Privacy policy

Who we are

Bandalator is operated by Darren Johnstone, ABN 34 143 901 796. Written questions about privacy, requests to see what we hold, and complaints all go to support@alator.app.

We handle personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

Two different relationships

This matters more than anything else on the page, because it decides who you should talk to.

Your band collected your details, and your band is responsible for them. The committee decided what to ask you for, who on the committee can see it, and what they use it for. If you want your details changed or removed, your band is the first and usually the only place to ask.

We store and process those details on the band's behalf. We run the software and the servers it sits on. We do not decide what your band collects, we do not use your details for our own purposes, and we do not contact members on our own account. The exception is the obvious one: if your band asks us for help with something, we may have to look at the data to fix it.

What is held about a member

Whatever your band chose to ask for, from this list:

• Name
• Email address
• Phone number
• Postal address
• Date of birth
• Instruments, and the sections you play in
• Membership category, such as adult, junior or non-playing
• Whether your subs are paid up, and the date and amount of your last payment
• Your answers to gig and rehearsal invitations, including answers an organiser recorded for you after you told them in person
• When you last signed in
• Whether you have unsubscribed from mail-outs, and whether emails to you have been bouncing

If your band uses the treasury side, payments recorded against your name sit there too. Anything your band writes on its own public pages, such as a photo or a note about a concert, is the band's content and is public because the band published it.

Members do not have passwords

There is no member password anywhere in this system, which means there is no member password to leak. You put your email address in and we send you a link, with a six-digit code underneath it for when the email is open on your phone and the browser is on something else. Tapping the link signs you in on that device, and you stay signed in there.

Where it is kept

In Australia. The member list, everything the band has written on its site, the photos and the nightly backups are all stored in Sydney, and the software itself runs in Sydney too:

• The application runs on Vercel in its Sydney region (syd1).
• The database is Neon Postgres, in Sydney.
• Uploaded files, such as logos and gallery photos, are in Sydney.
• The nightly backups are in Sydney.

What does leave Australia: email

Email does not stay in Australia, and we would rather tell you than have a committee member discover it.

Band email, which is RSVP requests, mail-outs, receipts and sign-in links, is sent through Resend, an American company. Messages pass through its systems, and the infrastructure we have observed it using sits in the Asia Pacific region rather than in Australia. What travels is what an email has to carry: the recipient's name and address, and the content of the message. The member list itself is not uploaded anywhere.

This is true of ordinary email generally, including a committee member sending a message from their own account. It is still worth saying out loud, because “stored in Australia” and “never leaves Australia” are not the same claim, and only the first one is ours to make.

No analytics, and no tracking

There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, no heat-mapping and no tracking of any kind. Nothing on a band's site reports your visit to anybody, and we do not build a picture of who looked at what.

The software sets exactly five cookies, all of them its own and all of them there to remember that you are signed in:

• ccb_member keeps a member signed in on their device.
• ccb_editor keeps a committee editor signed in.
• ccb_treasurer keeps a treasurer signed in to the treasury.
• ccb_gate holds the password for a site that is not public yet.
• bnd_platform signs the operator in to the dashboard that manages bands.

Two things on the page can come from somewhere else, and only if a band switches them on. A band that pastes in its Google Calendar gets Google's calendar frame on its events page, and Google may set cookies of its own inside that frame. A band that switches on the Cloudflare Turnstile check on its public forms loads a script from Cloudflare to run that check. Both are the band's choice and both are plainly visible on the page. Neither is there to watch you, but neither is ours, so we will not claim otherwise.

How long it is kept

While a band is using Bandalator, its data is kept because the band needs it, and the band decides what to remove. If a band closes its account, its data is deleted on the same basis: a warning, then deletion. Nightly backups roll over as they go, and the last thirty are kept, so a deleted record can persist in a backup for up to thirty days before it ages out.

What we never do

• We never sell a band's member information, to anybody, for any price.
• We never share it with another band, or with anyone outside the band it belongs to.
• We never use it to train artificial intelligence or machine-learning models, ours or anyone else's.
• We never email a band's members to sell them something.

Your rights

Under the Australian Privacy Principles you may:

• Ask what is held about you. Most of it you can see yourself: sign in and your own details are on your dashboard, where you can change your phone number, email and address.
• Ask for a correction. Your band can change anything about you on the roster.
• Ask for it to be removed.This is the band's decision, because the band holds the membership, not us.
• Stop the mail-outs. Every mail-out carries an unsubscribe link, and most mail apps show their own button beside it. It stops mail-outs only: you still get asked whether you can make a rehearsal or a gig, because that is the band organising itself.

Ask your band first. They hold your membership and they can act on it immediately. If you would rather come to us, or your band cannot help, write to support@alator.app. We aim to answer within 30 days.

If you are not happy with our answer

Tell us first, so we get the chance to fix it. If that does not resolve it, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the regulator for the Privacy Act, at oaic.gov.au.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the bands using Bandalator are told. The date at the top is the date of the last substantive change, not the date of the last deployment.

Contact

Darren Johnstone
ABN 34 143 901 796
support@alator.app

What Bandalator does, and what it costs