Privacy Policy

Last updated: 20 July 2026

CustomsWait is a community-powered border crossing wait time tracker. This notice explains what personal data we collect, why we collect it, how long we keep it, and what rights you have over it. We have tried to write it in plain language rather than legal boilerplate.

In short

• You can use CustomsWait without an account, and without telling us who you are. Browsing wait times and submitting a report both work without signing in.
• Submitting a wait time requires your location. Your browser has to give us a satellite fix so we can check you really are at the crossing you are reporting; without one, the report is refused. We use the coordinates to work out how far away you are and which side of the border you are on, and then discard them. They are never stored.
• We ask for an email address in only three places: creating an account, subscribing to the newsletter, and — optionally — when you send us feedback.
• We never sell your data, and we do not share it with advertisers. There are no advertising trackers, no social media pixels, and no data brokers involved in this site.
• Analytics cookies are off until you accept them. If you decline, no analytics cookie is set and no analytics data is sent.
• Wait time reports are not linked to your identity unless you have an account — but they are not perfectly anonymous either, and the "Wait time reports" section below explains exactly what is stored with them.

1. Who is responsible for your data

The controller of your personal data is:

CUBEVO - Bule Ileana Persoană Fizică Autorizată Bulevardul Bucureștii Noi 136, Parter, Apartament 5, Sector 1, Bucharest, Romania CUI: 53281837 · Reg. Com.: F2026001624003

For any privacy question or request, contact hello@customswait.com.

We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer, as we are not required to under Article 37 GDPR. Privacy requests go to the address above.

2. What we collect, why, and on what legal basis

Wait time reports

When you submit a wait time, we store the crossing, direction, waiting time, and the date and time of the report.

Reporting requires your location. The "Location" section below sets out exactly what happens to your coordinates; the short version is that we use them during the request and then throw them away. What stays attached to the report is what we worked out from them: your distance from the crossing in kilometres, the accuracy your device claimed for the fix, in metres, and a label recording how the report was verified.

There are two ways to report. You can type the waiting time once you are through, or you can let us measure it: you tap "I've arrived" when you join the queue and "I've crossed" once you are past the border, and our server puts its own timestamp on each tap and calculates the wait itself. The measured route creates a crossing session record, which holds the crossing and direction, those two timestamps, the distance and accuracy figures from each tap, the vehicle class you chose, and who you are — your user ID if you are signed in, otherwise the client_hash described next. A session you start but never finish expires after 24 hours and is marked abandoned; we do not delete it, because how often people abandon a report tells us something about the service.

We also store a client_hash with every report, including anonymous ones. This is an irreversible hash of a random identifier held in your browser's csrf_bind cookie. It exists so that reports coming from a single browser can be recognised as coming from the same source — which is what lets us detect abuse and, if you later create an account, attach the reports you already made from that browser to it.

We want to be direct about the consequence: this means your earlier anonymous reports can become associated with your account if you sign up from the same browser. The hash cannot be reversed to identify you, and we cannot connect it to you unless you create an account, but it is not the same as your reports being untraceable. If you would prefer this not to happen, clear your cookies before creating an account.

If you are signed in, we additionally store your user ID. We also store the vehicle class you report with. The measured route asks everyone for it, signed in or not, because it decides how far from the crossing you are allowed to mark your arrival — a truck queue is far longer than a car queue. The typed form still offers it only to signed-in reporters.

Reports are published as part of the community dataset and appear in aggregated statistics.

Legal basis: legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) — operating a community data service and protecting it from abuse.

Accounts

To create an account we store your email address, your language preference, your chosen home country, and the times you created the account and last signed in.

We do not use passwords. You sign in through a one-time link or code sent to your email address. We store only a hashed version of your session token and login codes, never the token itself.

Legal basis: performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b)) — providing the account you asked for.

Alerts and favourites

If you set up a wait time alert, we store which crossing and direction you are watching, your threshold, and a record of each time the alert fired. If you save a favourite crossing, we store that too.

These records reveal which border crossings you are interested in and when, so we treat them as personal data and protect them accordingly.

Legal basis: performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b)).

Newsletter

If you subscribe, we store your email address, your language, which of the three categories you opted into, and the timestamps of your consent, confirmation, and unsubscription.

Subscribing uses double opt-in: we email you to confirm before sending anything. Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link. We do not track whether you open our emails or click links inside them.

Legal basis: consent (Article 6(1)(a)). You may withdraw it at any time, and doing so is as easy as giving it.

Feedback and crossing proposals

If you send feedback or propose a new crossing, we store your message and, for feedback, your email address if you choose to provide one — it is optional and used only to reply to you.

Legal basis: legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) — responding to enquiries and improving the service.

Anti-spam and rate limiting

To stop automated abuse we keep short-lived records of how often an action has been performed. These records hold a truncated hash — of an IP address, or of an email address for sign-in and subscription attempts — never the value itself.

We should be precise about what that hash is worth: it is pseudonymised data, not anonymous data. A truncated hash of an IP address can, with effort, be matched back to a candidate address. We therefore treat these records as personal data, and we delete them after 24 hours.

Legal basis: legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) — securing the service.

Server logs

Our web server writes standard access logs, which include your IP address, the page requested, and the time. These are used for security and debugging, are not linked to any account, and are deleted after 30 days.

