Privacy Policy
This Website (https://vidukon.org, âWebsiteâ) is part of VidUKon, a community organisation committed to fan privacy that organises not-for-profit fan conventions.
The Website allows VidUKon (âweâ/âusâ) to provide a logged-in area where current and past attendees can find information, access digital management tools, and submit and manage convention programming. It also allows us to provide a subset of information to public visitors to the Website, for example, what VidUKon is and how to participate. Persons registered for attendance may also use the Website to participate in the convention virtually by accessing virtual convention tools.
To provide the above services, we process certain data and information, including Personal Information. This Privacy Policy details how and why we collect and process Personal Information, what kind of information we process, and how you can protect your Personal Information while interacting with VidUKon and the Website.
Note that while we have provided some guidance towards the latter, there are limits to our ability to secure your data, and your own choices when engaging in a virtual space carry significant impact. We provide guidance to assist you in making safe choices, not to imply ownership of responsibility regardless of your way of engaging virtually.
We also rely on some third-party tooling. Our privacy policy when it comes to those tools is also described here.
If you have any concerns, you may use the contact links in the footer of the Website to reach out to us.
General Principles (a.k.a. 'TL;DR')
We will not sell, trade, or rent your Personal Information. We will not use your Personal Information to market third-party products and services to you. This means that we do not collect or use your Personal Information for targeted advertising, nor do we process Personal Information for automated decision-making purposes. If we begin to do so, that change will be reflected in this Privacy Policy, and you will have the right to restrict the use of that Personal Information accordingly.
We consider UK & EU privacy laws to be applicable to VidUKon and the Website.
We use cookies and other, similar technologies on the Website only to enable necessary technical functions and do not track your presence or behaviour on the Website. We use third-party tooling to provide some of our services and cannot take responsibility for those toolsâ data handling practices; see also âThird-Party Toolsâ.
We are committed to the privacy customs of the digital fan communities VidUKon grew out of and encourage you to choose a âfannish pseudâ to use when interacting with VidUKon; see also âFan Privacy & Critical Personal Informationâ.
Terminology
âPersonal Informationâ describes information that a User (âyouâ) submits to the Website or affiliated tools, or that we collect when you use or request our services, that qualifies as âpersonal dataâ or âpersonal informationâ under the data privacy laws applicable to VidUKon and the Website. In the widest sense, this Privacy Policy uses âPersonal Informationâ to describe any information that could identify you personally, either directly or indirectly, or could allow profiling you when combined with other identifying data.
âCritical Personal Informationâ is a subcategory of âPersonal Informationâ. It is highly sensitive personal information that could identify you directly, such as your full legal name, your address, or an email address that contains your full legal name (incomplete list).
Internationality & Applicable Data Privacy Laws
VidUKon has its origin in the United Kingdom, which is where the offline convention usually takes place, and where VidUKon is registered as a community organisation. Persons responsible for organising the event have nationalities from across the globe, and so do our members and attendees. Organisers are volunteers, act primarily in a virtual environment, and may hand their duties off to other persons of any nationality at any point.
The Website is hosted in Germany on Hetzner Cloud Services. At this time, we do not knowingly use our technical set-up to transmit any Personal Information to any other digital subprocessors.
Considering the above, due to our hosting serviceâs location and VidUKonâs origin, we consider EU and UK privacy laws to be applicable to the Website. We strive to comply with other privacy laws as well, and try to resolve conflicts in good faith with solutions that protect the privacy of our users.
Fan Privacy & Critical Personal Information
We are committed to âfan privacyâ, which alludes to privacy customs of the fan communities this event grew out of â primarily online, largely anonymous communities, whose members often experience marginalization due to ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or other personal traits or circumstances. We believe that relative anonymity, i.e. interacting with the community using a âfannish pseudâ and staying otherwise anonymous, allows our members and attendees to express themselves in and about an obscure art form (vidding) more freely while avoiding potential difficulties and/or marginalization both within and outside of the community. This relative anonymity also provides members with a larger measure of control over the degree to which they wish to share any Personal Information with the community.
This is why we encourage you to choose a nickname, or a âfannish pseudâ, to engage with VidUKon, rather than using your full legal name. We also encourage you to use an email address in your interactions with VidUKon that does not contain your full legal name.
