Privacy policy

ReviewRay is run by Torsten Mohr, Im Gillesbachtal 54, 52066 Aachen, Germany (“we”). We are the controller for the personal data this page describes.

For questions about privacy, write to support@reviewray.pro.

ReviewRay is a tool for reputation agencies and other professionals. It has three parts:

• the ReviewRay extension for Chrome, which our customers use in their own browser;
• the audit service at app.reviewray.pro, which checks license keys and builds the reports;
• the report pages at app.reviewray.pro, which a customer opens, prints, or downloads as a PDF.

This page is for visitors of this website, for our customers and the people who work for them, and for people who appear in a Google Maps listing that a customer audits: the business, and the people who wrote its reviews.

ReviewRay is a tool for work. It is not made for children.

This website (reviewray.pro) sets no cookie and has no tracking. It loads nothing from another server: no fonts, no scripts, and no pictures.

The website is hosted by Cloudflare. To deliver a page, Cloudflare handles your request with your IP address.

The website has no forms. When you write to us by email, we get your message and your email address, and we use them to answer you.

If you ask us to tell you when ReviewRay is in the Chrome Web Store, we keep your email address until we have told you. We use it for that one email only.

Apart from placing its buttons (below), the extension reads the content of a page only when you start an audit, only in your own browser, and only on three kinds of pages:

• the Google Maps listing of the business you have open (www.google.com/maps/place/…), and at the end of an audit its photo gallery, which the extension opens, counts, and closes again;
• the public profiles of the people who wrote the negative reviews it checks for the report, one profile at a time;
• once in an audit, after those profiles, a Google Search page about the business (www.google.com/search?kgmid=…; for a business in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, with that country’s setting, so that the page shows what people there see): the extension reads only its part that lists the business’s profiles on social sites, and how many products Google shows for the business there, and clicks nothing there.

While it reads the listing’s reviews, a small script of the extension in that tab reads a copy of the answers Google’s page receives for its list of reviews, and keeps of them only when each review was posted and last changed, its stars, and when the owner first answered it, and of the negative reviews their text and the addresses of their photos. These stay in your browser: only those of the reviews in the report are sent, as before. It changes nothing the page shows or sends, and makes no request of its own.

While the extension counts the tabs “By owner” and “Videos” of the photo gallery, the same script reads a copy of the answers Google’s page receives for these two lists, and keeps of them, in the page, only the day each photo or video was posted, with Google’s id for it so that each is counted once. The extension gets from it only the newest day of each list and how many photos and videos it saw, and sends only that day. The ids stay in the page. It changes nothing the page shows or sends, and makes no request of its own.

On each reviewer profile, another small script of the extension, in the window where the profiles open, reads a copy of the answers that profile’s page receives for its own data, so that the extension does not ask Google for that data a second time. It changes nothing the page shows or sends, and makes no request of its own. Where it has no copy of an answer, the extension asks Google for that data once more, as the page did.

With your license key entered, the extension shows its ReviewRay buttons on Google Maps pages: under each business of a list Google Maps shows for a search, and above the tabs of the business you have open. To place them, a small script of the extension looks at how the page is laid out: where the list and its results are, whether each result links to a business, and where the business’s tabs and name are (to tell its panel from the list). It keeps none of it and sends nothing. Only when you click one of the buttons does it read the link to that business, and the extension then starts an audit of it, as this page describes. You can turn the buttons off in the popup.

When you open its popup, before any audit, the extension only looks at the address and the title of the open Google Maps tab, to show which business it is ready to audit. Nothing about that tab is sent at that point.

It reads one reviewer profile at a time, at least 1 second apart, and at most 60 in an audit. It never signs in for you. If, while it reads the profiles, Google shows a CAPTCHA, answers that there were too many requests, or sends a profile to a page the extension cannot read, it opens no more profiles, and no Google Search page, in that audit. Our server never contacts Google.

What your browser does on Google’s pages is also covered by Google’s own privacy policy. To show the icon of the business’s website in the report, your browser asks Google’s icon service for it. This tells Google the host name of that website. In the same way it asks for the icons of the social sites the business has profiles on: this tells Google the site’s own host name, such as instagram.com, never the address of the profile.

The extension sends data to the audit service at app.reviewray.pro, and to nobody else. For each kind of data, this list says why we need it and how long we keep it.

Your license key

To check that your account may run audits. The extension sends the key with each request. The server does not store the key itself: we keep only a keyed hash of it, and its last four characters.

A random device id, made by the extension

To count the devices that use a key. We keep only a hash of it, with the family of the operating system (for example “Mac”), the kind of app, and when the device was first and last seen. It is deleted when the device is freed, or after 90 days without use.

