How MakerIndex handles personal data

MakerIndex is managed by Olivier van Embden. For privacy questions, access, correction, objection or deletion requests, contact olivier@oliviersinnovations.nl.

What data do we process?

For submissions or suggested changes, we process the information you enter, the relevant MakerIndex page, your relationship to the makerspace and, optionally, your email address. For administrator and makerspace accounts, we process names, email addresses, password hashes, roles, session data and security data. Public profiles may contain business contact details provided or confirmed by the makerspace.

Purposes and legal bases

We use this data to keep the directory accurate and current, review submissions, record consent, secure accounts and send necessary emails. We process voluntarily connected sources with the makerspace’s consent. Review, abuse prevention, aggregate usage statistics and management of the public directory rely on our legitimate interest in providing a reliable and useful MakerIndex. Account data is necessary to provide the requested management features.

Maker Skill Tree

You can use the Skill Tree without an account. Completed skills and progress remain in this browser’s localStorage until you clear them or delete browser storage. This guest progress is not sent to MakerIndex. You can export your progress as a personal backup. Local storage may be lost if you clear browser data or use private browsing.

With an optional Skill Tree account, we store your username, display name, password hash, progress and session data in our Cloudflare database to sync across devices. We use necessary session and security cookies for this. Signing in merges local and account progress. The guest copy remains stored locally. Your username and password stay private. As we do not ask for an email address, we cannot offer password recovery; keep your password and an export safe.

You can optionally choose one team: a makerspace team or a private team by invitation. The public makerspace team list is based on MakerIndex’s published, visible and active makerspaces. Before joining, you consent to share your display name, XP, counts and your current and subsequently synced completed skills with other members. Only signed-in members of the same team can view member progress, the team leaderboard and who has completed a skill. Joining is your choice and does not prove affiliation with a makerspace or grant management rights. We store your current team and joining time. You can leave or change teams without losing your progress, which ends access through your previous team. Deleting your account also deletes your membership and stored account progress. If you own a private team, that team, its invitations and memberships are dissolved; other members’ personal progress is retained.

Private teams do not appear in the public makerspace list. The owner manages the team name, participants and invitation. Invitations last seven days and can be renewed or revoked. Anyone with a valid link can see the team name and expiry date, then join after signing in and giving consent; the link does not expose member data. We store only a hash of the invitation code in the database. To preserve an open invitation during sign-in or registration, we temporarily store the code in sessionStorage in that browser tab. It is cleared after joining or closing the invitation. The code appears in the link’s fragment and is removed from the URL by the page.

Information sources and AI

A makerspace can separately consent to processing its official website, newsletter, shared spreadsheet and connected social accounts. Cloudflare Workers AI may check text from these sources for explicit changes. MakerIndex retains only a suggestion, a short supporting excerpt and a confidence score; raw newsletter text and social media captions are deleted after processing. No suggestion is published automatically.

Service providers and recipients

Cloudflare provides hosting, databases, queues, security and AI processing. Zoho is used for necessary emails. Meta is involved only when a makerspace connects Instagram. For distance search, MakerIndex sends only the entered postcode, without a house number, to the public PDOK location service. We do not sell personal data.

Retention periods

Public organisation details remain until the makerspace changes them, withdraws consent or the profile is archived.
Contact details in resolved submissions are automatically anonymised after six months. Rejected, unlinked submissions are deleted after twelve months.
Resolved source suggestions and their supporting excerpts are deleted after twelve months; raw source text is deleted immediately after processing.
Password reset links are valid for thirty minutes. Expired tokens, sessions and abuse records are cleared automatically.

Privacy-friendly statistics

To assess MakerIndex’s quality and effectiveness, we count public page views, navigation between public pages and use of the tool finder in our own Cloudflare database. We do not set or read cookies or local browser storage for this, or use visitor IDs, fingerprinting or an external analytics service. We therefore cannot link visits to a person or previous visits. A statistics preference or temporary daily identifier from an older version is only removed from local browser storage on the next visit. Management pages, account pages and consent links are not measured.

Referring websites are assigned only to a fixed source category; we do not store full referring URLs. For the tool finder, we retain only a fixed tool category or machine selection, whether results were found and, when a postcode filter is used, the first two postcode digits, such as 35xx. Free search text is classified locally and is not sent to statistics. The statistics database does not store exact postcodes, coordinates, IP addresses, browser characteristics or individual browsing history. The chosen search area does not indicate where you live or are currently located.

Statistics consist only of daily totals and are retained for at most 90 days, including the current day. We send no statistics when a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal is present.

A/B tests

On the Dutch homepage, we sometimes compare different search button labels. One variant is chosen at random for each page load, without cookies, local browser storage or visitor IDs. For each test, variant and day, we only count how often the button is visible and how often it is clicked. At most one click per impression counts. These totals are retained for up to 90 days. Browsers with Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control do not participate. For SEO period comparisons, we also store manually imported daily totals from Google Search Console for the homepage: date, clicks and impressions. These contain no individual search queries or visitor data. SEO schedules and these Google daily totals are retained so that periods can be compared.

Security, cookies and logs

MakerIndex uses secure, restricted session cookies for signed-in accounts and no advertising or statistics cookies. Public forms and the statistics endpoint are protected by rate limits and abuse checks. Technical logs may contain IP addresses and request data and are used only for security and troubleshooting.

Your rights

You can request access, correction, deletion, restriction or transfer of your personal data, object to processing or withdraw consent. Send your request to olivier@oliviersinnovations.nl. We may ask for more information to verify your identity. You can also lodge a complaint with the Dutch Data Protection Authority.

Changes

We update this policy when our services or processing change. The current version is always available on this page. Last substantive update: 18 October 2026.