We will only ask for and process any Critical Personal Information if entirely unavoidable. When we do need to ask such data from you, we take care not to retain it, especially not in a structured, easily accessible, or digitally vulnerable way. This means that such data will not be stored in our databases, and that documents containing this data will be promptly deleted or otherwise disposed of when the data has served the immediate purpose it was collected for.
Note one exception: Critical Personal Information may be stored in our databases if you register using an email address that contains your full legal name, which is why we encourage you to use one that doesnât.
In some cases, this approach means we will have to ask the same data from you repeatedly. For example, virtual attendees who purchase con merchandise that has to be shipped will be asked yearly for their shipping address, as we donât store address data between cons.
Third-Party Tools
As a very small, entirely volunteer-run event, VidUKon does not have the resources to own & manage all tooling to ensure full control over data processing. We use third-party tools to facilitate some of our services and communication. It is not possible to participate in VidUKon without using those third-party tools and providing them with Personal Information.
While we take care to take privacy precautions in our use of these tools and the data they store, we have no control over these toolsâ technical data handling, performance, or access policies, and are therefore not able to fully control or secure this data. Find below a list of the tools that may receive Personal Information, why we use them, and how we manage our use of them.
Ticket Tailor
We use this service to collect registration information and fees. Ticket Tailor stores the information you provide during registration, which includes your email address, your fannish pseud/ username, and may include any of the following:
- • Your full legal name
VidUKon does not require this data, use it, or store it. However, it is technically not possible to remove these fields from the Ticket Tailor registration template. It is also not possible to remove your full name from Ticket Tailor's 'doorlist' export, which is shared among organisers for a range of purposes including communications, adding the fannish pseuds of attendees to the conbook, and verifying the number of attendees in different categories. This doorlist is never shared outside of con organisers and is deleted after use. - • Your shipping address
We require this information if you are a virtual attendee and have indicated a wish to receive items that need to be shipped to you (conbook or similar). We extract this information from Ticket Tailor in a CSV export, which is handled only by organisers and deleted after use. - • Information about your accessibility needs
We ask you to optionally provide information about accessibility needs so that we can make the con accessible to you. We extract this information from Ticket Tailor in a CSV export, which is handled only by organisers and deleted after use.
Only con organisers concerned with attendee and tech management have access to Ticket Tailor and the data it stores.
Gmail
We use this service as our email provider. Any email communication with VidUKon is handled through Gmail, which means that if you communicate with us through email, your email address and any Personal Information you include in your messages is stored and processed by Gmail. We retain stored emails to maintain information consistency. We use a delegated Gmail account to share inbox access between current con organisers, with a primary owner who has full control over the account.
Programming Using Zoom
We use Zoom to facilitate programming attended by both in-person and virtual attendees. You do not need a Zoom account to join virtually. You will choose a meeting name when joining a Zoom call, which does not have to be your legal name (and we encourage you to choose a meeting name that is not your legal name). If you turn on your camera, your image will be captured and transmitted to Zoom, and will be displayed to all in-person attendees. Should you decide to actively participate by speaking, your voice will be transmitted to and captured by Zoom, and played on speaker in the room.
Using camera on the call is not mandatory. Neither is participating by speaking: you may instead use the programming chat to communicate without speaking out loud. Chat messages from that channel intended as participatory comments are shared by a con organiser with the attendees at the in-person con and in Zoom.
As an in-person attendee, you will be joining the call along with the rest of the room through the conâs computer, managed by an organiser. Should you decide to actively participate by speaking, your voice will be transmitted to Zoom. You may also choose to use your mobile device to participate via chat without speaking out loud.
There will be a single, clearly visible camera active in the room, which may capture your image and transmit it to Zoom. You may approach con organisers if you want to avoid being captured by the camera, and organisers will be mindful of your request.
Our programming events that use Zoom are streamed to YouTube, so please also read the YouTube section below for further privacy information.
If you have privacy concerns about Zoom not alleviated by the above-described measures, you have the option to attend virtually through YouTube and Discord, see below under âYouTubeâ. You may do so even at the in-person con by joining through a device from your hotel room.
