Why there is a second privacy notice. The site privacy policy describes what we hold about you as a member. The affiliate programme collects different things for a different reason: it tracks clicks, it attributes signups, and it holds bank and tax details in order to pay you. This notice covers only that. The site policy still applies to everything else.
1. What we hold about you as an affiliate
1.1 Your account. Your referral code, the date you joined, the version of the terms you accepted, the date and time you accepted them, and the IP address you accepted from. The acceptance record exists because an agreement nobody can evidence is not an agreement.
1.2 Payout details. If you choose ACH: the name on the account, the routing number, the account type, and the account number. The account number is stored encrypted; after you enter it, only its last four digits are ever displayed anywhere, including to us. If you choose credit against your own subscription, we hold no bank details at all.
1.3 Tax details. Where a Form W-9 is required, the name on it, the country, and the last four digits of the tax identification number. We do not store the full number in this system.
1.4 The ledger. Every commission, what it was earned on, the rate applied, its hold date, and every payout, its method, its reference and its date.
1.5 Correspondence. A record of each programme email sent to you: which one, when, and whether it was accepted for delivery.
2. What we hold about the people you refer
2.1 The click. When somebody follows your link we record the time, the referral code, any campaign tag you added, the page they landed on, the page they came from, their IP address, and their browser’s user-agent string.
2.2 A one-way fingerprint of the address. We also store a hashed form of the IP address so that repeated signups from one address can be spotted without keeping a list of addresses that can be read back.
2.3 The signup. If they create an account, we record which account it is, when, and which click it came from.
2.4 Their payments. For each payment they make inside your earning window, the amount and the payment reference — because the commission is a percentage of it and has to be auditable.
3. What you are shown about them, and what you are not
3.1 On your own page you see that somebody joined, when, whether they are paying, which campaign tag they came from, and what you earned.
3.2 You do not see their name, and their email address is shown to you only in masked form. You are never shown what they bought, what they uploaded, what they do with the service, or anything else about them.
3.3 This is deliberate and is not negotiable. You are owed an accurate figure, not a customer list.
4. The cookie
4.1 Following a referral link sets one cookie on the visitor’s browser. It holds the affiliate identifier, the click identifier and the campaign tag, and it lasts as long as the attribution window — thirty days.
4.2 It is used for attribution and for nothing else. It carries no advertising identifier, it is not shared with anybody, and it is not used to profile anyone or to build an audience.
4.3 It is deleted the moment attribution is settled, or when the window expires. Blocking or clearing it means the signup may not be attributed to you.
5. Why we are allowed to hold this
5.1 For your own affiliate data: to perform the agreement you entered into. Without it we cannot pay you.
5.2 For click and attribution data about visitors: our legitimate interest in operating a referral programme accurately and in detecting manufactured referrals. Where consent is required in your visitors’ jurisdiction for the cookie in section 4, it is obtained by the site’s own consent mechanism.
5.3 For tax and payment records: compliance with a legal obligation.
6. Who else sees it
6.1 Our bank. When we pay you, the bank receives what a bank needs to move money: the name on the account, the routing number, the account number and the amount.
6.2 Our payment processor. Payments by referred members are processed by the site’s payment processor, which tells us the amount and the reference. It is not told that a payment relates to an affiliate.
6.3 Our email provider. Programme emails go out through the provider named in the site privacy policy.
6.4 Our accountant, and the tax authorities. Payment totals, and any required form.
6.5 Nobody else. We do not sell affiliate data. We do not share it for advertising. We do not sell or share data about the people you refer, to you or to anyone.
7. How long we keep it
7.1 Click records that never became a signup: twelve months, then deleted.
7.2 Attribution and commission records: for as long as the commission could be questioned, and then as long as tax and accounting law requires — generally seven years from the end of the year the payout fell in.
7.3 Bank details: until you change or remove them, or your affiliate account closes and everything owed has been paid, whichever is later.
7.4 The acceptance record for the terms: for as long as the ledger it relates to.
8. Your rights
8.1 You may see everything we hold about you as an affiliate. Most of it is already on your account page.
8.2 You may correct your payout and tax details yourself, and ask us to correct anything else.
8.3 You may ask us to delete your affiliate data. We will, except where we must keep a record for tax or accounting, or where a commission is still open. We will tell you which parts we have kept and why.
8.4 You may turn off programme email at any time from your account page. Turning it off does not stop your balance accruing and does not stop a payout.
8.5 Write to the support address on this site to exercise any of these. The site privacy policy sets out the response times and the appeal route, which apply here too.
9. Security
9.1 Account numbers are encrypted with authenticated encryption before they are written to the database, and the key is not stored alongside them.
9.2 No system is perfect. If affiliate payout data were exposed we would tell you, and any authority we are required to tell, without unnecessary delay.
10. Changes
10.1 If this notice changes materially, affiliates are told by email. The version number at the top of the page changes with it.