the host.
• The meeting point: the exact place and the host's instructions are shown to paid participants once the date is confirmed.

Payments

• Data: the amount, the currency and an identifier for the payment. Your card number, expiry and security code are entered directly into Stripe's own payment form and never reach LakeBooking's servers. We store Stripe's payment identifier so we can match a payment to a booking and issue a refund.
• Why: to take the online booking fee and to refund it where the booking rules require.
• Legal basis: performance of a contract with you (art. 6(1)(b)). Stripe's fraud prevention rests on Stripe's own and our legitimate interest (art. 6(1)(f)).

Invoicing and accounting

• Data: your billing identity and address (which may be a company name, CUI and VAT number), the invoice amounts, and the invoice PDF.
• Why: to issue the fiscal invoice for the booking fee we retain, and to keep the accounting records Romanian law requires.
• Legal basis: compliance with a legal obligation (art. 6(1)(c)).

Messages and support

• Data: the content of messages you send to a host or to platform support (including the thread of an experience booking and, for an experience host, the thread with our team about your hosting), and anything you write in the contact or feedback forms (including your name and email).
• Why: to deliver your message and to answer you.
• Legal basis: performance of a contract for host and booking conversations (art. 6(1)(b)); our legitimate interest in answering enquiries and improving the service for general contact and feedback (art. 6(1)(f)).

Questions to a host

• Data: a question you send a host from an experience page before booking, and the conversation that follows.
• Why: to put you in touch with the host before you book.
• Legal basis: performance of a contract (art. 6(1)(b)).
• The host sees your question and your name.

Reports of content and moderation decisions

• Data: for a report you file about a listing, a review, a catch report or a message, the link, the reason, the words you write, your name and email (or your account) and, to curb abuse, a one-way hash of your IP address. When we decide on content you posted, the decision, its reasons, and a copy of the content as it was.
• Why: to review content that may be illegal or break our rules, to tell you what we decided, to give the person whose content we restricted a statement of reasons, and to handle appeals.
• Legal basis: compliance with a legal obligation (art. 6(1)(c)) under Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, the Digital Services Act, arts. 16 to 18.
• A report goes to our team only, and the person you report is not told who you are, unless the law requires it (a copyright claim they must answer, for example). Where we suspect a criminal offence that threatens someone's life or safety, we pass what is needed to the competent authorities.

Reviews

• Data: your rating, the text you write, any photos you attach, and your display name and profile photo shown alongside.
• Why: to publish honest reviews of lakes and fishing experiences, which is the point of the feature. The review of an experience also counts towards its host's rating.
• Legal basis: performance of a contract (art. 6(1)(b)), since reviewing a completed stay or experience date is part of the service. Reviews are public by design; you are told so before you submit one.

Catch reports

• Data: the species, weight, length, bait, rig, the time of the catch, the photos you upload, the position you pin on the lake map, and any notes you write.
• Why: to keep your own catch log, to build the lake's activity view, and (where you choose it) to appear in the lake's public catch feed.
• Legal basis: performance of a contract (art. 6(1)(b)).
• You choose who sees each catch when you file it, either everyone or only you. Notes are never shown publicly, whatever you choose, and you can change or delete a catch afterwards. Location metadata is removed from photos when they are uploaded (see section 9).

Photos and other uploads

• Data: the image files themselves, plus any caption or alt text.
• Why: to show your profile photo, your catch photos and your lake's gallery.
• Legal basis: performance of a contract (art. 6(1)(b)).
• We strip embedded metadata (EXIF, IPTC, XMP) from every uploaded image before it is stored, which removes GPS coordinates, capture timestamps and device identifiers your camera or phone may have written into the file.

Hosting a lake

• Data: everything about the listing (which is business information, not personal data), plus your identity as the operator, your seller tax details and, if you choose to upload them, identity or registration documents.
• Why: to run the listing, to pay out correctly and to check that a host is who they say they are.
• Legal basis: performance of a contract (art. 6(1)(b)); compliance with a legal obligation for the tax and reporting data (art. 6(1)(c)); our legitimate interest in verifying hosts and protecting anglers from fraudulent listings (art. 6(1)(f)).
• Your contact details: the email, phone number and WhatsApp you save in Lake settings are shown to an angler once their booking is confirmed, on their ticket and in the emails about that booking. They never appear on the public lake page.

Contact details of lakes we list

For a lake we added ourselves from its public information, we keep the contact details the lake publishes (for example, the phone number on its website or page), so that we can check availability and book on behalf of anglers. The legal basis is our legitimate interest (art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). We do not publish these details on the lake page. An angler whose booking we have confirmed receives the lake's phone number, so they can reach the lake on the day. We delete the details when the lake asks us to or when it is no longer listed. You can object at any time at contact@lakebooking.com.

