Privacy Policy

1. If you browse the directory

You can search the directory and view artist profiles without an account and without telling us who you are. We do not use analytics, advertising or tracking cookies, and there are no third-party trackers on the site.

Artists you save with the heart button are stored in your own browser and are never sent to us — clearing your browser data clears them.

2. If you enquire about an artist

When you send an enquiry we ask for a message, an email address or phone number so the artist can reply, and optionally your name and which services you are interested in. That enquiry is emailed straight to the artist and is not stored on our systems. We keep a count of how many enquiries each profile has received, with no record of who sent them.

Once the enquiry reaches the artist, anything that follows is between the two of you — see section 2 of our Terms & Conditions.

3. If you create an artist profile

To hold an account and appear in the directory we collect:

• Your email address, which is how you sign in and how we contact you about your profile. It is never shown on your public profile.
• Your date of birth, to confirm you are 18 or over. Your exact date of birth is never published — visitors only ever see a broad age range such as “25–34”, and only if you have not hidden it.
• Your gender identity, which is shown on your profile and used by the directory filters. This is special category data under UK data protection law, so we only ever record the option you choose yourself, and “Prefer not to say” is always available.
• Your postcode, to work out where you are based. Your exact postcode is never published. We show your town, and the map uses coordinates rounded to roughly a kilometre, so it points at an area and not an address. You can hide your location entirely.
• Your profile content — display name, biography, artist types, services and prices, links and photos. This is all published on your profile once it goes live, so please only put things there you are happy for anyone to see.

We keep the version of your profile that a moderator reviewed alongside the current one, so there is a record of what was approved.

4. Signing in

You can sign in either with a six-digit code emailed to you, or with Google. The code is stored only as a one-way hash and expires after ten minutes.

If you choose Google, Google tells us your email address and confirms you own it. We do not receive your Google password, and we do not ask Google for anything else. Google’s own handling of that sign-in is covered by Google’s privacy policy.

A successful sign-in sets two cookies, both lasting 30 days:

• qc_session — your session. It cannot be read by JavaScript and is stored on our side only as a one-way hash.
• qc_signed_in — a flag with no identity in it, so the page knows whether to offer you your dashboard.

Your email address and whether you hold a moderator role are also kept in your browser’s local storage so the header can be drawn without asking the server on every page. Signing out clears all of it. These are strictly necessary for the site to work, so we do not ask for cookie consent for them; we set nothing else.

5. Reports and abuse prevention

Anyone can report a profile. Reports are anonymous: we store the reason given, and a one-way hash of the reporter’s IP address so one person cannot report the same profile repeatedly. We do not store the IP address itself and we cannot work it back out from the hash, so we have no way to tell an artist who reported them.

We count requests to the enquiry and reporting endpoints the same way, hashed and per hour, to stop the site being flooded.

6. Why we are allowed to hold it

• Contract — everything needed to give you an account and publish the profile you asked us to publish.
• Explicit consent — your gender identity, which you choose to publish on your profile. You can change or remove it at any time from your dashboard.
• Legitimate interests — moderating the directory, handling reports and preventing abuse, so the site stays safe and useful for everyone listed on it.

7. Who else is involved

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for marketing. It reaches these organisations only because they run parts of the service:

• Cloudflare hosts the site, the database and the photo storage, and delivers our email. Data is stored in Western Europe.
• Google, if and only if you choose to sign in with Google.
• postcodes.io, which turns a postcode into a town and coordinates. We send it the postcode you typed and nothing else.

Artists receive the enquiries sent to them, which is the whole point of the enquiry form. We will also disclose information if the law requires it.

8. How long we keep it

Your profile and account stay with us for as long as you have an account. Sign-in codes are deleted after ten minutes, and sessions expire after 30 days.

You can delete your account yourself from your dashboard. Your profile leaves the directory and search results immediately, your photos are deleted from storage and you are signed out everywhere. The account record itself is held for 30 days and is then permanently erased, along with your profile history and any reports about you. During those 30 days that email address cannot be used to open a new account. Email us if you would like it erased sooner, or if you deleted your account by mistake.

9. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask us to give you a copy of what we hold about you, correct anything that is wrong, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, or send it to you in a portable format. Where we rely on your consent you can withdraw it at any time.

Email info@queerconnective.co.uk and we will respond within one month. If you are not happy with our response you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

10. Under 18s

Queer Connective is for adults. You must be 18 or over to hold an account, and we check the date of birth on every profile before it can be submitted. If you believe we hold information about someone under 18, please tell us and we will remove it.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle personal information we will update this page and the date at the top. If the change is significant, we will email account holders rather than rely on you noticing.