The version of the extension

To ask you to update when that is needed. It is not stored.

The languages and the time zone of your browser

For the language and the date of the report. They are held in memory with the report, and deleted with it.

Your IP address

Every request carries it, as on any website. The audit service uses it in memory only, to limit wrong keys and too many requests. It does not store it, and it does not write it to its log.

Data of the listing

To build the report. It is the public name, address, category, rating, number of reviews, and website of the business, and the address of the listing on Google Maps; whether the business is claimed, its additional categories, where its booking button leads (the host name of the link) and Google’s booking partners, and for a hotel the sites in Google’s price list (no prices); the number of reviews for each star rating; for the newest reviews, back to a little over 12 months (at most 1,000), their date, their stars, and whether they have text, photos, or an answer from the owner (past the first ones only their stars, whether they have text, and how many photos), and for each also how many days ago it was posted, how many minutes the owner took to answer it, and for a negative review whether the audit read it twice; for the negative reviews read with Google’s “Lowest rating” sort, Google’s id of the review, its stars, its date, its number of photos, whether it has an answer from the owner, and how many minutes the owner took to answer it; the number of photos and videos on the listing, how many the owner posted, how many are videos and 360° photos, and the date of the owner’s latest update; the day the newest photo or video was posted on the listing (or Google’s own words for it), from the listing’s data, and the days of the owner’s newest photo or video and of the newest video, from the gallery; the number of services or menu items Google shows for the business, how many of them have a price (and how many show something else where the price goes), the type of each group of them as Google labels it, and the booking platform they come from when it is one the extension knows; and a few facts about the reading itself. All of it is held in memory only. It is deleted 30 minutes after the report was built, or, when no report was built, 30 minutes after the last step of the audit.

The business’s social profiles

To show them in the report. From a Google Search page about the business, the extension sends the social sites Google lists for it, and the address of each profile when the page shows it, as host and path. It sends the site and the address only for the seven sites Google lets owners add to a profile: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, X, and YouTube. Of other sites it sends only how many there are. All of it is held in memory only, and deleted with the report.

The business’s products on Google

To show in the report how many products Google shows for the business. From the same Google Search page, the extension sends how many product cards Google’s panel shows, whether Google shows its “View all” there, and whether it shows the store’s stock; and for a business in one of the countries for which the page is opened with that country’s setting, that country. Nothing else of a product. All of it is held in memory only, and deleted with the report.

Text from reviewer profiles

To read how many times a review was viewed, and to link the report page to that review on Google Maps. The extension sends short pieces of the profile’s public data: at most 400 characters on each side of the review in question, and at most 8 pieces for a profile. The profile’s own Google id is blanked out before sending. It also sends a few figures about that data: how many answers it read, how many reviews they list, whether the page says that the profile is private, and how many of the answers it asked Google for a second time. From the pieces we keep two things with the report, until it is deleted: the view count, and Google’s own link to that review. Everything else is discarded at once. The pieces can hold other public text from the profile, such as the names of other places the person reviewed, or the person’s display name. We never store or log that text.

The reviews chosen for the report

To show them in the report. It is the full text and up to 3 photos of each of these reviews, the icon of the business’s website, the icons of the social sites it has profiles on, and the main photo of the listing. They are held in memory only, and deleted with the report.

Your agency’s settings

They are printed on your reports, on every computer you use. They are what you enter in the popup: the name and the logo of your agency; the name, phone number, email address, website, and booking link of the contact person; an extra contact line; the text of your offer; your color, your currency, your usual figures, and the language. We store them with your account until you change them or the account is deleted.

Not collected: your browsing history, the details of your Google account, and cookies; the names of the people who posted photos, and the texts and photos of the owner’s updates; of the photos and videos whose days the extension reads, the pictures themselves, their web addresses, and Google’s ids for them; the texts of the owner’s answers to reviews; the names, descriptions, and prices of the services and menu items; the names, prices, and pictures of the products. The extension also sends no reviewer’s name and no link to a reviewer’s profile as a field of its own. (A name can be inside the pieces described under “Text from reviewer profiles”. The server discards it at once.)

The audit service keeps its database on a server in Germany. The database holds:

• accounts: the name and the contact email address, the limits of the plan (audits a month, devices for a key), the status, notes of our own, and the agency’s settings named above;
• license keys: as keyed hashes, with their last four characters, a label, and when each key was made, last used, and turned off;
• devices: as described above;
• the dates on which a key holder freed a device, for 30 days;
• audit counts: for each account and month, how many audits were started, finished, and given back;

Nothing from an audit is written to disk: no business, no review, no reviewer, no view count, and no report. Audits and reports exist only in the memory of the server. An audit that is not finished is deleted 30 minutes after its last step, and a report 30 minutes after it was built.

