Privacy policy
Last updated: 24 September 2026
Courtesy translation. Watchtower Ping is operated from France and this policy is governed by French law. The French version is the only one that prevails in case of any difference in interpretation.
This page describes precisely what data Watchtower Ping keeps, why, for how long, and what you can require. It describes how the service actually works, not an intention.
Data controller
Marty Faivre — sole trader (French micro-entreprise) — contact@watchtowerping.com.
Data collected
| Data | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Name, email address | Create the account, send alerts | Performance of the contract |
| Password (hashed with Argon2id, never in clear) | Authentication | Performance of the contract |
| Sign-in IP address and browser | Session security | Legitimate interest |
| Addresses of the monitored sites | The very purpose of the service | Performance of the contract |
| Check results, incidents, certificates | Uptime history | Performance of the contract |
| Log of alerts sent | Avoid duplicates, diagnose failures | Performance of the contract |
No advertising cookie, no third-party tracker, no resale of data. The only cookie set is your session cookie, strictly necessary for the service to work.
Retention periods
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Detailed check results | 60 days, purged automatically |
| Incidents and alert history | Lifetime of the account |
| Account and monitored sites | Until the account is deleted |
| Session | 30 days, or until sign-out |
| Encrypted backups | 365 days |
| Web server logs (including IP addresses) | Rotated by size, roughly 50 MB rolling |
| Audience measurement events (see “Audience measurement” below) | 60 days, purged automatically |
| Aggregated traffic statistics (daily counts, no identifying data) | Kept indefinitely |
| Daily secret used to compute visit identifiers | 1 day, deleted automatically |
Processors
The service relies on a single provider, inside the European Union.
| Processor | Role | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Hosting, database, backups | Paris (eu-west-3) |
| Amazon SES | Sending alert emails | Paris (eu-west-3) |
Your rights
You have a right of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and portability. Write to contact@watchtowerping.com: you will get an answer within one month at most.
Deleting your account erases the account, the monitored sites, their history and the associated incidents. Backups already written keep that data until they expire, at most 365 days.
If we disagree, you may refer the matter to the CNIL, the French data protection authority — or to the supervisory authority of the country you live in.
One clarification that matters
The addresses you register are checked from our servers. If those sites belong to your own clients, you remain the data controller towards them: we act only as a processor, on your instructions, and we keep only the response code, the response time and the certificate details. No page content is ever recorded.
Audience measurement
If you install our tracking tag (a t.js file, no dependencies, placed on
the site you monitor) to measure a site's traffic, that measurement covers the visitors
of that site — not only your own account. It is optional: nothing is measured until you
place the tag.
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| Page viewed, referring site of the visit (when present) | Traffic statistics shown in your report |
| Browser family, operating system, device type | Breakdown shown in your report |
| Irreversible visit identifier, regenerated daily | Counting unique visitors without identifying them |
No cookie is placed on the visitor's device, and nothing is read from or written to it. The visitor's IP address is never recorded, neither in the database nor in an application log: it is used only, in the moment, to compute the visit identifier, from a secret regenerated every day and deleted as soon as that day is over. Nobody — not even us — can then reconstruct a visitor's identity from that identifier, or link their visits from one day to the next.
Because it neither writes nor reads any information on the visitor's device beyond what is strictly necessary to display the page, this measurement falls outside the scope of article 82 of the French Data Protection Act (which transposes the ePrivacy directive), and therefore requires no consent banner.
As with uptime (see “One clarification that matters” above), you remain the data controller towards the visitors of your own clients when you enable this measurement on their sites: we act only as a processor, on your instructions, and only on the sites where you choose to place the tag.
This site is measured the same way. The pages of watchtowerping.com — including the one you are reading — carry that same tag, with exactly the same data and the same retention as above: no cookie, no IP address kept, an irreversible visit identifier regenerated daily. What differs is who answers for it: here we are the data controller, not a processor. The legal basis is legitimate interest — knowing whether the pages of this site are read, without learning anything about who reads them. You can object at the address given under “Your rights”.
Security
- TLS encryption on every connection, HSTS enabled.
- Passwords hashed with Argon2id, never stored or transmitted in clear.
- Database not exposed to the internet, reachable only by the application.
- Daily backups, verified by automatic restore, stored off the server.
- Protection against requests to internal networks (SSRF), checked after DNS resolution and after every redirect.