Only con organisers concerned with managing Zoom during programming and the Zoom tech integration have access to the VidUKon Zoom account.
YouTube
We use YouTube to provide live streams of our panels and activities for the virtual audience. For this purpose, we use a digital camera and a microphone to capture panelists, or to capture the projection of a video call in case of virtual panelists, and their materials.
As an in-person attendee, your image may be caught in this capture should you be present in the room during the panel. As a virtual attendee, if you participate in the panelâs Zoom call, your Zoom meeting (nick-) name and, should you decide to use camera in Zoom, your image may be caught in this capture.
Should you decide to actively participate in the panel (e.g. ask a question), your voice will be captured. Should you decide to share Personal Information during the panel, this information may be captured.
As a panelist or presenter, your image and voice will be caught on camera, and so will any material you share, digitally or verbally. Any Personal Information you decide to share will be captured.
We use the standard Zoom-YouTube integration to allow Zoom to stream our video and audio capture to the VidUKon YouTube channel, where they are stored and processed. The YouTube streams are unlisted, so cannot easily be accessed without a direct link. We provide the direct link to attendees in the logged-in area of the Website shortly before, during, and after the panel or activity. Recorded panels remain in our YouTube channel, unlisted, and remain accessible for replay to con attendees after the programming event has passed.
Only con organisers who manage the YouTube contents or the YouTube tech integration have access to the YouTube account, most of them through their own Google account.
Discord
We use Discord to facilitate attendee communication during the event. We also use Discord as a platform to organise upcoming events.
You will need a Discord account to access the VidUKon Discord server, which means providing Discord with some of your Personal Information. Any Personal Information you decide to share while perusing the VidUKon Discord server will be stored and processed by Discord, as well.
When organising the event, organisers may share information between each other using Discord, more specifically, an organisers-only area of the VidUKon Discord server. While we take care not to use this channel to exchange Critical Personal Information, we do use it to discuss other information shared with us elsewhere (in email, for example).
All con organisers have access to the Discord server and its management settings.
MailChimp
We use MailChimp to send group emails to attendees of upcoming events which contain important updates and information. This means that your email address will be stored and processed by MailChimp. You are able to opt out by using the âUnsubscribeâ link in any of our group emails.
Only con organisers concerned with comms and with tech integration have access to the MailChimp account.
BunnyCDN & Hetzner
We use Hetzner Cloud Services to host the Website, with a server location in Germany. Whenever we're talking about servers or databases, any data saved there will be saved on a Hetzner service.
We use BunnyCDN to stream video content (âvidsâ) in a way that ensures best-possible performance across the globe. Vids donât usually contain Personal Information, though they might if the creator chose to put such information into the video; see also âContributing Materialsâ.
Only con organisers concerned with tech set-up and integration have access to the Hetzner and BunnyCDN accounts.
The Website
Scope of Personal Information we process:
We collect, process, and retain your email address that you provide during registration in Ticket Tailor. This means we import your email address into the Website, save it, and associate it with your user account, which will be created if it doesnât exist yet.
The import writes a file to our server that contains your email address and initial credentials. This is necessary for us to be able to provide you with the credentials information. These files are deleted after your ability to access your account on the Website has been confirmed.
In the management part of the Website, con organisers have access to structured information about your user account, which includes the associated email address.
We may use your email address to contact you about services you requested or expressed interest in, such as the Vidding Workshop, or to provide information about upcoming events. We send out group emails on occasion that contain important event information (no advertisement). This means that manual processing may occur to transfer your email address to Gmail and/or MailChimp.
These steps are necessary to run the convention and make all information and programming accessible to attendees and contributing members.
It is possible to change the email address that we associate with your user through your profile, accessible after login through the main menu. We do not retain a persistent history of past email addresses, so a change means an update throughout our systems. This change will be complete within a week, when our server-side database snapshots that still contain a record of your previous email address will be deleted.
We do occasional offline database backups to ensure information integrity. Email address updates do not extend to those offline backups.
Username & Password
Users are associated with a username on the Website, which serves as a human-readable user ID and allows you to interact with user-specific services (such as login). On initial account creation, we set the âfannish pseudâ you provide in Ticket Tailor during registration as your username.
