Our six commitments, and what they mean day to day

Our about page carries six sentences about what we stand for. Writing six sentences costs nothing. That is the trouble with lists like these: they read the same everywhere, and they rarely tell you what they mean on an ordinary Tuesday morning.

This post takes the six commitments one at a time. For each, a concrete case from an ordinary working day — a joinery receiving a quote request, a language school collecting enrolments, a private individual opening an account — and then the limit: what the commitment expressly does not cover. The second part matters more. A commitment without a stated limit is advertising.

1. Data in Switzerland

The sentence: our apps store your data on infrastructure in Switzerland.

Day to day. A joinery in Thun receives a quote request through a form: name, phone number, address, a description of the kitchen the customer wants. That answer is stored in a data centre in Switzerland and stays there until it is deleted. If the customer later asks where her details are held, the answer is a place and a country, not a region.

That can be looked up rather than believed. Our own forms on this website run on Supabase, and Supabase’s list of regions reads “Central Europe (Zurich), eu-central-2”. It is a statement by the provider, at an address where you can check it.

Where the sentence stops. It covers the data an app stores for you — not everything we run. This website is delivered through Cloudflare, an international provider. In its Regional Services documentation, Cloudflare describes that traffic is accepted at Cloudflare data centres worldwide, and that only the functions which need decrypted traffic are applied at locations inside the configured region. Technical data arising when a page is requested may therefore be processed outside Switzerland as well. Our privacy policy says so, and we would rather repeat it here than stretch one sentence over everything.

Second: a storage location is a place, not a statement about who may look inside. Whoever uses a piece of software normally remains the controller under the Swiss Data Protection Act (FADP); the provider is a processor (Art. 5 let. j and k FADP). Access is a separate question, and a data centre in Zurich does not answer it.

2. Your data is not for sale

The sentence: we do not sell, rent or pass on your data.

Day to day. A language school in Bellinzona collects course enrolments. The email addresses from those enrolments go to no marketing list, no data broker and no analytics tool that joins them into a profile. There is no second use we earn anything from: we earn from the app, not from the contents of the enrolments.

The law has a term for this that is wider than people expect. Under Art. 5 let. e FADP, “disclosing” means transmitting personal data or making it accessible — not only selling it. And under Art. 19 para. 2 FADP, the information given at collection includes, where applicable, the recipients or categories of recipients.

Where the sentence stops. “Not for sale” does not mean “nobody but us touches the data”. Every piece of software has a chain behind it: hosting, email delivery, error reporting. Such providers are processors, and the law permits that arrangement under conditions (Art. 9 FADP) — a processor may delegate processing to a third party only with the prior authorisation of the controller (Art. 9 para. 3 FADP). So the honest wording is: we do not turn your data into a product. That leaves untouched the question of which service providers are needed to run the thing — and that question is answered by a list, not by a principle.

It also says nothing about statutory duties to give information to the authorities. No provider can promise its way out of those.

3. No AI training on your data

The sentence: your data is not used to train AI models.

Day to day. A practice records appointment notes. Those notes are the practice’s working material, not training material. They are not placed in a dataset a model learns from — neither ours nor anyone else’s.

The anchor for that sits in the law, not only in a self-declaration: personal data may be collected only for a specific purpose that is evident to the data subject, and may be processed only in a way compatible with that purpose (Art. 6 para. 3 FADP). In 2023 the FDPIC stated that the FADP is drafted in a technology-neutral way and is therefore directly applicable to AI-supported data processing as well.

Where the sentence stops. It is about your data, not about technology in general. It is not a statement about whether an app will ever contain a feature built on a model; it says where the model does not learn from. And it is not a statement about other providers. What another product does with its customers’ data is written in that product’s documentation, and that is where it should be read.

4. Swiss data-protection law as the standard

The sentence: we design to the Swiss Data Protection Act and build privacy in from the start.

Day to day. This is the commitment most likely to stay abstract, so here are four places where it becomes visible.

