Privacy Policy

Effective October 1, 2026.

This policy explains what personal information Posium collects, why, who receives it, how long it is kept and what you can do about it. Posium is operated by Kelly Copley ("Posium", "we", "us"), in Pennsylvania, USA. Contact: [email protected].

1. Two roles: Posium and the Organizer

Posium is software that event organizers ("Organizers") use to run their events. That gives us two roles:

• For your account, Posium decides what is collected and why. This covers your login, name, contact details, community profile and consent records.
• For event data, the Organizer decides. When you register for an Organizer's event, buy a ticket, submit a proposal, enter a contest or answer a survey, you are giving that information to the Organizer, and Posium processes it on the Organizer's behalf and under its instructions. The Organizer's own privacy notice, where it provides one, is linked on its event pages. Posium does not use event data to market to you, and does not sell it.

If you have a question about event data, contact the Organizer. If you contact us, we will pass your request to the Organizer.

2. What we collect

You give us:

• Account: email address, password (stored only as a one-way hash), first, middle and last name, mobile number if you provide it.
• Community profile (if you create one): display name, username, bio, website and social links, books, avatar, and a shipping address that is not shown publicly.
• Tickets and orders: the ticket holder's name and email, and a shipping address if the event ships something; which tickets, sessions and add-ons were bought; agreements you accepted for the event; refund and dispute status.
• Proposals (calls for proposals): presenter names, emails, bios, affiliations and headshots; the submitter's email; the proposal and abstract.
• Contest entries: entrant and nominator names and emails, the Organizer's entry-form fields, and uploaded files such as manuscripts.
• Survey answers: tied to your account in identified surveys; not tied to you in anonymous and public surveys (see section 4).
• Messages you send us.

Collected automatically:

• Sign-in and preferences stored in your browser: see section 4.
• Error reports: when the Service hits an error, a report is sent to our error-monitoring provider. Reports are filtered before they leave the Service to remove names, email addresses, phone numbers, proposal and entry titles, and links that grant access. The provider stores no IP address. It records the country and region it derives from the IP address before discarding it.
• IP address: your IP address is used to deliver pages to you and, for public surveys, to limit abuse. The public-survey rate limit holds IP addresses in memory only and does not store or log them.

We do not collect full card numbers or bank details (they go directly to Stripe or PayPal), and we do not use advertising, analytics or tracking cookies.

3. How we use it

• To provide the Service: accounts, registration, ticketing, check-in, proposals, contests, surveys and community profiles.
• To send email you need: sign-in and verification links, receipts, ticket and claim messages, refund notices, and messages about proposals, contests and surveys you take part in. Organizers decide which event messages are sent. Solicitation messages (such as survey invitations) respect your unsubscribe choice. Receipts and refund notices are sent whether or not you have unsubscribed.
• To tell Organizers' account holders about their subscription, billing and changes to the Service.
• To keep the Service secure, prevent fraud and fix errors.
• To meet legal, tax and accounting obligations and handle disputes.

We do not sell or "share" personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined in California law, and we do not use it for targeted advertising.

4. Browser storage

The Service stores the following in your browser. All of it is needed for the Service to work, so there is no cookie banner.

| What | Why | |---|---| | Login token (browser storage and a cookie) | Keeps you signed in | | Theme preference | Remembers light or dark mode | | Checkout drafts (cleared when the tab closes) | Keeps your place during registration | | Survey progress | Lets you resume a survey | | Public-survey device token | Stops the same browser answering a public survey twice. We store only a one-way hash of it, not linked to your account |

On payment pages, Stripe and PayPal load their own scripts, which may set cookies under their own privacy policies for fraud prevention.

5. Who receives it

We use these service providers to run the Service. Each receives only what it needs for its task.

| Provider | Purpose | What it receives | |---|---|---| | Stripe | Ticket payments (to the Organizer's account) and Posium subscription billing | Payment details you enter, order and event reference numbers, Organizer name and contact email, subscribing owner's email | | PayPal | Ticket payments (to the Organizer's account) | Payment details you enter, order reference | | Customer.io | Sending email | Name, email address, and the details a message needs (event, ticket, proposal or entry name, amounts, links) | | Sentry | Error monitoring | Filtered error reports, as described in section 2 | | Galaxy (Meteor Software) | Application hosting and database | All data stored in the Service | | Cloudflare R2 | File storage | Uploaded files: avatars, headshots, contest entries, documents | | Open Library (Internet Archive) | Book search for community profiles | The search text you type, sent from our servers. Not your identity |

We also disclose information:

• to the Organizer of an event you take part in: everything you submit to that event;
• publicly, as you choose: your community profile, and anything an Organizer publishes with your agreement (such as an accepted session on a schedule);
• when required by law, or to protect the rights, safety or property of users, Organizers or Posium;
• to a successor if the Service is transferred, for example to a company formed to operate it. This policy would continue to apply.

6. Where it is processed

Posium operates from the United States and is intended for US organizers. Your information is stored and processed in the United States. If you use the Service from outside the US, you understand that your information will be processed there.

7. How long we keep it

| Data | Kept | |---|---| | Account and community profile | Until you delete your account (see section 8) | | Orders, tickets and payment records | 7 years after the transaction, for tax, accounting and dispute purposes, including after account deletion | | Proposals, contest entries, survey answers and other event data | As long as the Organizer keeps the event, including archived events, and up to 30 days after the Organizer closes its account. The Organizer can ask us to delete it sooner | | Error reports | 30 days | | Consent records (which version of these policies you accepted, and when) | For the life of the account, and as long as needed to prove consent afterwards | | Backups | Up to 4 days after deletion from the live system | | Messages to us | As long as needed to handle them |

8. Your choices and rights

You can:

• see and correct your account and profile details in account settings;
• ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
• ask us to delete your account and personal information. We will delete or de-identify it, except records we must keep (section 7) and event data controlled by an Organizer, which we will pass to that Organizer;
• unsubscribe from solicitation emails through the link in each email.

Send requests to [email protected] from the email address on your account. We will verify the request and respond within 30 days. We will not treat you differently for exercising these rights. Residents of states with privacy laws (including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia and others) may have further rights under those laws. We honour the requests above for everyone, and you may use an authorised agent where state law allows.

9. Security

Passwords are stored as one-way hashes. Connections are encrypted in transit. Payment details are handled by Stripe and PayPal. Access to production data is limited to the operator. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you and authorities as the law requires.

10. Children

The Service is not intended for children under 16, and accounts require you to be 16 or older. An Organizer that admits younger people to its event is responsible for obtaining any parental consent. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information without parental consent, contact us and we will delete it.

11. Changes

When we make a material change, we will email account holders at least 30 days before it takes effect, and ask you to accept the new version the next time you use the Service after that date. Minor changes are published here with an updated effective date.

12. Contact

Kelly Copley 1845 Ore Bed Rd Mansfield, PA 16933 [email protected]