Privacy Policy
What we collect, what is public, who can see it, and what you can do about it.
Effective date: September 17, 2026
The short version
We are a small Seattle events company. We collect what we need to run events, sell tickets and let members find each other — and we would rather tell you the awkward parts plainly than bury them.
The three things most worth knowing before you read the rest:
- If you complete a member profile, it is a PUBLIC page and search engines can find it. The private setting reduces what the page shows; it does not hide the page.
- We do not sell your information and we do not advertise to you. We use Google Analytics to see which pages people find useful, which does set a cookie — you can decline it, and in Europe and the UK we ask first.
- Buying a ticket creates a financial record that outlives your account. Deleting your account removes you from it, but the order itself is kept.
Who we are
North Connect is a creative community in Seattle, Washington, running events and operating this website. In this policy, “we” and “us” mean North Connect.
You can reach us at the address at the end of this policy, and we answer privacy questions ourselves rather than through a form.
What you give us
Creating an account
Your name and email address. Your password is handled by our authentication provider, stored only as a hash, and is never visible to us.
We record the date you accepted our Terms of Service.
Your profile
A handle, and optionally a photo, a short bio, a tagline, your city, the disciplines you work in, links you choose to add, and a line about what you are working on.
A phone number is optional. It is never shown on your profile and is never given to an event host — it exists so we can reach you if something changes on the day.
Buying a ticket, or reserving a free place
The first and last name of the person attending, and an email address, before you pay. A phone number is optional.
You do not need an account. If you check out as a guest we keep those details with the order so we can send the ticket, name you on the door list, and help you afterwards.
Your ticket is sent to the address you gave us — not to any address you may type separately on the payment page, which belongs to your card receipt.
Paying
Payments are processed by Stripe. We never receive or store your full card number. We keep a record of the order — the event, ticket type, quantity, the amount charged, the Seattle admission tax collected, what card processing cost, and Stripe’s reference — so we can issue and support your ticket and meet our tax obligations.
Joining a waitlist
If an event is full you can leave an email address to be told when a place frees up. We keep that address and the date we last contacted you about it, so we do not email you twice in an hour.
Telling us how an event went
After an event we may ask what you thought. What you write is kept with the event so we can run the next one better.
Turning on two-factor authentication
If you choose to add a second factor, our authentication provider stores the secret your authenticator app uses. We hold a record that the factor exists, never the codes it generates.
If you lose your device we can send a recovery link to your email address.
Writing to us
Anything you send through the contact form or by email — your name, your address and what you wrote. Mail to us is received in Google Workspace.
Your profile is public
This is the part people are most often surprised by, so it has its own section.
Once you finish setting up your account, your profile has a public web address of its own. Anybody can open it without signing in, we list it in our sitemap, and search engines can index it. That is deliberate: the point of the community is that creative people can find each other.
What the private setting does, and what it does not
Marking your profile private narrows WHAT THE PAGE SHOWS. Your bio, city, links and what you are working on become visible only to people you are connected to. Your name, handle and photo stay visible to everyone.
It does NOT remove the page, hide it from search engines, or take it out of our sitemap. If you would rather have no public page at all, the way to achieve that is to delete your account — and you can do that yourself, at any time, from your account settings.
If you want something off the internet quickly
Search engines keep their own copies on their own schedule, and we cannot clear those for you. Removing or changing what you have written on your profile takes effect on our site immediately; it takes search engines longer. Tell us and we will help where we can.
Connections
At our events you can exchange a short code with somebody you have met, and become connections. A connection is made only when the other person accepts — scanning a code is never enough on its own.
Your list of connections is yours. Other members cannot see it, and we deliberately do not show anybody how many connections they have in common with you — a count is not a privacy measure, and we would rather not build one than build one that leaks.
Being connected to somebody lets them see the parts of your profile you have chosen to share with connections.
Events, tickets and the door
Every ticket carries a reference number and a QR code. When you arrive we record that the ticket was checked in, when, and whether it was scanned or entered by hand — so that a ticket cannot be used twice and so we know who is in the room.
We generate a door list for each event from the tickets sold. It exists to get you in when the venue’s wifi does not work.
What an event host can see
Some events are run in partnership with a host. The host of an event can see the attendee list for that event — and only for that event.
A host is shown five things about each ticket: the attendee name, the ticket number, the ticket type, whether the ticket was checked in at the door — including the time, and whether it was scanned or entered by hand — and whether the ticket is held by a member account or was bought as a guest. Hosts are never shown email addresses, phone numbers, or payment details, and nothing about your account or your activity outside that event. This is enforced in our systems, not only by policy.
Hosts are not shown the attendee list for events they do not run, and their access ends when their hosting access does.
Transferring a ticket
If you pass your ticket to somebody else and ask us to change the name, we update the name recorded against that order so the door expects the right person. That changes the order, never anybody’s account.
The homepage spotlight
We sometimes feature one member on our homepage, with their photo, their handle and a short piece about them written by us.
