Privacy policyin plain language.

What the membership form collects

The application form is by far the largest thing this site collects. It takes twenty-one pieces of information across four sections, and every one of them is stored.

• About you: full name, date of birth, gender, nationality, institution, programme and year of study.
• How to reach you: email address, phone number, WhatsApp number, postal address, and a social media platform and handle if you give them.
• Why you are applying: your reasons in your own words, the programme areas you tick, any other area you name, a project code if you have one, and whether you want to volunteer.
• What you agreed to: that you accept the club's commitments, that you accept the terms, and whether you want the newsletter.

A date of birth, a home address and a WhatsApp number are more than most forms ask for, so they are named here rather than folded into the phrase "your contact details".

What the rest of the site collects

Registering for an event records your name, email address and phone number against that event, and later whether you were checked in on the day. Sending a message through the contact form records your name, email address, the subject and what you wrote. When the club emails you, it records that the message was sent — your address, your name and the subject line, and whether it arrived — but not the body.

Nothing else on this site collects anything about you. There is no facility to upload a file here, so nothing you send this club arrives as an attachment through these pages.

The newsletter box in the footer is not connected to a mailing list, because the club has not chosen one. Nothing typed into it is sent anywhere or stored. The only place a newsletter preference is recorded is the checkbox at the end of the membership form.

There are no trackers, and no cookie for a visitor

This site carries no analytics, no tag manager, no advertising pixel and no third-party script of any kind. Reading these pages is not counted, measured or reported to anybody. Nothing here loads from another company's servers.

It sets no cookie on a visitor either. The one cookie this system uses is a session cookie for club officers signing in to the administrative console, and it is set only on those pages. You can read this entire site without being identified, counted or remembered.

Who can see it

Nobody outside the club can. Every table that holds a person refuses a request from the public side of this site. That was tested one table at a time, against the register, the applications, the messages, the event registrations, the payment records, the officer list and the change log, and each one refused.

Inside the club, what an officer can see follows the office they hold rather than who they are. There are eight offices: president, vice president, secretary general, organizing secretary, communication director, project coordinator, treasurer and administrator.

• The membership register: all eight offices.
• A membership application, which is the fullest record described above: five — the president, the vice president, the secretary general, the treasurer and the administrator.
• Messages sent through the contact form: seven — every office except the treasurer.
• Event registrations: six — the president, the vice president, the secretary general, the organizing secretary, the communication director and the administrator.
• Payment and donation records: five — the president, the vice president, the secretary general, the treasurer and the administrator.

Your details are not sold, and they are not passed to another organisation. If that ever changes, this page has to change first.

Where it is held

The club does not run its own servers. The records sit in a database run by a company the club pays for that service, and outgoing email passes through a separate email company. Both are outside the club's premises and outside its direct control.

Which countries those systems are in has not been confirmed by anybody at the club, so this page does not name one. They will be named here once somebody has read that from the providers themselves rather than assumed it.

How long it is kept

The club has not set a retention period, so this page does not quote one. An application, a message, a registration, a payment record and a register entry all stay until somebody removes them by hand. A rejected application from this year is still here in ten years unless a person opens it and removes it.

One thing does expire on its own. The temporary records that limit repeated sign-in attempts are cleared every day, and they hold scrambled values rather than addresses in the first place. That is the only automatic deletion this system performs.

Asking what is held about you, or having it corrected

Use the contact form on this site, or write to info@universalsustainabilityclub.com. A correction is straightforward: an officer with edit rights changes the record, and the change is recorded.

The club has not yet named which office is responsible for these requests. Until it does, a message sent by either route reaches the offices listed above, and this page names no single person so that it does not name the wrong one.

Asking for your record to be removed, and what that reaches

This section is the one to read before you decide to apply, because what the club can do is less than the word "delete" usually promises.

There is no button anywhere in this system that deletes a member. An officer can mark a former member as former, which changes their standing but keeps the record. An actual deletion is done on request by an administrator working directly on the database.

Whenever a record here is changed or removed, the system writes an entry to a change log, and that entry holds a copy of the values as they stood beforehand. So deleting a member's record does not erase the member: their name, email address, phone number, home address and date of birth remain inside that earlier copy.

That change log cannot be edited or deleted. The database refuses both, from every connection, including an administrator's. It is meant to work that way — a record of who changed what, that could itself be quietly altered, would be worth nothing as a safeguard — but it does mean the club cannot honestly tell you that removal reaches everything.

The change log can be read by three offices: the president, the secretary general and the administrator. Nobody else in the club can read it, and nobody outside the club can.

So: on request the club can remove your record from the register and from the screens officers work with, and it cannot remove the earlier copy kept in the change log. Whether to build a way of blanking the personal fields inside those entries is a decision the committee has not taken. Until it does, this page states the position as it is rather than one that reads better.

If you are not satisfied

Write to the club first, by either route above, and say what you want done. Beyond that, the club has not yet confirmed which authority a complaint about its handling of personal data should be taken to, and this page will not guess at one. It will be named here once it has been established.

What this page is

Everything above was checked against this club's own software and database rather than written from what an organisation of this kind usually does. Where the club has not decided something — how long records are kept, which office answers these requests, where the data physically sits, what removal ought to reach — this page says so instead of filling the gap.

No date appears at the top of this page because the committee has not yet recorded one on which it adopted the policy. A revision date nobody set would be worse than none, because it is exactly the thing a reader relies on to know whether what they are reading still applies.