Privacy Policy
This page describes, in general terms, what QsoLab collects and why. It's kept intentionally general about a few details that may still change as the project grows -- our hosting setup, exact retention periods, and how account closure is handled -- and isn't a substitute for legal advice. We'll update it, and the date below, as those details firm up.
Who we are
QsoLab is operated by Konstantin Lisitsyn (callsign SP5LST) as an individual project, without a registered company or club behind it. QsoLab is currently based in Poland.
Contact for anything below: [email protected]
What we collect
- Account: a username, e-mail address and password to sign up locally -- or, if you sign in with Google instead, your Google account id and the e-mail Google shares with us. We never see your Google password.
- Callsign: the callsign(s) you claim on your profile, entirely optional.
- Profile: things like your grid, country, station details, and coordinates if you choose to enter them -- all optional, and only used to personalise your account and, where relevant, to help compute marathon distances.
- Your QSO log: the contacts you enter or import, including the other station's callsign and whatever other details you log about the contact (band, mode, and similar fields; roughly what an ADIF file carries). Logging anything at all is entirely up to you.
- Cookies: the ones needed to keep the site working and keep you signed in securely, plus a couple that just remember your preferences (like your light/dark theme and whether the sidebar is collapsed). We don't use cookies for advertising or cross-site tracking.
- Site analytics: we use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see aggregate traffic -- which pages get visited, roughly where visitors come from. It's cookieless: it sets no cookie and uses no identifier that could tie one visit to another, so it runs without asking you first, much like counting lines in a server log would. It never sees your account, callsign, or anything else tied to who you are.
About the other station in your QSOs
A logged contact necessarily involves someone else -- their callsign, and possibly other details about the contact, become part of your log. That person is very often not a QsoLab user and has no direct relationship with us. We keep that information because a contact log wouldn't mean much without it, and because some of it (like location) is what lets us compute distance for marathon scoring.
If you submit a QSO to a marathon, your callsign, the other station's callsign, and some details about that specific contact (band, mode, your score, distance, and similar) appear on that week's public leaderboard -- that's inherent to a public competition. Details we don't need for that purpose stay private.
If you're that "other station" and have a question about how your callsign or contact details are used, or want something corrected or removed, write to [email protected] -- the same rights below apply to you, not only to people with a QsoLab account.
Who else sees your data
- Hosting: QsoLab currently runs on infrastructure we operate ourselves; we're planning to move to a commercial hosting provider (Hetzner, based in the EU) at some point.
- E-mail: account and password-reset e-mails go out through Cloudflare.
- Cloudflare: also runs the cookieless site analytics described above and, as our DNS/CDN provider, sees the same traffic any hosting provider would.
- Google: only involved if you choose to sign in with it.
We don't sell your data, and we don't use it for advertising.
How long we keep it
Roughly: for as long as your account is active. We don't yet have a fixed, published schedule for things like log or backup retention -- that's something we intend to formalise, and this page will be more specific once we have.
If you ask us to close your account, we'll do what we reasonably can to remove your data. Because of how competition results are stored today, we may not always be able to remove every trace of your participation from past, already-published results without affecting other participants' standings for that competition -- if this matters to you, tell us before asking, and we'll talk through what's actually possible.
Your rights
Under GDPR and similar laws, you can generally ask to access, correct, export, restrict, object to, or delete data we hold about you, and withdraw any consent you've given (for example, for optional profile fields or future analytics). Write to [email protected] and we'll do our best to help, normally within a month. You can also raise a complaint with a data protection authority -- Poland's UODO, or the one in your own country -- if you're not satisfied with our response.
Automated scoring
Marathon and rating scores are calculated automatically from formulas published on the Rules pages. They only affect your standing in the game -- they don't affect your account status or access to the site.
Changes
We'll update this page as things change, and note that here.
Last updated: 2 September 2026