What the law says	How you notice it
Processing must be designed technically and organisationally to comply with the rules, considered from the planning stage (Art. 7 para. 1 FADP)	A field that does not exist cannot be stored wrongly
Default settings limit processing to the minimum required for the purpose (Art. 7 para. 3 FADP)	Extra fields are optional, not switched on by default
Information on request, as a rule within 30 days and in principle free of charge (Art. 25 paras. 6 and 7 FADP)	There is a way to ask, and an address it reaches
Release of one’s own data in a commonly used electronic format (Art. 28 para. 1 FADP)	An export that genuinely takes the data with you

For the language school in Bellinzona that means: if a participant wants to know what is stored about her, there is a procedure for it, and the answer costs her nothing.

Where the sentence stops. “Standard” is not “certified” and not “fully compliant”. Whether a given processing operation was lawful is decided in the end by an authority or a court, not by the provider. We can say what we design to; we cannot promise an outcome that others determine.

There is also a division of roles that often gets lost: a business using our app remains responsible for its own processing. We supply the tool and the facts about it. Which fields it collects, and how long it keeps them, the business decides.

5. Made for Switzerland

The sentence: German, French, Italian and English. CHF, the QR-bill, cantons, Swiss holidays and Swiss terminology.

Day to day. It reads like a list, but it is a series of decisions a product either makes at the start or retrofits later.

Languages. The national languages are German, French, Italian and Romansh (Art. 4 of the Federal Constitution); the official languages of the Confederation are German, French and Italian, and Romansh too in dealings with people who speak it (Art. 70 para. 1). An app built multilingual from the outset has no language switch that drops into English halfway through.

Payments. The QR-bill has been in circulation since June 2020 and replaced the previous payment slips on 1 October 2022, as SIX describes on its page about the standard. Anyone invoicing in Switzerland works with it — not with a format designed for a different payment system.

Calendars. 1 August is the only federal public holiday; under Art. 20a of the Labour Act the cantons may treat at most eight further holidays as equivalent to Sundays, and which ones those are differs from canton to canton. For an appointment overview that means “public holiday” is not a single list but one list per canton.

Where the sentence stops. It describes the starting point, not the feature set. Building for Switzerland does not say that a particular app will contain a particular function — planned apps are described in the future tense, and which features they end up with is stated on their own page once it is settled. Nor does it mean an app knows every cantonal and communal peculiarity. Where it makes an assumption, that assumption belongs in plain sight and should be changeable.

6. Fair, clear pricing in CHF

The sentence: a price a small business can decide on without a procurement process, stated once it is settled.

Day to day. “Clear” means two things here: in francs, and complete. The Swiss price indication ordinance (PBV) has a useful term for it. Where goods are offered to consumers for purchase, the price actually payable must be indicated in Swiss francs (Art. 3 para. 1 PBV), and public charges passed on, as well as any other surcharges that are not freely chosen — notably for reservation, service or handling — must be included in it (Art. 4 para. 1 PBV). That is precisely the sum a joinery would rather not have to do itself before it knows what a piece of software costs per month.

Where the sentence stops. There is no figure here, and that is deliberate: as long as a price is not settled, any number would be a commitment we might not keep. For the same reason there is no date. And “fair” does not mean “cheapest”. We do not make software cheap by earning money from your data — that is the other side of commitment number two, and it has a cost.

What the six sentences add up to

They are not a seal of approval. Nobody has audited them, and they do not stand in for a certificate. They are six checkable statements: for four of them you can look up whether we keep to them — in the privacy policy, in the provider’s stated region, in the export function, in the price. For two of them — no selling, no AI training — what remains is an undertaking you can believe or not; saying so is more honest than leaving it out.

The same six questions can be put to any provider, ourselves included. Where the answer names a page it is written on, it is worth more than the sentence itself. And if one of our commitments strikes you as unclear or too broadly drawn, write to us. A commitment that cannot survive a follow-up question is badly worded.