User accounts are also associated with a password, which allows secure login and file upload.
Usernames are stored normally in the database. Passwords are hashed. This means that even organisers who have database access are unable to learn your password. An exception to this is the time between account creation and your first time logging in: since we have to provide you with initial credentials via email, we have access to this data. The Website prompts a password change after first login. This is to ensure you using a password that is unknown to organisers and has not been transmitted via email.
It is possible to change your username. As with emails, we do not persistently store old usernames. After you change it in your profile, the old name will be purged from our systems within a week when the database backup files are deleted.
We do occasional offline database backups to ensure information integrity. Username updates do not extend to those offline backups.
Time Zone
Upon account creation, your user account will be set to the time zone of the offline con location. We allow you to optionally change this setting on your profile to the time zone that you live in. We store and process this information across our system. This is to support features like being able to view the programming schedule in your own time zone, or receiving programming time and dates in your local time. Setting your time zone means creating data that is associated with your other user data, such as your email, and that gives a rough suggestion of where you live.
Your configured time zone is only visible to you on the profile. Other users are not able to easily see your time zone, unless they are organisers.
You do not have to set your time zone and may leave it at the default setting. This wonât impact your ability to participate in the con, though you wonât be able to benefit from localized schedule information.
Contributing Materials
You are able to contribute material to the programming. This material may include vids, panel material, activity material, or vidshow material (incomplete list). Explicitly excluded from âContributing Materialsâ is any digital data created during and due to unstructured virtual con attendee interaction (i.e. chat logs) â this means that you will not be considered to be contributing material by simply attending the con. You are only considered to be contributing if you are a programming owner (panelist, VJ, etc.), or whenever you choose to submit vids to non-curated shows.
Any material that is shared on the Website is stored and processed by us. It is necessary for us to store and process this material to provide you with a hybrid con experience. We retain a permanent record of the existence of this material, but do allow for deletion of the item or items themselves. Currently, item deletion is possible by contacting organisers. In the future, we plan to implement more control for creators over their material on the Website. Until then, we are committed to promptly complying with any deletion requests.
Due to the nature of most of these materials, the majority is unlikely to contain any Personal Information. However, it is possible that some do. We encourage you to judiciously examine the material you share for privacy implications in the context of this privacy policyâduring upload, during metadata input, and during file creation of any sharing filesâand to keep in mind that sharing material with VidUKon is a very similar act as making the material public (see below).
Materials are reviewed by organisers before any con event. Should we notice anything that we deem to have problematic privacy indications, we will contact you about it, whether or not the material was created or merely included by you. Since VidUKonâs organising resources are limited, though, we expect contributors to act responsibly when selecting materials for sharing.
Sharing Your Own Material
VidUKon considers material that you created and shared with the con to have been shared with the express wish to be distributed in the community, without for-profit charge and with appropriate attribution. This may go beyond sharing/exhibiting the material only at the con event it was submitted to, and may include sharing it at other, future con events or other community occasions.
We are committed to faithful attribution of any materialâs creator, to pertaining explicit permission for sharing on occasions besides the original con event if possible, and to sharing material only in a context comparable to the one the material was originally submitted for. Most importantly, we will never use material submitted to us to turn a profit.
We do consider sharing your material with VidUKon an act of making it widely accessible to the community. The community is an open community and therefore not in explicit control of its members; this means we also consider sharing any material you created with VidUKon an act of making it public.
Sharing Other Material
You may make use of material created by persons not attending VidUKon when creating material to share with VidUKon, for example when putting together a curated vidshow and including other creatorsâ vids, or when creating panel material and including references to publications.
We expect that you attribute such material appropriately to allow easy recognition of the original creator or owner. We also expect that you make a good-faith effort to gain permission by the original creator to use their material, if feasible. At the same time, we expect that you respect the privacy of the original creator in the context of this Privacy Policy, and take care not to implicitly or explicitly reveal any Personal Information about them in the way that you integrate their material into your contribution. (Personal Information already publicly attached to the material, such as a textbook authorâs name, is of course fine to use for attribution).
Partially adapted from the AO3 Privacy Policy, with thanks