Abyss Gallery

Privacy (Datenschutzerklärung)

What happens to your data when you visit abyss.gallery: very little, and nothing that needs your consent.

Controller (Verantwortlicher)

The controller in the sense of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the German Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG) is the site's owner, also named in the imprint.

In short (Überblick)

• abyss.gallery is a static page: no accounts, no forms, no comments, no newsletter, no cookies, no analytics, no advertising.
• Your browser necessarily sends its IP address to the servers it loads the site from: Vercel (the page and the image library) and, when you open a work's card, the Wikimedia Foundation's servers. The typeface is loaded from Google's servers.
• One flag is kept in your browser's local storage so that the hint on how to look around is shown only once.
• The list of works your browser has dived into or opened is kept in its local storage, so that the next visit shows you works you have not seen yet.

Hosting (Hosting)

The site is hosted by Vercel Inc., 440 N Barranca Ave #4133, Covina, CA 91723, USA ("Vercel"), on its global content delivery network, which serves the page from a location near you. To deliver it, Vercel's servers receive and log what your browser sends with every request: your IP address, the address of the requested file, date and time, the referring page if any, and your browser's user-agent string. Vercel uses these logs to run and secure its network; the site owner does not evaluate them. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, the legitimate interest in delivering the site reliably and securely.

Vercel processes this data on the owner's behalf under a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR) that includes the EU Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers to the USA (vercel.com/legal/dpa). Vercel's privacy policy: vercel.com/legal/privacy-policy.

The image library (Die Bildbibliothek)

The paintings themselves, packed into tiles, are loaded from Vercel's blob storage at lv2kxfutar9vqpvm.public.blob.vercel-storage.com, which is part of the same hosting and covered by the same agreement and legal basis. As with the page, your IP address and the requested file reach Vercel.

When you open a work (Wenn Sie ein Werk öffnen)

Clicking a painting opens its card: the whole picture and a few lines about it. For this, your browser requests, directly from servers of the Wikimedia Foundation Inc., San Francisco, California, USA, the work's data from wikidata.org, a summary from en.wikipedia.org, and the image with its file information from commons.wikimedia.org and upload.wikimedia.org. These requests carry your IP address and browser data to Wikimedia's servers; they happen only on your action, and the site owner has no influence over how Wikimedia handles them. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, the legitimate interest in showing each work as it is kept at its source, up to date and credited, instead of copying Wikimedia's texts and images here. Wikimedia's privacy policy: foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Privacy_policy.

Cookies and local storage (Cookies und lokaler Speicher)

The site sets no cookies. It writes two kinds of entry to your browser's local storage: abyss-gallery-visited with the value 1, the first time the museum opens, so the hint on how to look around is shown only once; and abyss-seen:…, one per collection, listing the identifiers of the works (Wikidata numbers, at most 4,000) your browser has dived into or opened, so the zoom takes you to works you have not seen yet. The entries are never sent anywhere, are read only by this page in your browser, and say nothing about you; storing it is strictly necessary for the service you asked for (§ 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG), so no consent and no banner are needed. You can delete it at any time in your browser's site-data settings.

Analytics (Reichweitenmessung)

None. No visitor statistics are collected, there are no tracking pixels and no third-party scripts.

Your rights (Ihre Rechte)

Under the GDPR you have the right to access the personal data held about you (Art. 15), to have it corrected (Art. 16) or erased (Art. 17), to restrict its processing (Art. 18), to receive it in a portable form (Art. 20), and to object to processing based on a legitimate interest (Art. 21). Since the site itself keeps no data about you, these rights mostly concern the providers named above; for anything about this site, write to the address in the imprint. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR). The one responsible for the site owner is the Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit, Alt-Moabit 59–61, 10555 Berlin, datenschutz-berlin.de.

Changes (Änderungen)

This statement is updated when the site changes. Last updated: 23 October 2026.