We use the contact addresses lakes publish on their own websites, in their public profiles or in fishing directories to present our online booking service to lake operators by email, once. The basis is our legitimate interest (GDPR art. 6(1)(f)). Every such email shows where the address came from, carries an unsubscribe link that covers every later message, and can be answered at contact@lakebooking.com. You can object at any time; on request we delete the address and keep only a fingerprint of it so that it is never used again.

Hosting a fishing experience

• Data: your application (the message, the links you give, the kinds of experience you plan to run, and your acceptance of the Experience Host Standards with its version), our decision, the notes we send you and our own review notes, your host profile (display name, headline, bio, fishing styles, languages, years of experience, cover photo, social links and audience figures, whether you share your phone number with participants, your currency and time zone), your listings and their dates, your seller tax details, and the bookings your dates receive.
• Why: to review your application, publish your host page and your listings, take bookings for your dates, and look after quality and safety (reports, suspensions, the cancellations counted on your record).
• Legal basis: performance of a contract (art. 6(1)(b)); compliance with a legal obligation for the tax and reporting data (art. 6(1)(c)); our legitimate interest in checking hosts before they sell to anglers and in keeping listings honest (art. 6(1)(f)).
• What is public: your host page shows your display name, profile photo, cover photo, headline, bio, fishing styles, languages, years of experience, social links and audience figures, your rating and reviews, the number of participants you have hosted, when you joined, and your published listings. Your username appears on it unless you made your angler profile private. Our review notes, your tax details, your phone number and the exact meeting points of your listings are never public.
• Your phone number reaches the participants of a date only if you turn on sharing in your host profile, in the reminder they receive the evening before.
• YouTube audience: when the figure is read automatically, we send YouTube (Google) the channel identifier from the YouTube link on your profile, when you save the link and once a day, and show the public subscriber count it returns. The Facebook, Instagram and TikTok figures are the ones you type.
• Where your experiences happen: the public page shows the location at the precision you choose (exact, approximate or county only); the exact meeting point and your instructions go only to paid participants of a confirmed date.

Host verification documents

• Data: an identity document for an individual host, or a company registration certificate for a business.
• Why: to confirm a host can take bookings for the lake they list or the experiences they run.
• Legal basis: our legitimate interest, and yours as an angler, in a marketplace where hosts are real and verified (art. 6(1)(f)). Uploading a document is optional; it supports your tax details, does not affect the Verified badge (which comes from our review of your lake) and is not required to take bookings.
• How they are handled: stored on a private, non-public storage bucket. They are never included in any public page or API response, never reachable by URL, and can only be opened by a platform administrator through an authenticated route. Only administrators reviewing a verification request access them.

Seller tax data (DAC7)

• Data: the seller's identity, tax identification number, address and the consideration paid over the reporting year.
• Why: the EU rules on reporting by digital platform operators (Council Directive 2021/514, "DAC7"), implemented in Romania, oblige us to collect and report this for hosts who earn through the platform, lake hosts and experience hosts alike.
• Legal basis: compliance with a legal obligation (art. 6(1)(c)).

Newsletter and marketing email

• Data: your email address, the language you subscribed in, the date and IP address of your subscription and of your confirmation, and which version of the wording you agreed to.
• Why: to send the newsletter and optional product updates you asked for.
• Legal basis: your consent (art. 6(1)(a)). You can withdraw it at any time from the unsubscribe link in any such email, or from your account's notification settings, without affecting anything else.

Referrals and the affiliate programme

• Data: the referral code you arrived through, and which signups and bookings are attributed to an affiliate.
• Why: to credit the person who recommended us.
• Legal basis: your consent for the cookie that remembers the code (art. 5(3) ePrivacy and art. 6(1)(a)); performance of the affiliate contract for the attribution itself (art. 6(1)(b)). If you decline marketing cookies, no referral is recorded.

Security, abuse prevention and platform operation

• Data: IP addresses in server request logs and rate-limit counters, sign-in sessions, and technical error reports.
• Why: to stop brute-force attempts, spam and abuse, and to find and fix faults.
• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a secure and working service (art. 6(1)(f)).
• Error reports are sent to our monitoring provider with personal data attachment switched off. We do not log message bodies, form contents, passwords, payment details or authentication tokens.

Platform administration

Platform administrators can, for support and fault reproduction, temporarily view the platform as a given user. Every such session is recorded with who did it, to which account and when, and payment, credential and account-deletion actions are blocked while it is happening.

