What happens to what you send us.

Who is answerable

The venue trades as Emerald Forest. The company legally answerable for the details you send is to be filled inthe registered company name, at to be filled inthe registered postal address.

Anything on this page — a copy of what we hold, a correction, a deletion — is asked for by writing to info@emeraldforest.events.

What you type

• Your name, and an email address, so that there is somewhere to answer.
• A phone number, if you give one. That field is optional and stays empty happily.
• When you are thinking of — a month and a year, or an exact day if you picked one out of the open dates.
• Roughly how many guests.
• Whatever you write in the message box, up to 2,000 characters of it.
• That you ticked the consent box, the exact sentence you ticked, and the moment you ticked it. Nothing is pre-ticked, and the form will not send without it. The sentence is stored beside your details rather than a bare yes, so that editing the wording later cannot rewrite what you were shown.

What is written down that you did not type

• The page the form was on, and the page you came from before it, when your browser says so.
• The campaign tags on the link you followed, if it carried any — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content. They are how we tell whether a link we put somewhere was worth putting there.
• Your browser’s user-agent string: the make and version of the browser and the system, the first 400 characters of it.
• A one-way keyed hash of your IP address. Not the address — the hash. The address itself is held for the length of the request, used for counting and for the spam check, and never written to the database. A hash cannot be turned back into an address; it can only be compared with the hash of the same address.
• Whether the spam check ran and passed — one yes or no — and, when it ran, the hostname the challenge was solved on, the name this form gives that challenge, and the moment Cloudflare says it was solved. With the check off, those three are empty.
• The moment the enquiry arrived, the moment its row was last changed, and, if the venue has taken it off their list, the moment they did that.
• An identifier of its own, so the enquiry and the record of the two emails about it can be found together.
• Whether the venue has marked the enquiry as spam. Every enquiry arrives unmarked; the mark is a judgement made by hand in the admin afterwards, and what it does is take the enquiry out of the list the venue works through and stop any further mail going to the address on it. It is recorded on the enquiry, so it comes with the copy you can ask for.

Why we keep any of it

• To answer you. That is the whole purpose of the form, and it is what the checkbox says.
• To be able to show what you agreed to, and in which words, if it is ever in question.
• To keep the form from being used to flood the inbox. The limits are eight enquiries an hour from one connection and four an hour from one address, and counting them is what the hashed address and your email are used for.
• To know which page and which link brings couples here, so we do not keep paying for the ones that bring nobody.

In the words the law tends to use: your consent for keeping your details and answering you, and our own legitimate interest in a contact form that works and is not abused.

What we do not do

• We set no cookies on the public pages. Not one — no analytics cookie, no tracking cookie, nothing that follows you anywhere else. The admin side is behind a login and is a different thing entirely.
• No analytics, no advertising pixels, no heatmaps, no session recording.
• Nothing is sold, rented, or handed to anyone but the two services named below.
• No mailing list. There is nothing to subscribe to here, so answering your enquiry is the only mail you will get from us.
• The typefaces are served from our own machine, not borrowed from anyone else’s, so loading a page here does not tell a third party that you did.

Who else handles it

Amazon Web Services, for mail. When an enquiry is saved, two messages go out through Amazon Simple Email Service: one to the venue, one back to you as a copy. SES carries the addresses, the subject and the body — which is to say your name and whatever you wrote. For each message we keep which of the two it was, the address it went to, the subject, whether it was delivered and when, how many times sending was attempted, whatever the failure said if it failed, and the identifier SES gave it.

Cloudflare, for the spam check, and only when the check is switched on. While it is on, your IP address goes to Cloudflare so that it can say whether the challenge passed; Cloudflare answers with a pass or a fail, the hostname and the time, and nothing else about you goes there. It is off as this page is being served to you: no key is configured, and no request to Cloudflare is made.

Otherwise the enquiry is read by the venue, in an admin behind a login. It can be exported there as a spreadsheet — that file stays with the venue and goes nowhere else.

How long it is kept

The period after which an enquiry is erased as a matter of course is to be filled inthe retention period. What is true today, and stated plainly: there is nothing in the software that deletes an enquiry on a schedule. One stays until somebody removes it, and asking us to remove yours is the fastest way to make that happen.

• Taking an enquiry off the list in the admin only hides it. It is still in the database until it is erased.
• An erasure is a real delete: the enquiry and the delivery records of its two messages go together, in one go.
• The anti-abuse counters are not enquiries and do not live long. Each holds a hashed address, or an email address, and a count for one hour; anything older than a day is deleted.
• Two emails have already been delivered by then. The copy in your own inbox is yours to keep or bin. The one in the venue’s mailbox is deleted along with everything else when you ask.

What you can ask for

• A copy of everything your enquiry holds: what you typed, every derived field above, the spam mark if there is one, and the delivery record of the two emails sent about it. What you type and what is written down without you typing it are the two lists at the top of this page, and between them they are the whole of an enquiry, field for field — nothing is held back from them.
• A correction, if we have something wrong.
• Deletion. Withdrawing your consent comes to the same thing here — without it there is no reason for us to be holding an enquiry at all.
• A complaint to the data protection authority where you live, if what we do about it does not satisfy you.

Write to info@emeraldforest.events and say what you want done. Use the address you put on the form if you still have it — it is how we find the enquiry. We do it, and we write back to say it is done.

If this changes

When the form changes, this page changes with it, and so does the sentence beside the checkbox. Editing that sentence never rewrites what you agreed to: the wording you were shown is stored with your enquiry, and it stays as it was.