Legal
Privacy
What the programme collects, why it holds it, how long it keeps it and what you can ask it to do.
Account information
Creating an account stores a name, an email address, a country of residence and, for organisations, a company name. Entrants may add a job title, a nationality and a profile image; none of those is required to enter.
This information identifies an entrant to the programme and appears in public only where the entrant put it there: a project page names the participant and, where supplied, the client.
Proof documents
Tier verification requires evidence: an enrolment record for students, a trade licence or commercial registration for freelancers and companies. These documents are seen by the verification team only.
They are never shown to jurors, never shown to partners, and never published. They are held for the length of the cycle and the dispute window that follows it, then deleted.
Payments
Payments are processed by Stripe. Card details are entered on Stripe's own form and are never sent to, seen by, or stored on the programme's systems.
What the programme keeps is a payment record: an amount, a currency, a date, a method label such as the last four digits, and Stripe's own identifier - enough to issue an invoice and answer a refund, and nothing more.
Voter email addresses
Public voting does not create an account. An address is used once, to send a confirmation code and to enforce one vote per project per person.
The address is stored as a one-way hash, so the programme can tell that an address has already voted without being able to read it back. Voter addresses are never added to the newsletter, never shown to entrants, and never sold.
Newsletter
Subscribing stores an email address and the date it was given. The list is used for entry windows, jury announcements and results, a few times a year.
Every message carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes the address rather than flagging it. Submitting an address that is already subscribed returns the same confirmation as a new one, because telling a visitor whether an address is on the list would leak whether that person entered.
How long things are kept
Published entries and results are permanent: the archive is the point of the programme. Proof documents are deleted after the cycle's dispute window. Payment records are kept as long as accounting law requires. Voter hashes are kept for the cycle they were cast in.
An account that is closed removes the profile and its documents. It does not remove a published result, because a result is a record of something that happened.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of what the programme holds about you, ask for a correction, ask for an account and its documents to be deleted, unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time, and object to a specific use.
Requests go to privacy@gridliners.example and are answered within thirty days. Where a request cannot be met in full - a published result, an accounting record - the reply says which part could not be met and why.