Usage statistics

• Data: the pages you visit, with personal details removed before they are sent (no email addresses, reset links, booking references or map coordinates), your searches and booking steps, a random identifier stored in a cookie, your browser and device type, and a region estimated from your IP address, which Google uses for that estimate only and does not store.
• Why: to learn which pages work and where visitors give up, so we can improve the site.
• Legal basis: your consent (art. 6(1)(a), and art. 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive for the cookies), given through the Analytics category of the cookie banner and withdrawable at any time from Cookie settings in the footer. Nothing is measured until you allow it.
• Provider: Google Analytics, run by Google as our processor. Google signals and advertising features are off, and the data is not used for advertising.
• Retention: 14 months in Google Analytics; the cookies last 12 months or until you withdraw consent, whichever comes first.

4. Signing in with Google or Facebook

You can create an account or sign in with Google or with Facebook instead of a password. If you do:

• What we ask the provider for. From Google, your OpenID identifier, basic profile and email address (openid, profile, email). From Facebook, your email address, name and profile picture. We have narrowed the Facebook request to exactly those fields, so information Facebook would otherwise return by default (such as gender and your profile link) is not sent to us at all.
• What we keep. The provider's identifier for you, the email address, the name and the profile picture URL. The name and picture are a display snapshot refreshed when you sign in; they do not overwrite anything you set on your LakeBooking profile.
• What we do not keep. We do not store the access token or refresh token the provider issues, and we do not call the provider's APIs afterwards. The connection is used to prove it is you, and nothing more. Authorisation codes, tokens and provider payloads are never written to our logs, our redirects or any message sent back to your browser.
• Linking to an existing account. If your provider email matches an existing LakeBooking account, we connect the two automatically only when both sides are verified, that is, when the provider states the email is verified and the LakeBooking account has already verified the same address. Otherwise we ask you to sign in with your password first and connect the account from your security settings. This is deliberate. It prevents someone registering an account with your address and waiting for your sign-in to attach to it.
• If the provider stops sharing your email, we cannot match or create an account and the sign-in fails with an explanation.
• If you disconnect the provider from your security settings, we delete the stored connection. We refuse only when it is your last way in (no password and no other provider), so you cannot lock yourself out.
• If you revoke LakeBooking's access from Google or Facebook, that provider will no longer sign you in. Your LakeBooking account and its data are unaffected; use your password or another provider.
• If you delete your LakeBooking account, the provider connection stops signing you into a live account. Signing in with it during the recovery window offers your account back rather than creating a new one; after the retention window it is erased with the rest.
• Two-factor authentication. Google and Facebook run their own multi-factor checks, which we rely on for these sign-ins. LakeBooking's own two-factor authentication continues to protect password sign-in.
• Browser-managed sign-in. On browsers that support it, your browser itself may offer to sign you in with the Google account you are already signed into in that browser, in a prompt the browser draws (no Google code runs on our page for this). Nothing reaches us until you choose an account. If you do, the browser hands us a signed identity token containing the data listed above and a one-time code we issued; we verify it and keep only what "What we keep" says, never the token itself. Dismissing the prompt sends us nothing. Requires legal review

Google and Facebook process your use of their sign-in service under their own privacy policies (Google, Meta).

Requires legal review Whether LakeBooking and the sign-in providers are independent controllers or joint controllers for the sign-in step, and what that means for this section's wording, is a legal classification we have flagged rather than asserted.

5. Who we share your data with

We share personal data only with the parties below, only for the purposes stated, and only to the extent each one needs. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

We also share data where we are legally obliged to, or where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim.

Note on invoicing. LakeBooking does not currently transmit invoices to the ANAF RO e-Factura system. An earlier version of this policy said it did. If that changes, this policy will be updated before it happens.

6. Where your data is processed

Our hosting is in the European Union. The website is served from Frankfurt, and the application and database are hosted in the EU.

Some of the providers above are established outside the European Economic Area, or may process data outside it, notably Stripe, Google, Meta, Algolia, Sentry, Vercel, Cloudflare and the AI translation providers. Where that happens, transfers rely on the mechanisms in Chapter V of the GDPR, which for these providers is ordinarily the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, an adequacy decision, or the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified.

Requires legal review The exact transfer mechanism relied on for each provider, and confirmation of each provider's current certification status, are being verified. We have stated the factual position (which providers may process data outside the EEA) rather than asserting coverage we have not confirmed.

