HelpShelter

Privacy Policy

Who we are

HelpShelter is run by Ecaterina Griciuc and Grigori Panciohin, two volunteers based in Moldova. There is no company behind it: we are responsible for this site personally. You can reach us at support@help-shelter.com, and we answer to that address ourselves.

This policy explains what happens to information when you visit help-shelter.com, and what we publish about the shelters listed here. We follow Moldovan data protection law and the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which applies to visitors in Europe.

What we collect when you visit

Almost nothing. There are no accounts, no sign-ups and no contact forms — nothing you type on this site is sent to us.

Our server keeps ordinary technical logs of the requests it receives, including IP addresses, so that the site can run and so we can see when something breaks or is attacked. We do not use these logs to build a picture of individual visitors. They are deleted after 30 days.

When you choose filters on the shelters page, your choices are kept in your own browser so the page remembers them while you look around. They disappear when you close the tab and never reach us. This is not a cookie, and the site sets no cookies at all.

Visitor statistics

We intend to add simple traffic statistics: how many people visit, which pages they read, and which sites they arrive from. We will use software that sets no cookies, stores no identifiers on your device and does not follow you to other websites. The figures are counts, not profiles, and they cannot be traced back to you. We will update this page when it is in place.

If you write to us

If you send us an email, we keep it, along with your address and whatever you chose to tell us, for as long as we need it to deal with the matter and to understand the history if you write again. We do not add your address to any mailing list, and we do not pass it to anyone.

Information about shelters and the people who run them

Every shelter page here is built from information that is already public: the shelter's own website and social media accounts, public registers and similar open sources. Along with the organization's details, a page may name a contact person and show their phone number, email address or the bank details a shelter has published for donations. Where a named individual appears, that is personal data, and we treat it as such.

We publish it on the basis of our legitimate interest in making shelters findable, and in the interest of the shelters themselves, who depend on being reached. We publish only what the shelter has already made public, and only what helps someone contact or support it. We do not collect anything a shelter has kept private, and we never buy data.

Having your information corrected or removed

Write to support@help-shelter.com and tell us which page concerns you. You can ask us to correct anything that is wrong or out of date, to remove a name, a photograph or a contact detail, or to remove the shelter's page altogether. We do this on request — a shelter does not have to justify itself to us, and neither does a person named on a page. We reply within a few days and act as soon as we have found the page.

Donations

HelpShelter does not take payments and never handles your money. When you donate to a shelter, you use that shelter's own bank account or payment page, and when you support the platform, you go to PayPal. We see nothing of those transactions: no card details, no account numbers, no names. Those services handle your data under their own privacy policies, not ours.

Links to other sites

Shelter pages link out to websites, social media profiles and payment pages that we do not control. Once you follow such a link, that site's own policy applies.

Where the information is kept

The site and its database run on servers in the European Union. We do not transfer personal data outside the European Economic Area.

Your rights

If you are in the European Union, the UK or Moldova, you have the right to ask what personal data of yours we hold, to receive a copy, to have it corrected or deleted, and to object to our using it. There is one address for all of this: support@help-shelter.com.

If you believe we have handled your data wrongly, you can complain to the National Center for Personal Data Protection of the Republic of Moldova, or to the data protection authority of the country you live in.

Changes to this policy

If what we do changes, we change this page and update the date below. When the change is significant, we will say what changed rather than quietly replacing the text.

Last updated: October 6, 2026