GDPR is a European law that gives you ownership of your personal data. When you use Solace Care, it means you can see, correct, export, and delete your information at any time — and we are legally accountable for how we handle it.
Dealing with the administrative side of a death is already overwhelming. The last thing you want is to wonder what a platform is doing with your information. This guide explains, in plain language, how the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects you when you use Solace Care.
What is GDPR, in one paragraph?
GDPR is Regulation (EU) 2016/679 — the strongest data protection law in the world, in force across the European Union since 2018. It gives every person six core rights over their personal data, holds companies financially accountable (fines can reach 4% of global turnover), and applies to any service handling the personal data of people in the EU, regardless of where the company is based.
What personal data does Solace Care handle?
Bereavement admin involves sensitive information by nature. Depending on how you use the platform, Solace Care may process:
Identifying details about you (name, contact details, sometimes a personal identity number via BankID for verified identification in Sweden, Norway, or Finland)
Information about the person who died, shared by you or verified through public registries like SPAR in Sweden
Financial and insurance information related to the estate
Documents you upload, such as death certificates or policy paperwork
Messages and tasks you create inside the platform
Some of this is treated as special category data under GDPR Article 9 — information that gets extra legal protection. We handle it accordingly.
What rights do you have over your data?
You have six rights under GDPR, and they apply fully when you use Solace Care:
Right to be informed — You can always ask what data we hold about you and why. Our Privacy Policy covers the essentials; we will answer specific questions directly.
Right of access — You can request a full copy of your data.
Right to rectification — You can correct anything that is wrong.
Right to erasure — You can ask us to delete your data. We honour this unless we are legally required to retain specific records.
Right to restrict processing — You can ask us to pause how we use certain data while we resolve a question.
Right to data portability — You can take your data with you in a machine-readable format.
To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@solace.care. We reply within 30 days, usually within a few working days.
How does Solace Care decide what data to collect?
We follow the principle of data minimisation — one of the six foundational principles of GDPR (Article 5). We only collect what we need to help you through the bereavement process, and we do not keep it longer than we need to.
That means we will not ask you for information unrelated to your situation, we will not sell or share your data with third parties for marketing, and we will not use your data to train external AI models — a commitment enforced through both our technical settings and our legal agreements with suppliers.
What happens to your loved one's data?
GDPR primarily protects living people, and the rules around a deceased person's data vary by country. In Sweden, Finland, and Norway, some protections extend to the deceased's close relatives.
In practice, Solace Care treats a deceased person's information with the same care as living users' data. We share it only with people you explicitly invite, we protect it with the same technical safeguards, and we follow the same retention rules.
How long do we keep your data?
We keep your data only as long as we need to, and no longer. Active accounts keep their data while you use the service. Inactive accounts are deleted after three years. Some records — financial transactions, for example — we are legally required to retain for up to seven years. We document all of this in our retention schedule, available on request.
Who oversees this?
Solace Care has a named Data Protection Officer who is responsible for making sure we meet our GDPR obligations. You can reach the DPO directly at privacy@solace.care, or by post at: Solace AB, Data Protection Officer, Luntmakargatan 26, 111 37 Stockholm, Sweden.
You also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority. In Sweden that is IMY (Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten), in Finland the Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman, and in Norway Datatilsynet.
What should you do next?
You do not need to do anything to benefit from GDPR — it applies automatically. But if you ever want to exercise one of your rights, or if you just want to understand what information we hold about you, the fastest way is to email our privacy team. We treat every request seriously, and we will walk you through the answer.
Grief is hard enough without data worries. If you are navigating a loss right now, Solace Care is here to help you take the practical steps, one at a time, in a way that keeps your information safe.
Questions about your data? Write to us at privacy@solace.care.
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