Privacy policy

Last updated: 2026-10-05

This page explains what personal data Martialis (martial.is) collects, why, and what rights you have over it. It covers two different things: the account-related parts of the site (sign-in, settings, the monthly updates newsletter), and the personal data of living people recorded in the public lineage database itself (names, dates, photographs, teacher/student relationships). These have different legal bases and are covered separately below.

Who is responsible for your data

Martialis is operated by Frederico Muñoz, Lisbon, Portugal, contactable at [email protected]. This is the “controller” for the purposes of data protection law.

Part 1: Account data

What we collect

• Account email address. Whether you sign in with Google, GitHub, or a direct email link, we receive and store your email address.
• Name and profile picture. If you sign in with Google or GitHub, these providers share what you've made available on your account. Google shares your name, email address, and profile picture URL. GitHub shares your username, public name (if set), email address, and avatar URL.
• Your saved preferences: interface language, and, if set, your default lineage focus person.
• Whether you've opted in to monthly updates, and when.
• Your free self-profile, if enabled: a display name, short bio, and an optional claimed lineage link (“student of …”), which you provide yourself; the photo shown is the same one from your sign-in provider (Google/GitHub, see above), kept in sync automatically – there is no separate profile photo to provide or store. This is off by default: your profile is a private draft until you explicitly publish it. A published profile is reachable by anyone who has its link, but is never listed, indexed, or made searchable. You can unpublish it at any time, which immediately makes it private again.
• Your bookmarks, if you save any: the entries you bookmark, and when. They are private: only you can see them, they are never shown on your profile, and they are deleted with your account.
• Minimal server request logs (the kind any web server keeps briefly for security and troubleshooting), kept for a short, limited period.
• If you submit a correction or suggestion for a database entry while signed in, your display name is included alongside the suggestion text when it is emailed to the maintainer for review. Your email address is included only if you tick the optional “you may contact me about this suggestion” box; otherwise it is never sent. This processing relies on our legitimate interest in spam prevention and in being able to trace and act on submissions (Art. 6(1)(f)), and submissions are retained only until triaged, after which the email is deleted (see “Who else processes this data” below).
• If you ask to have your profile confirmed as belonging to an entry in the database, the request is emailed to the maintainer with your account's email address and whatever supporting information you provide. That address is required there – it is how we reply – and is used for nothing else. Requests are kept in the maintainer's mailbox until they are decided and are never published; a decision changes only your profile, never the database entry. Once confirmed, a published profile is linked from that entry's page; a draft is not. You can remove the confirmation yourself at any time from your profile.

We do not collect payment information, browsing history across other sites, or any special category of data (health, religion, etc.).

Cookies

Martialis uses a small number of cookies, all of them strictly necessary to make the site work:

None of these are used for advertising or cross-site tracking, so no cookie consent banner is shown: none is required for strictly necessary, functional cookies under EU law.

Why we process this data

• Signing you in and running your account: necessary to provide the service you asked for (performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b)).
• Security and abuse prevention: our legitimate interest in keeping the site working for everyone (Art. 6(1)(f)).
• The monthly updates newsletter: only with your explicit, freely given consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), requested separately from anything else, never pre-selected, and recorded with a timestamp and the exact wording you agreed to. Consent is withdrawable at any time (see “Your rights” below), and withdrawal stops further processing for that purpose.

We do not put account creation, sign-in, or suggestion handling under consent: those run on the contract and legitimate-interest bases above, so they do not stop working if you decline the newsletter.

Who else processes this data

We use a small number of external providers (“processors”) to run the site:

Data processing agreements are in place or being put in place with each of these; the underlying hosting infrastructure is not itself a data processor for personal data covered by this policy.

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone for their own marketing purposes.

Supabase, Brevo, and Hetzner resources are all in EU-located regions.

Donations

Support Martialis links to Stripe Payment Links, hosted entirely on Stripe's own pages. We never receive or store your card details. If you answer the optional question about being listed as a supporter, that answer (and the name you give, if any) is stored by Stripe, not by us; there is no supporter list today, but if one is added, only “yes” answers would be used. To withdraw that answer, or ask what was recorded, contact [email protected].

How long we keep your data

We keep your account data for as long as your account exists. If you delete your account (Settings > Delete my account), your account and its associated preferences are deleted immediately and permanently. Server request logs are kept only briefly (days, not months) and then rotated out. Submitted corrections are described above.

If you set a public handle (@handle), it can never be claimed by anyone else once it has been used – including by you again after deletion – because a handle sitting next to lineage claims could otherwise let someone impersonate a deleted account. To make that permanent restriction possible without keeping your handle or email on file, we keep only a one-way salted hash of the handle, indefinitely, plus a one-way salted hash of your email as the sole evidence for a manual, discretionary request to reclaim it later. Neither value is stored as plain text, and a copy of the hashes alone cannot be turned back into your handle or email; nothing reads the email hash automatically.

International transfers

Our processors may process data outside the EEA (for example, on sub-processors' infrastructure). Where that happens, it relies on that processor's own Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent safeguard; we do not transfer your data to a third country ourselves, beyond what is involved in using these processors' services.

Part 2: Personal data in the database

The lineage database itself is about people, most of them historical, some living. For a living person recorded in the database – a name, dates, places, photographs, teacher/student relationships, ranks, and training venues – different rules apply than for site accounts, because this is third-party personal data collected from public and cited sources, not data the person gave us directly.

• Lawful basis: legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)), for archiving in the public interest and historical research (Art. 89(1)), complemented in Portugal by Lei n.º 58/2019, Arts. 24 and 31.
• Not collected: contact details, current training schedules, or any special category of data (Art. 9).
• Where the data comes from: cited public and published sources; see each record's Sources section, which names them.
• Your rights: if you are recorded in the database, you can ask for rectification (Art. 16) of an inaccurate claim, or object (Art. 21) to a specific claim about you. Request via martialis-db's issue tracker or by email to the controller above. Requests are honoured without argument.
• Erasure limits: an erasure request is applied to the current database and every release from that point forward. It does not rewrite git history already published, or alter copies of prior releases already distributed. This is the same limit that applies to any git-based public repository.

This is separate from, and in addition to, the copyright and database-rights notice covering the database as a body of work; see Licensing.

Your rights (account data)

You have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you.
• Correct it if it's wrong.
• Erase it at any time, immediately and without needing to ask us: Settings > Delete my account.
• Take it with you (data portability).
• Withdraw consent to the monthly newsletter at any time, as easily as you gave it: Settings > Monthly updates, or the unsubscribe link in any such email.
• Object to processing based on our legitimate interest.
• Complain to your data protection supervisory authority. In Portugal, this is the CNPD (Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados, https://www.cnpd.pt); in another EU country, normally the authority in your country of residence.

To exercise any of these rights beyond the self-service options above, contact us at [email protected].

Age

Registration requires you to be at least 13 years old (the age set for Portugal under Lei n.º 58/2019, transposing GDPR Art. 8, though since account creation here relies on contract rather than consent as its lawful basis, Art. 8 does not strictly apply). We do not knowingly collect account data from anyone younger.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the site evolves. Material changes will be reflected here with an updated date, and, where they affect the newsletter, may prompt us to ask for your consent again. As of 2026-09-10: correction/suggestion submissions no longer go through GitHub – a git history can't be properly erased, which conflicted with your right to erasure. They are now emailed directly to the maintainer and are kept only until triaged, after which the email is deleted.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: [email protected].