Privacy Policy
Last updated: 21 September 2026
1. Who we are
This site, vilvaathiban.com, is the personal site and blog of Vilva Athiban Periyasamy Boominathan, an individual based in Germany. He is the data controller for the processing described on this page.
Contact: vilvaathiban@gmail.com. The full legal notice is on the Impressum page.
2. What we collect
This is a static site: the pages are pre-built files served to your browser. There are no accounts, no logins, no comment form, no newsletter sign-up handled here, and no database.
Beyond the access logs kept by our hosting provider (section 3) and — only if you agree to it — Google Analytics (section 4), we collect nothing about you. We do not sell data and we do not use it for advertising.
3. Server logs
Our hosting provider records standard access logs when your browser requests a page. These typically include your IP address, the time of the request, the page requested, the referring page, and your browser and operating system version.
This happens for every website on the internet and is necessary to deliver the page, keep the site available, and investigate abuse or errors. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in a secure and functioning website, Article 6(1)(f) GDPR. We do not combine these logs with anything else and we do not use them to identify visitors.
4. Cookies and analytics
We use Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages people find useful — how visitors arrive, which articles they read, and how far down they get. We use it to improve what we write, not to profile individuals, and we do not use it for advertising.
Nothing loads until you agree. When you first visit, a banner asks whether you accept analytics cookies. Until you choose "Accept", no analytics script is downloaded, no cookie is set, and no data about your visit is sent to Google. If you choose "Reject", or simply ignore the banner, that remains true for your entire visit. The site works identically either way.
If you accept, Google Analytics sets cookies (named _ga and _ga_<id>) that hold a randomly generated identifier. That identifier lets us recognise a returning browser so a person who reads three pages is counted once rather than three times. We enable IP anonymisation, so your IP address is truncated before it is stored. These cookies expire after up to two years, and analytics data is retained for 14 months.
What we measure, if you accept: the pages you view, roughly how far you scroll, which sections of an article hold your attention, how long you stay, and whether you click a link that leads off the site. This is aggregated in Google's reporting; we do not attempt to identify individual readers.
Who receives it: Google Ireland Limited, and its parent Google LLC in the United States, act as our analytics provider. Data may be transferred outside the EU; Google relies on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework for those transfers. Google's own description is at policies.google.com/privacy.
Legal basis: your consent, under Article 6(1)(a) GDPR and § 25(1) TTDSG. You can withdraw it at any time using the link in the footer — or right here. Withdrawing deletes the analytics cookies from your browser and stops any further collection. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of what was collected beforehand.
Strictly necessary cookies: any cookie required to make the site work (for example, keeping you signed in, or remembering this very cookie choice) is stored on your own device, is not shared with anyone, and does not require consent. Your cookie choice itself is kept in your browser's local storage under the key cookie-consent and is never sent to us.
5. Who else receives data
Our hosting provider, which serves the pages and keeps the access logs described in section 3, and Google, for analytics, but only if you accepted analytics cookies. Nobody else.
Pages on this site link out to third-party platforms (for example GitHub, LinkedIn, YouTube, Medium and dev.to). Following such a link takes you to a service with its own privacy policy, over which we have no control.
6. Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to access your personal data, to have it rectified or erased, to have its processing restricted, to object to processing, and to data portability. Where processing is based on consent, you may withdraw that consent at any time — for analytics, through the link.
In practice we hold no account or contact record for you, so for most requests there is simply nothing on our side to retrieve or delete. Write to vilvaathiban@gmail.com if you want to exercise a right.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority — in Germany, the authority of the federal state in which the operator resides.
7. The mobile apps
This page is also the privacy policy for our iPhone and Android apps. Those apps do their work on your device: the voice notes, chats, photos and audio files you open stay on the phone, are not uploaded to us, and we never see them. There is no account and no sign-in.
The one exception is advertising. Our free apps show banner ads through Google AdMob: every free app on Google Play, and the free Opus to MP3 Converter on iPhone. To serve them, the Google Mobile Ads SDK collects your device's advertising identifier and standard technical information such as device type, coarse location derived from your IP address, and whether an ad was shown, and shares it with Google as the ad provider. We ask for non-personalised ads, and we do not receive, store or sell any of it ourselves.
In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland the app asks for your consent before any ad loads, and shows no ads if you decline. You can reopen that choice from inside the app at any time. On iPhone you are also asked separately whether the app may track you, and declining changes nothing about what the app can do. Anywhere in the world you can reset or delete your advertising identifier — Android Settings under Privacy → Ads, or iOS Settings under Privacy & Security → Tracking — and apps that offer a paid unlock remove the ads entirely. Google's own policy explains what it does with the data: policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.
Our paid iPhone apps contain no advertising SDK at all — not disabled, not present. Paying for an app is the alternative to being advertised to, so it would be wrong to charge and then show ads anyway.
8. Changes
We update this page when the site changes, and we change the date at the top when we do.