DearWho
DE
DearWho

Legal Notice (Impressum)

Last updated: 11 September 2026

This is the legal notice required for this website under German law (§ 5 DDG). The German version of this page is the binding one; this English text is a convenience translation.

Information pursuant to § 5 DDG (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, the German act implementing digital-service provider duties)

This is the German Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, not Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (the EU Digital Services Act).

Niels Erselius
c/o COCENTER
Koppoldstr. 1
86551 Aichach
Germany

DearWho is operated by a natural person as a sole proprietorship. There is no entry in a commercial, association, cooperative or partnership register. No VAT identification number under § 27a UStG has been issued. Operating this website requires no official licence and involves no chamber membership, so the details required by § 5 (1) nos. 3 to 6 DDG do not apply.

The postal address is provided through an imprint service (c/o address). Mail is accepted and forwarded there; service of documents to this address reaches the operator. For all enquiries, e-mail is the preferred channel.

Contact

E-mail: nielserselius@yahoo.de

This website offers no contact form. No telephone number is maintained; e-mail is the intended channel for direct electronic communication within the meaning of § 5 (1) no. 2 DDG.

Responsible for content under § 18 (2) MStV

Niels Erselius (address as above)

This statement is made with regard to the editorial content of this website (country guides, explanatory articles on name analysis).

Consumer dispute resolution

The European Commission shut down its Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform on 20 July 2025. A link to it would be meaningless and is therefore not provided.

We are neither obliged nor willing to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board. An information duty under § 36 VSBG does not apply to this service in any case, because the operator has no employees (§ 36 (3) VSBG); this statement is made voluntarily for clarity.

Liability for content

As a service provider we are responsible for our own content on these pages under general law, pursuant to § 7 (1) DDG. Under §§ 8 to 10 DDG, however, we are not obliged as a service provider to monitor transmitted or stored third-party information, or to investigate circumstances that indicate unlawful activity. Obligations to remove or block the use of information under general law remain unaffected. Liability in this respect is only possible from the point at which we become aware of a specific infringement. If we become aware of such infringements, we will remove the content immediately.

Liability for links

This website links to external third-party websites over whose content we have no control. We cannot accept any responsibility for that external content; the respective provider or operator of the linked pages is always responsible for it. The linked pages were checked for possible legal violations at the time of linking; no unlawful content was apparent. Permanent monitoring of the content of linked pages is not reasonable without concrete indications of an infringement. If we become aware of legal violations, we will remove such links immediately. This website embeds no third-party content (no videos, no social media plugins, no map services); it uses plain links only.

Copyright

Content and works created by the operator on these pages (text, design, application source code) are subject to German copyright law. Reproduction, adaptation, distribution and any kind of exploitation beyond the limits of copyright require the written consent of the respective author. Downloads and copies of this page are permitted for private, non-commercial use only. Where content on this page was not created by the operator, the copyrights of third parties are respected and marked as such — see the next section.

This restriction does not apply to the derived name data or to results returned by the public API: those are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and may be copied and redistributed under its terms, including commercially. The licence text is available at https://dearwho.io/licence.

Data sources and licences

The name data on this website is derived from three open datasets. The derived data is itself published under the GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.2 or later. The full licence text is available at https://dearwho.io/licence and accompanies every distribution of the data.

  • First-name dictionary by Jörg Michael (“gender.c”, nam_dict.txt, version 1.2, 2008-11-30), published in the German magazine c't. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.2 or later, with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts. The data files derived from it are likewise under the GFDL.
  • US Social Security Administration baby name data (1880-2017), obtained via the CRAN package “babynames” by Hadley Wickham. A work of the US federal government and therefore in the public domain in the United States.
  • Character model for Chinese given names, derived from the wainshine/Chinese-Names-Corpus, licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Source: https://github.com/wainshine/Chinese-Names-Corpus

The application code that reads this data is separate from and unaffected by the data licences.

Note on the results

What this website says about a first name is a statistical estimate based on the datasets named above. It describes how a name has usually been given in certain countries and periods. It is not a statement about the gender, the identity or the correct form of address of any particular person, and must not be used as one. How a person describes themselves always takes precedence.

Note on the AI feature

Where the optional AI feature is enabled, part of the displayed content is generated by an AI system. That content is labelled as AI-generated (Art. 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the AI Act). Details of the data processing involved are set out in the privacy policy.