Privacy

Who is responsible

Stage Search is operated by [legal entity name], at [postal address]. We decide what is collected here and why, which makes us the controller of it.

The person responsible for protecting personal information is [name and title of the person responsible], reachable at [privacy email address]. Any question, request or complaint about privacy goes there and gets an answer within 30 days.

You can use most of this without an account

Browsing shows, artists and venues never asks you to sign in, and we do not build a profile of signed-out visitors. An account only becomes necessary to keep a gig diary, follow an act, post a show or arrange a booking.

What we store, and why we are allowed to

• Your email address — to sign you in and to send things you asked for. Necessary to provide the account you requested. It is not shown on your public page.
• A display name, and optionally a handle, a short bio and photos — to build the public profile you chose to have. These are public once you fill them in.
• A password, if you set one — stored only as a scrypt hash, so we cannot read it and neither could anyone who stole our database.
• Sign-in tokens — stored as SHA-256 hashes rather than in the clear, so a leaked backup does not hand anyone a working session. Necessary for security.
• What you save, follow and log — the features themselves. Without storing them there is nothing to show you.
• Booking messages and reviews — to run the booking side, and to be able to sort out a dispute afterwards.
• Images you upload — stored under a generated filename.
• Reports of bad content — to moderate the site. These can be filed without an account, and we keep them whether or not you were signed in.

If you are in the UK or EU: we rely on performance of our agreement with you for everything needed to run your account, and on our legitimate interest in a site that is not full of fakes for security and moderation. Where we rely on consent — only for optional things you switch on yourself — you can withdraw it at any time without affecting what came before.

Your gig diary is location history — we treat it that way

A diary of which venues you were at on which nights says a great deal about you. It is private by default, and two separate switches both have to be on before any entry appears publicly: the diary-wide setting in your settings, and the per-entry setting on each log. Turning the diary public does not retroactively expose entries you marked private. The default is the most private setting available, deliberately — you have to choose to be visible, not discover that you were.

One thing decided automatically

When you rate a show, whether that rating counts toward the show’s public average is decided by the system, not by a person. A rating from an account less than a day old does not move the average unless you had saved that show before it happened. Your rating is still stored and still shown on your own diary either way — the rule exists so a brand new account cannot be used to push a score around.

No other decision here is automated, and nothing automated affects your access to the site. If you think the rule got your rating wrong, write to [privacy email address] and a person will look at it.

Cookies — there are exactly three

• onstage_session — keeps you signed in, for 60 days. Not readable by scripts.
• onstage_accounts — lets you keep more than one account signed in on the same device and switch between them. Also not readable by scripts.
• onstage_location — remembers the place you are searching from so it survives moving between pages. Set only when you pick a location, and kept for a year.

Your theme choice is kept in your browser’s local storage, not a cookie, and never reaches us. None of these are advertising or tracking cookies: two are strictly necessary to sign you in, and the third only ever exists because you chose a location. That is why this site has no consent banner to click through.

Where your location goes

If you use the “use my current location” button, your browser gives us coordinates, which we immediately round to about 110 metres before doing anything with them. We ask OpenStreetMap what neighbourhood that is, so the site can show you a name rather than a number. Because the location is part of the page address so links can be shared, that rounding is what stops a shared link naming the doorstep you were standing on.

Map images are loaded by your browser directly from OpenStreetMap, which means they can see your IP address, the same as any image on any website. We never send them your name or email.

Who else is involved, and where they are

• OpenStreetMap — geocoding and map tiles, as described above.
• Our email provider — receives your address and the sign-in link, in order to deliver it.
• Our hosting and storage providers — run the servers and hold the database and uploaded images, and keep ordinary request logs.

That is the whole list. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising.

Personal information is stored and processed in [countries where data is held]. Where that is outside your own country, the protections may differ from those at home; we choose providers that commit contractually to protecting it, and you can ask us at [privacy email address] for the details of any specific one.

How long we keep it

• Your account and its content — until you delete it.
• Sessions — 60 days, then they expire. Old ones are cleared out as people sign in.
• Emailed sign-in links — 15 minutes, and each works once.
• Booking records and reviews — kept after an account closes, because they are also the other party’s record of work they did.
• Moderation reports — kept while we might still need to act on a pattern.

What you can do about it

• Get a copy of what we hold about you, or have something corrected. Email [privacy email address] — we do it by hand, so allow us a few days; there is no self-service export yet.
• Sign out everywhere, from settings, which invalidates every session on every device.
• Reset your password, which also ends every existing session — because resetting is what you do when you think someone else is in your account.
• Delete your account. This removes your profile, your diary and your saved shows. Two things deliberately survive it: any band pages you claimed become unclaimed rather than being deleted, since other people’s listings and history depend on them; and completed bookings stay on the other party’s record, because leaving must not rewrite someone else’s history.
• Object, or ask us to stop a particular use. Tell us which and we will explain what we can do without breaking the account.

If our answer does not satisfy you, you can complain to [supervisory authority]. If you are in the UK or EU, you can complain to your own national data protection authority instead.

If something goes wrong

If personal information here is lost or exposed in a way that presents a real risk of serious harm, we will report it to [supervisory authority] and tell the people affected, without undue delay. We keep a record of incidents whether or not they meet that bar.

Children

This site is not intended for under-13s, and we do not knowingly keep accounts for them. Plenty of the shows listed here are all-ages; the account is the part with an age expectation, not the listings. If you believe a child has an account here, tell us at [privacy email address] and we will remove it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we do with information we already hold, we will say so on this page and date it. Continuing to use the site after that is not treated as agreement to anything materially worse — where consent is needed, we will ask.