Privacy notice
What Affiliatant holds, why, for how long, and how to get it out or have it erased.
Two different relationships
Affiliatant handles personal data in two capacities and they have different answers, so they are kept apart here.
As a controller, for the people who hold an Affiliatant account: the merchant administrators and staff who sign in, and the people who contact us. We decide what is held about them and why.
As a processor, for everything a merchant's programme generates: their affiliates, and the visitors who click a tracking link. The merchant decides what happens to that data; we act on their instructions.
What is held about a visitor who clicks a tracking link
Deliberately little, and the one piece that identifies a person is never stored in the clear.
- A keyed hash of the IP address. Not the address. It cannot be reversed without a secret held separately, and it exists to spot the same visitor clicking forty times, not to identify anybody.
- A coarse hash of the browser and language, used only to suppress a double click.
- The country, the page landed on, the referring site's host name, and the time. The landing page is stored without its query string, because a query can carry an email address or a campaign identifier that names somebody.
- An opaque click id, which is what ties a later order back to a partner.
No name, no email address, no account, no cross-site profile and nothing sold or shared with an advertising network. Raw click rows are deleted by dropping whole days at a time, on a retention period the merchant sets between 7 and 730 days. Aggregated counts outlive them, so reports do not lose history.
Tracking consent
Affiliate tracking is not "strictly necessary" under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, and we do not pretend otherwise. Where a merchant's site asks for consent, our integrations respect the answer, and a visitor who has refused is handled accordingly rather than quietly tracked anyway.
Our own website sets no analytics, advertising or non-essential cookies at all, which is why there is no cookie banner on it.
What is held about an affiliate
Their name, email address, the sites and channels they declared, what they earned, how they want to be paid, and their tax status where self-billing applies. The merchant is the controller of all of it.
An affiliate can be erased on request. Erasure strips the identity and keeps the money: the commission and ledger entries remain because accounting records must be kept by law, and the ledger is checked inside the same transaction, so an erasure that would unbalance the books is refused rather than applied. Two things survive on purpose and the screen says so at the time: the supplier name and address already printed on an issued VAT invoice, and the append-only audit log.
What is held about an account holder
Name, email address, business name and address, sign-in history and audit records of what was changed. If a paid band is bought, Stripe holds the card and the billing address; we hold an identifier for the customer and the subscription and never see the card.
Sub-processors
Kept short on purpose.
- Stripe Payments Europe Ltd - card payment for our own subscription bands. Not used for merchant payouts, because there are none.
- Cloudflare - the network in front of the service.
- Havenswift Hosting Ltd - the hosting, which is us, in the United Kingdom.
The current list is always visible to a signed-in merchant in the console, with the date it last changed. We will give notice before adding one.
Where it is held
In the United Kingdom, on infrastructure we operate.
How long
- Raw clicks: the merchant's chosen retention, 7 to 730 days, deleted a whole day at a time.
- Conversions, commission and ledger entries: kept, because they are accounting records.
- Audit log: kept, append only.
- An unverified signup: deleted after 48 hours.
- A closed account: the data is removed on request, subject to the accounting records above.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be erased, or object to how it is used. If a merchant's programme holds data about you, ask the merchant first, because they decide what happens to it. Ask us and we will tell you who that is.
Write to privacy@affiliatant.com. If we get it wrong you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.
Security reports
security@affiliatant.com, and there is a security.txt at the usual place. We will not take action against anybody who reports something in good faith.
Havenswift Hosting Ltd, 71-75 Shelton Street, London WC2H 9JQ.