Privacy Policy

What We Collect

We only collect what a festival needs to run. Different activities collect different things:

• Ticket registration — your name, email address and (optionally) phone number. Your ticket code is emailed to you.
• Voting — a vote is stored against your ticket code or your wristband QR code, never against your name. We record which contestant you chose so that one attendee cannot vote twice in the same category.
• Photo gallery — the photo you upload, an optional caption, and optionally your name and email so we can credit or contact you. Every photo is reviewed by a person before it appears publicly.
• Artist, vendor, volunteer and sponsor forms — the contact details you type into the form, which may include phone number and ZIP code, plus any images you attach.
• Community Altar — the portrait photo you submit, an optional display name, and your explicit consent checkbox. This is the most sensitive thing we handle; see the dedicated section below.
• Your IP address is used briefly to rate-limit abuse (for example, to stop a script submitting a thousand forms). It is used as a temporary key in memory and is not stored in our database alongside your submission.

The Community Altar and AI

The Community Altar turns a portrait you submit into a short animated clip shown on a screen at the festival. This involves sending your photo to a third-party AI provider (fal.ai), which generates an edited image and then a short video from it.

This only happens after two gates: you tick the consent box, and a festival organiser reviews and approves your photo. If you do not consent, or an organiser does not approve it, your photo is never sent to any AI service.

Altar photos and clips are stored privately and are only served through our own site — they are not in a public bucket. You can ask us to remove your submission at any time and we will delete both the photo and the generated clip.

How We Use It

• To send you your ticket code and event information you asked for.
• To run the contests fairly — one vote per person per category.
• To follow up on an application you submitted (artist, vendor, volunteer, sponsor).
• To understand, in aggregate, how many people visit the site. We use Umami analytics, which does not use cookies and does not build a profile of you across sites.
• We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for advertising.

Who Else Sees It

We share data only with the services needed to operate the festival:

• Our email provider, to deliver ticket codes and confirmations.
• fal.ai, only for Community Altar submissions you consented to, as described above.
• Umami analytics, which receives page-view data without cookies or personal identifiers.
• Our hosting and storage provider, where the site and uploaded files live.
• We may disclose information if required by law.

Photos You Submit

When you upload a photo to the gallery you confirm you have the right to share it. Nothing appears publicly until an organiser approves it. Photos are converted to a compressed web format on upload.

Separately, the festival is a public event and general crowd photography may take place. If you appear in a festival photograph and would like it removed, contact us.

How Long We Keep It

Registration, voting and application records are kept for the festival year and a reasonable period afterwards for accounting and planning the next edition. Gallery and Community Altar submissions are kept until you ask us to remove them, or until we retire that edition of the site.

Your Choices

• Ask what we hold about you, and we will tell you.
• Ask us to correct something that is wrong.
• Ask us to delete your submission, photo or altar clip.
• Votes already cast cannot be individually withdrawn, because they are not linked to your name — we would be unable to identify which vote was yours.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. Family tickets are purchased by an adult. If you believe a child has submitted information to us, contact us and we will remove it.

Security

Passwords are hashed, admin access is restricted, and altar photos and clips are held in private storage served only through this site. No system is perfectly secure, but we do not keep payment card details on our servers — ticket payments are handled by an external payment provider.

Changes

If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top of this page. Continued use of the site after a change means you accept the updated policy.