Backups: every day the server makes an encrypted copy of the database. The newest 14 copies stay on the server. A copy of each also goes to Cloudflare R2, a storage service, in the EU. There it is deleted after 30 days.

We keep the account for 30 days after the plan has ended. Then it is deleted, unless a payment is still open or disputed. Its keys, devices, and audit counts are deleted with it. After that, the account is still in the backups until they are deleted.

The log of the audit service has one line for each request: the time, the kind of request, its result, and how long it took. For each audit that ends in a report it has one line more, with numbers only: how many reviewer profiles were read and how fast, how many answers of Google were read and how many of them were asked for a second time, and whether Google showed a CAPTCHA. It holds no IP address, no key, no link to a report, no name, and no data of a business. The log starts new each time we update the service, and only its newest part is kept.

In your browser, the extension keeps your license key, the device id, your choices in the popup, and the last summary of your account. They stay until you remove the extension. The button “Remove the key from this computer” removes the key and the summary.

The extension also keeps how long your last audits took in this browser: three numbers for an audit, for at most 20 audits. They are the number of reviews in the report, the time from the start of the audit until the listing was read, and the time the rest of the audit took. The popup uses them to show about how long an audit takes on this computer. These numbers hold nothing about a business, and they are not sent to us. Only the newest are kept, and all of them go when you remove the extension.

Until you close the browser, the extension also keeps the state of the last audit, and a list of the reports you made in this browser whose links still work: for each one its link, the name of the business, and when the link ends.

We handle personal data on these grounds of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):

• Customers: to carry out our contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). This covers your account, license keys, devices, settings, and audit counts.
• People who work for a customer: our legitimate interest, and the customer’s, in providing the service the customer bought (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
• Security: our legitimate interest in protecting the service (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). This covers IP addresses in memory and the limits on requests.
• This website: our legitimate interest in delivering it to you (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
• Public data of a listing and its reviews: the legitimate interests of our customer and of the business in understanding how the public reviews of the business are seen (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR), within the limits described in the next part.

An audit uses what is already public on Google Maps: the listing of a business, and the reviews written about it.

Reviewers are not named

The report gives them numbers instead of names (“Reviewer 1”). The extension sends no reviewer’s name and no link to a reviewer’s profile as a field of its own.

A link to the review, on the report page only

Until the report page is deleted, it shows a link from each quoted review to that review on Google Maps, so that the review can be checked at its source. It is Google’s own address of the review. The link is not in the printed report and not in the PDF.

No other link to a person

The PDF has at most one link: the agency’s own booking address.

Short-lived

The texts and photos of the reviews in a report, and everything else from the audit, are deleted from the server’s memory 30 minutes after the report was built.

What a report holds about a review

Its text (in Google’s translation, when the original could not be read), its stars, its date as Google shows it, up to 3 of its photos, and how many times it was viewed according to Google’s public count.

The PDF

Our customer can download the report as a PDF and keep it. We keep no copy.

Your rights: we keep nothing from an audit for longer than 30 minutes after its report was built. So we usually hold no data about a reviewer that we could show or delete. You can still write to support@reviewray.pro, and you can object to this use of data (Art. 21 GDPR).

• Hetzner Online GmbH (Germany) hosts the audit service and its database, on a server in Germany.
• Cloudflare, Inc. (USA) hosts this website. It carries the traffic of the website and of the audit service, with IP addresses. To pass it on, it decrypts it for a moment. And it stores the encrypted backups in the EU (Cloudflare R2).
• Google Ireland Limited (Ireland) hosts our mailbox support@reviewray.pro.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not use it for advertising. We give it to nobody else, unless a law requires it.

• Every connection is encrypted (HTTPS).
• License keys and device ids are stored only as hashes. Backups are encrypted.
• Only Cloudflare can reach the web ports of the server.
• The browser that makes the PDF is set to load nothing from the network.

Under the GDPR you can ask us which data we hold about you. You can have it corrected or deleted, have its use restricted, and get a copy of it. You can object to a use that rests on legitimate interests. Write to support@reviewray.pro. We answer within one month.

You can also complain to a data protection authority: the one where you live or work, or the one for us, which is the Landesbeauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf (ldi.nrw.de).

The extension’s use of data complies with the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.

The extension collects only what this page describes, only to check your license and to build the audit report, and it sends it only to our audit service.

When this page changes, we publish the new text here, with a new date.