Privacy Policy
This policy explains what personal data we process for the Skills53 website, the competition platform and the competitions themselves, and why. We are a non-commercial project: we do not sell data, run ads or track you across sites.
Who Is Responsible
The Skills53 competitions are organised by ICT-Berufsbildung Schweiz under ICTskills, which is responsible for the processing described here:
ICT-Berufsbildung Schweiz
Waisenhausplatz 14
3011 Bern, Switzerland
The Skills53 expert team runs the website, the competition platform and the competitions on its behalf. For any privacy question or request, contact us at info@skills53.ch.
This Website
This website is a static site without cookies, analytics or tracking. It is delivered by Cloudflare, which processes technical request data such as your IP address and browser details to serve the pages and protect them from abuse.
Competition Platform
To take part in a competition, you need an account on our competition platform. It runs on our own software on a server in the Netherlands and stores:
- Account data: email address, first and last name, date of birth, your vocational school and/or employer and your password (only as a secure hash) or your linked Google or Microsoft account, plus any second factors you set up. Your date of birth is only used to check that you are eligible to take part.
- Training requests: if you request access to training, your request and its decision are stored on the platform. If approved, we share your name and email address with AWS Academy to enroll you in its training courses, where they are processed under AWS Academy’s own terms.
- Sign-in with Google or Microsoft: if you choose it, we only receive your name and email address from the provider. We do not store any access tokens, and a provider account is only linked to an existing account by its owner while signed in.
- Security data: IP addresses and browser details of your sessions and sign-ins, so we can keep accounts safe and investigate problems. After 30 days, IP addresses are shortened to their network, and after 90 days all of this is deleted. Server logs are kept for up to 30 days on our monitoring server.
- Cookies: only the cookies needed to run the platform, namely your sign-in session, protection against forged requests and your time zone.
- Backups: the platform is backed up in encrypted form. Backups are kept for up to about a year, so deleted data disappears from them only after that time.
- Team notifications: our experts receive short notices about platform activity and problems in private Discord channels. These can include your name, email address and details of what happened, such as a sign-up or an error.
We keep your account indefinitely, so your participation and results stay linked across competitions. If you want it deleted, contact us.
Competitions
During a competition, you work in AWS accounts that we provide. Everything you do there is recorded by AWS, for example in CloudTrail and service logs, together with the resources and results you create. We use this to mark your work, ensure fair play and investigate issues. These records may be kept long-term.
Your work is marked automatically by our software. Our experts review unusual results and check samples by hand. If you disagree with your result, you can tell us and ask for an expert to review it.
Results and Publication
Your name, company or school, scores and ranking are shared with ICT-Berufsbildung Schweiz, ICTskills and SwissSkills for the competition, qualification and awards. Rankings and winners are published, for example on websites and social media, and may be shown at award ceremonies. We keep competition results in an internal archive indefinitely as a historical record.
Automated emails from the platform, such as account verification and notifications, are sent through Mailgun. All other email, including messages from our experts and emails you send to us, is handled through Microsoft 365.
Service Providers and Transfers Abroad
We rely on these providers to process data for us:
| Provider | Purpose | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Website delivery | Worldwide |
| Onidel | Competition platform | Netherlands |
| Hetzner | Monitoring and server logs | Germany |
| Backblaze | Encrypted backups | EU |
| Discord | Team notifications | USA |
| Amazon Web Services | Competition environments | USA |
| AWS Academy (Amazon Web Services) | Training courses | USA |
| Google, Microsoft | Optional sign-in | USA |
| Mailgun | Automated platform email | EU |
| Microsoft 365 | Team email | EU |
The Netherlands, Germany and the EU offer an adequate level of data protection under Swiss law. Where data is processed in the USA or other countries, the providers are certified under the Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework or bound by standard contractual clauses.
Minors
Many participants are apprentices under 18. They can exercise their rights themselves if they are capable of judgement, or through their legal guardian.
Your Rights
Under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, you can request access to your data, have it corrected or deleted, object to its processing and receive a copy of it. Write to info@skills53.ch. Published results and archived rankings are part of the competition record and generally cannot be removed.
Changes
We may update this policy when our services change. The current version applies from the date below.
Last updated: 4 November 2026