Legal basis: legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) — security and operating the service.

Location

Submitting a wait time requires your location. The report form asks your browser for a satellite fix, and if you refuse permission, your device cannot get a fix, or the fix is too vague to be useful, the report is refused. This is what keeps the dataset made of reports from people who were actually at the crossing.

Here is precisely what happens to the coordinates:

• They are sent to our server inside the body of the report request, never in the web address. That distinction is the whole point: web addresses are written to our access logs and kept for 30 days, so putting coordinates there would quietly build a 30-day record of where you have been.
• The server uses them for two calculations — how far you are from the crossing, and which side of the border you are on (a completed crossing means you must be on the far side).
• They are then discarded within the same request. There is no column for latitude or longitude anywhere in our database, and coordinates are never written to any log file.

What we keep is derived from your coordinates rather than being them: your distance from the crossing in kilometres, the accuracy your device reported in metres, and a verification label. From those we cannot reconstruct where you were — a distance is a circle, not a point.

We want to be direct about why we built it this way. A running record of coordinates tied to the long-lived client_hash described above would amount to a movement profile, which is a far more sensitive thing than the one-off "are you here?" check we actually need. Not storing them also means there is nothing to leak, nothing to retain, and nothing for us to hand over.

Two other uses of your location work differently:

• The "Near me" filter on the home page and the radius filter on the map compare your position against crossing coordinates entirely inside your browser. Nothing reaches us.
• A correction to earlier versions of this notice. Until now this section said your coordinates were "not sent to us, not stored, and not logged". That was not true. The home page used to carry a "Use my location" shortcut that sent your coordinates to our server as part of the web address, which meant they were written to the access logs and kept there for 30 days like any other request. Only the "Near me" filter was ever genuinely browser-only. That button has since been removed — the report flow asks for the fix instead — but the statement was wrong while it was there, and we would rather say so than quietly edit it out.

Legal basis: legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) — checking that wait time reports are genuine, and preventing abuse of a community dataset.

Analytics

If — and only if — you accept analytics cookies, we use Google Analytics 4 to understand how the site is used. See section 3.

Legal basis: consent (Article 6(1)(a)).

3. Cookies

We use the following cookies.

Strictly necessary — set without consent, because the site cannot work without them:

Analytics — only if you accept:

If you decline, the Google Analytics script is never loaded and these cookies are never created. You can change your mind at any time through the Cookie settings link in the footer.

Note that csrf_bind does double duty: its security role is genuinely necessary, but because its hash is stored with your reports it also acts as a long-lived pseudonymous identifier. We are listing it as necessary while telling you plainly what else it does, so you can judge for yourself.

4. Who your data is shared with

We do not sell personal data. We share it only with the providers needed to run the service:

Where data leaves the EEA — which in practice means Google — the transfer is covered by the safeguards listed above. You may ask us for details of those safeguards.

5. How long we keep your data

Wait time reports are kept indefinitely because historical data is the point of the service — the charts showing when a crossing is usually busy depend on it. When you delete your account, your reports are unlinked from you and remain in the dataset without any connection to your identity.

6. What happens when you delete your account

Deleting your account is immediate and self-service, from your account page. It:

• deletes your email address, language and country preferences, and sign-in history;
• deletes all your favourites, alerts, and alert history;
• ends every active session;
• unlinks your wait time reports, which stay in the community dataset anonymously.

Your newsletter subscription is treated as a separate consent and survives account deletion unless you tick the box to unsubscribe as well. Equally, unsubscribing from the newsletter never deletes your account or your alerts. We keep these decisions apart on purpose, so that acting on one never silently undoes the other.

7. Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

• Access your data, and get a copy of it;
• Rectify it if it is wrong — you can edit your preferences directly in your account;
• Erase it ("right to be forgotten") — the delete button in your account does this;
• Restrict or object to processing based on legitimate interests, including on grounds relating to your particular situation;
• Portability — receive your data in a machine-readable format;
• Withdraw consent at any time, for the newsletter and for analytics cookies, without affecting processing carried out beforehand.

You can exercise most of these yourself: your account page has a data export (JSON) and a delete account button. For anything else, email hello@customswait.com. We will respond within one month.

8. Complaints

If you believe we have handled your data improperly, please contact us first — we would rather fix it. You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. Ours is the Romanian authority:

Autoritatea Naţională de Supraveghere a Prelucrării Datelor cu Caracter Personal (ANSPDCP) B-dul G-ral. Gheorghe Magheru 28-30, Sector 1, 010336 Bucharest, Romania anspdcp@dataprotection.ro · www.dataprotection.ro

You may also complain to the supervisory authority in your own EU country of residence or workplace.

9. Security

Session tokens and sign-in codes are stored hashed, never in plain text. IP addresses in our database are stored only as hashes. All traffic is served over HTTPS. Access to the administration interface is restricted and separately authenticated.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If we ever suffer a breach affecting your personal data, we will notify the supervisory authority and, where the law requires it, you directly.

10. Children

CustomsWait is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us personal data, please contact us and we will delete it.

11. Automated decision-making

We do not carry out automated decision-making or profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects.

12. Changes to this notice

If we change this notice materially, we will update the date at the top and, where the change is significant, tell newsletter subscribers. Previous versions are available on request.