7. How long we keep your data

Requires legal review The retention period for host verification documents has not been set. Keeping an identity document indefinitely is not defensible under the storage limitation principle, and the automatic deletion is already implemented, but the correct period depends on obligations (anti-money-laundering record keeping, DAC7 due diligence, the window in which a verification decision must remain defensible) that need a legal decision rather than an engineering one. Until it is set, documents are erased when the account is erased.

8. Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, from Account then Security, whether you signed up with a password, with Google or with Facebook. You will be asked to confirm your password; if you signed up with a provider and have never set one, set one first from the forgot-password flow.

What happens:

• Your account is deactivated immediately. You are signed out everywhere, all your sessions and API tokens are revoked, and you can no longer sign in.
• Any lakes you own are taken down with it. If you host fishing experiences, your published listings are unpublished and your upcoming dates are cancelled.
• For 6 months the account is recoverable. If you try to sign in, or sign up again with the same address, or use the same Google or Facebook connection, we offer it back rather than refusing you.
• After that window the account is permanently erased, along with your profile photo, catch reports and their photos, reviews, notifications, favourites, pending invitations, verification documents and their files, newsletter subscription and consent records.
• Bookings and invoices survive, with your account link removed. We are required to keep the invoices for 10 years, and the bookings are the host's own record of business they did. They are not ours to erase on request.
• If you hosted an experience that sold places, your account is not erased after the 6 months. It stays deactivated, together with those listings, so that their participants' bookings and invoices keep their host. Listings of yours that never sold a place are deleted, and the rest of your account then follows the rule above. Requires legal review

We refuse a deletion that would strand someone else, which is the case while you have an upcoming booking or places on an upcoming experience date, while anglers hold upcoming bookings at a lake you own, or while anglers have paid for places on an upcoming date you host. Cancel or complete those first.

9. Photos and location

Photos taken on a phone or camera commonly carry hidden metadata, including the exact GPS coordinates where the photo was taken. We remove that metadata from every image at upload, before it is stored, for profile photos, catch photos, lake galleries, experience photos, host cover photos and testimonial photos alike.

The position shown for a catch is the one you pin on the lake map yourself, not one read from your photo, and you choose whether it is published.

10. Automated decision-making

We do not make decisions about you solely by automated means that produce legal effects or similarly significantly affect you. We do not profile you for advertising.

Automation in the platform is limited to running the service, namely availability and price calculations, booking expiry, the cancellation of an experience date that did not reach its minimum by its deadline, fraud checks performed by Stripe on payments, and machine translation of listing text. None of these decides anything about you as a person.

11. Cookies and similar technologies

Set out in the Cookie Policy. In short, strictly necessary cookies run automatically; everything else runs only if you allow it, and you can change or withdraw that at any time from Cookie settings in the footer.

12. Children

The service is not intended for people under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has given us personal data, write to us and we will delete it.

13. Your rights

You have the right to:

• Access your data, and get a copy of it. You can download a machine-readable copy yourself, at any time, from Account then Security then Download my data.
• Rectify data that is wrong or incomplete. Most of it is editable directly in your account.
• Erase your data. Section 8 explains what this covers and what we must keep.
• Restrict processing while a dispute about accuracy or our grounds is resolved.
• Object to processing based on our legitimate interests, on grounds relating to your situation. We stop unless we can show compelling legitimate grounds that override yours, or the processing is for legal claims.
• Portability for data you gave us that we process on consent or on a contract, in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. This is the same download as above.
• Withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent (marketing email, the newsletter, and non-essential cookies). Withdrawing does not affect what was lawful before you withdrew.
• Complain to a supervisory authority. In Romania this is ANSPDCP, www.dataprotection.ro. You may also complain in the country where you live or work.

These rights are not unconditional, and some do not apply to some data. We cannot, for instance, erase an issued invoice, and we cannot restrict processing that a legal obligation requires. Where we cannot do what you ask, we will say so and explain why.

To exercise a right, use the controls in your account where they exist, or write to contact@lakebooking.com. We answer within one month, and will tell you if we need longer (which the GDPR allows for complex requests). We may need to confirm your identity first.

14. Security

Among other measures, we protect your data with passwords stored only as hashes, optional two-factor authentication, encrypted connections, session cookies that scripts cannot read, cross-site request forgery protection, rate limiting on sign-in and other sensitive actions, private storage for verification documents, unguessable names for non-public files, strict access rules on every API endpoint, and audit records for administrator impersonation.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that is likely to result in a high risk to you, we will tell you and the supervisory authority as the GDPR requires.

15. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we update the date at the top. Where a change is significant, or where it affects processing you consented to, we will tell you and, where consent is involved, ask again.

16. Contact

contact@lakebooking.com, or write to LakeBooking S.R.L. at the registered office in section 1.