That piece is editorial — it is our words, not your bio, and we write it about you. If you are featured and would rather not be, tell us and we will take it down.
What we collect automatically
When you visit the site we may collect:
- Your IP address — used to rate-limit sign-in and email requests and to protect against abuse
- Which pages were visited and which page referred you
- Device type, browser and operating system
- Country-level location
- Page loading performance measurements
This keeps the site fast, secure and working. We do not build advertising profiles and we do not track you across other websites.
Error diagnostics
When something goes wrong on the site we send a diagnostic report to our error-monitoring provider so we can find and fix it. These reports describe the error and the page it happened on, and — if you were signed in — include your account’s internal identifier so we can connect the error to a support request.
They do not include your name, email address, IP address or cookies, and we do not record your screen or session.
How we use what we collect
- Running North Connect and your account
- Issuing and supporting event tickets, and admitting you at the door
- Taking payment through Stripe, and collecting and remitting the Seattle admission tax
- Sending you transactional email — verification, password reset, tickets, reminders and receipts
- Sending community updates and event announcements, where you have asked for them
- Showing you notices in your account’s notifications inbox
- Letting members find and connect with each other
- Diagnosing errors and keeping the site working
- Understanding in aggregate how the site and our events are used, including what you tell us afterwards
- Preventing fraud, abuse and misuse
- Meeting our legal, tax and accounting obligations
Email and notifications
Some email is transactional and we send it because you did something: confirming your address, resetting your password, delivering a ticket, reminding you an event is soon, or following up afterwards. You cannot unsubscribe from these while you hold an account or a ticket, because they are how the thing works.
Community updates and event announcements are separate and optional. You can unsubscribe from them at any time using the link in the email, and we honour that immediately.
We also show notices inside your account. Those appear on the site and are not emailed.
How long we keep things
We keep information for as long as we need it to run North Connect, and then we stop.
- Your account, profile and connections — until you delete your account
- Tickets and check-in records — kept with the order they belong to
- Waitlist entries — kept with the event, and deleted outright if you ask us to forget you
- Event feedback — kept with the event; see below for what happens to it when you leave
- Contact form messages — kept in our inbox as ordinary correspondence
- Error diagnostics — kept on a rolling window by our provider
Orders outlive accounts, and this is the exception worth reading
Orders, tickets and the contact details supplied when an order was placed are retained after an account is deleted. We need them to meet financial and tax obligations, to investigate fraud, and to handle chargebacks and refunds — any of which can arise long after a purchase. The Seattle admission tax we collect is held in trust for the City, and the record of it has to survive too.
What is removed when you delete your account is everything that identifies you as a member: your profile, your name, your photo, your connections, and the link between you and your past orders. Waitlist entries are deleted outright, and the record linking your payment card across orders is erased.
Feedback you left about an event is ANONYMISED rather than deleted — your email address is removed from it and what you wrote stays with the event. We are telling you that because it is the one thing you might not expect: the words survive, the link to you does not.
Where an order was placed as a guest — that is, at checkout without signing in — the email address given at checkout forms part of that order record and is kept with it, including if the order was later linked to your account. It is what allows us to identify the purchase if it is ever refunded or disputed. Your payment provider keeps its own receipts under its own policy.
Keeping it safe
We implement reasonable administrative, technical and organisational safeguards designed to protect personal information, and we rate-limit the routes an attacker would use.
No internet service can be guaranteed completely secure. If a breach affected your personal information we would notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires, and we would tell you what happened rather than the least we could get away with.
Your choices
You can do most of this yourself, without asking us:
- Edit or remove anything on your profile, at any time
- Change whether your profile is private — remembering what that does and does not do
- Unsubscribe from community email using the link in any of it
- Turn two-factor authentication on or off
- Delete your account entirely, from your account settings
Asking us instead
Depending on where you live you may have the right to access the personal information we hold about you, correct it, ask for it to be deleted, withdraw consent, object to certain processing, or receive a copy. Write to us and we will do it.
We may need to verify who you are before acting on a request, because the alternative is doing it for somebody pretending to be you.
Children
North Connect is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If we learn that we have, we remove it.
Individual events may set a higher age requirement, and where they do it is stated on that event’s page.
If you are outside the United States
We operate from the United States and your information is stored and processed there. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we rely on your consent for optional communications and on the necessity of performing our agreement with you for everything else — and you keep the rights your local law gives you, which we will honour.
Links to other places
Our site, our emails and our events may link to other people’s websites and services. We are not responsible for what they do with your information, and their policies apply once you are there.
Accessibility
We publish what we test for accessibility, what we have not covered yet, and how to reach a person when something gets in your way. See our Accessibility statement at /accessibility.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. When we do, the effective date at the top changes and the new version applies from the day it is posted.
If a change materially affects what we collect or who sees it, we will tell members directly rather than relying on you to notice.
Governing law
This Privacy Policy is governed by the laws of the State of Washington, without regard to conflict of law principles.
Contact information
North Connect
Seattle, Washington, United States
Email: support@northconnectstudio.com