Privacy Policy

The short version.

We collect what you give us when you RSVP, join, or fill in your profile, plus first-party analytics we run ourselves on our own server. We do not use Google Analytics or any third-party tracker. We do not sell your data, share it with advertisers, or follow you around other websites.

What we collect.

• Event RSVPs and check-ins. Your name, email, ZIP, optional phone, party size, and what you told us you are looking for.
• Your member profile. Anything you choose to add: company, job title, industry, city, LinkedIn, photo, and a short bio. All of it is optional.
• Business listings. If you list a business, the contact details and discount you submit, including your redemption code.
• Analytics. Page views, the site or search engine you arrived from, the page you landed on, your country, and your device and browser type. Country comes from our CDN; device and browser are read from the request your browser already sends.
• Server logs. Standard access logs including IP address and timestamps, kept for security and diagnostics.

Cookies.

Two, both set by us. No advertising, retargeting, or cross-site tracking cookies, and no third-party cookies.

• nc_session. Keeps you signed in. Required for the site to work. Expires after 30 days, or when you sign out.
• nc_attr. Records where you first arrived from and which page you landed on, so we can understand which of our events, posts, and partners actually bring people in. It holds a random id, a source such as Google or LinkedIn, and a date. That random id is also what we count your page views against, which means we can tell that the same browser came back a week later. It contains nothing about you personally, it is not shared with anyone, and it cannot follow you to any other website. Expires after one year.

You can delete either cookie in your browser at any time, and you can email us to ask that we do not set the analytics one. Deleting nc_session simply signs you out.

How our analytics work.

We run our own analytics on our own server rather than sending your browsing to a third party. We do not store your raw IP address alongside your page views, and we do not use Google Analytics or any advertising tracker.

Page views are counted against the random identifier in the nc_attr cookie described above. It lasts a year, so we can tell that the same browser came back, which is how we know whether people return rather than only how many arrive. If you have deleted that cookie or your browser blocks it, we fall back to a one-way hash of your IP address and browser mixed with a secret that changes every night, which cannot recognise you the following day.

If you are signed in, we also record which member account a page view belongs to, so we can see whether members actually use the parts of the site built for them. Your session token itself is never written to the analytics table; it is hashed one way first, so a copy of that table could not be used to sign in as you.

We record use of the organiser dashboard by our own hosts and staff in the same way. That activity is kept out of the public visitor figures, so the traffic numbers describe the website rather than the people running it.

What we do with it.

• Confirm your RSVP, remind you about events, and follow up afterwards.
• Show you the member directory and, if you are a Sustaining Member, attendee lists for events you attended.
• Show participating businesses how many people saw and clicked their listing, as counts only, never as a list of who.
• Understand which pages, sources, and events bring people in.
• Protect the site from abuse.

What other members can see.

Your name, photo, company, title, city, and LinkedIn appear in the member directory and on attendee lists, and you can turn that off in your profile at any time. Your email and phone are never shown unless you deliberately add them to your member card, which is a separate switch you control.

What we never do.

• Sell or rent your data to anyone. Ever.
• Share your data with advertisers.
• Use it for retargeting or cross-site tracking.
• Send you marketing you did not opt into.

Third-party services we use.

• Cloudflare delivers the site and blocks attacks. They see your IP address at request time.
• Stripe processes memberships and payments. Card details go directly to Stripe; we never see or store them. We receive your email, and whether the payment succeeded.
• SMTP2GO sends our email. Your address is passed to them when we send you a message.
• Google Fonts serves the typefaces on this site, which means Google receives your IP address when a page loads.
• Mapbox and CARTO provide address lookup and map tiles on pages that show a map.

Your rights.

Unsubscribe from any email using the link at the bottom of it. To see, correct, or delete your data, email [email protected] and we will respond within 30 days. Most of it you can edit yourself under My Profile.

Changes to this policy.

If we materially change how we handle your data, we will update this page and tell members before the change takes effect.

Questions.

[email protected]. A real human replies.