Privacy Policy

Chatter Snow is an LGBTQ+ ski and snowboard community organization on the East Coast. This policy explains what personal information we collect through this website, why we collect it, who can see it, how long we keep it, and how to ask us for a copy or a deletion.

The short version: we try to collect only the information we need to run our events, programs, and gear library and to keep in touch with you, we don't sell or rent it to anyone, and you can ask us to delete it — apart from the few records we're legally required to keep — by emailing privacy@chattersnow.org.

Everything below is information you type into a form yourself. We don't buy personal information about you from anyone else.

• Contact form — Your name, email address, the topic you pick, and your message. So we can read what you sent and reply to you.
• Volunteer application — Your name, email address, and — if you choose to give them — your phone number, the roles you're interested in, and your availability. To review your application, follow up about volunteering, and let you check your application status with the reference code we give you.
• Event registration — Your name, email address, party size, and — optionally — your phone number, Instagram handle, and any notes you add. If you fill in a rider profile, we also store whether you ski or snowboard, your experience level, and your preferred mountain. To hold your spot, plan the event around who's coming, send you event details, and match the day to the experience levels showing up. We also ask whether anyone in your party is under 18, and if you say yes we ask for the name and mobile number of the adult coming with them and for an emergency contact — we never ask anyone's date of birth or age. Everyone helping run the event can see that your party includes someone under 18; only our board and leads can see those two contacts, and we clear both with the rest of your details on the schedule below. Our event pages say what we do with photos and video, and registering means you are happy for us to do that. If you would rather not be photographed, tell any organizer at the event, email us, or — if you have an account here — say so on your registration page, before or after. We keep that with your registration, with the date and a copy of what you were shown, so that everyone helping run the event knows.
• Gear requests — Your name, email address, and — optionally — your phone number and any notes about what you need. To match you with the gear you asked for and arrange a time to hand it over.
• Portal accounts — For board members and volunteer leads only: the email address you sign in with, and a session cookie that keeps you signed in. Signing in with Google shares your Google account's email address and name with us. To sign you in to the operations portal and apply the permissions attached to your role.

We also record the IP address a form submission came from and store it with that submission. It is used only to stop spam and abuse — to limit how many times the same sender can submit a form in a short window — and it is deleted when the submission it belongs to is deleted.

We are an LGBTQ+ organization, and you never have to tell us anything about your sexual orientation or gender identity to take part. None of our forms ask for it, and nothing about your participation is published by us. The rider details we do ask for — whether you ski or snowboard, your experience level, your preferred mountain — are there to plan the day around the group that's coming, nothing else.

• We don't sell, rent, or trade your personal information, and we don't share it with advertisers.
• We don't use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies on this site.
• We don't take payments or store card details on this site. Online monetary donations aren't open yet; when they are, this policy will be updated before they go live.
• We don't publish your information. Names and photos only appear on the public site when someone has agreed to that separately, such as a board member on our team page.

We keep personal information only for as long as we reasonably need it for the purposes described here. When we no longer need it, we delete it, or we strip the personal details and keep only the count — how many people came to an event, how many first-time riders — which tells us nothing about you.

• Contact form messages — 2 years from the date you sent them.
• Volunteer applications — 2 years after your last activity with us, or 1 year if the application is withdrawn or declined.
• Event registrations — 3 years after the event.
• Rider profiles — Until you ask us to delete your profile, or after 2 years of inactivity.
• Gear requests — 3 years after we hand the gear over.
• Portal accounts — If you hold a role with us, for as long as you hold it. When your role ends we permanently disable your access and clear the personal details we hold about you in the portal. We keep the record of what was done through the portal — including which account did it — for governance, security, audit, insurance, and legal reasons.

These periods are enforced by a scheduled job, not by hand: it runs nightly and removes or anonymizes whatever has passed its date, and keeps a record of what it did so we can check the policy is being applied.

Some records have to outlive those periods because the law or our own accounting requires it — donation and financial records we need for our reporting and tax filings, for example. A few organizational records, such as tax filings, financial statements, and governance records, we keep permanently. If you ask us to delete your information and something falls into one of those categories, we'll tell you what we have to keep and why.

Inside Chatter, what you submit is visible to the board members and volunteer leads whose role covers it — the people running events see event registrations, the volunteer coordinator sees volunteer applications, and so on. Access is enforced in the database by the permissions attached to each role, not just hidden in the interface.

Running an event means the volunteers staffing it may need to see who registered — a check-in list, a head count, who asked for gear or noted something we should know about on the day. We don't publish participant lists, and we don't give your name or contact details to a mountain, a partner, or a sponsor unless you have agreed to that separately, or the venue requires it to let the group in and we've told you so when you registered.

Outside Chatter, we rely on a small number of service providers to run the site. They handle information on our behalf, under their own terms and privacy policies:

• Supabase — hosts our database and handles portal sign-in.
• Vercel — hosts this website and provides the aggregate traffic counts we use to see which pages get visited.
• Resend — delivers the email this site sends, such as a confirmation or a reply to something you submitted.
• Google — only if you choose to sign in to the portal with a Google account.

We'll also share information if we're legally required to, or if it's necessary to protect someone's safety.

We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards to protect what you give us: information travels to the site over an encrypted connection, portal accounts are individual rather than shared, and access to each kind of record is limited to the roles that need it and enforced by the database itself.

No website or database is perfectly secure, and we can't promise otherwise. If a breach ever affects your information, we'll tell you and the authorities we're required to tell, as promptly as we can.

The public site sets no cookies of its own. The one cookie we do set is the session cookie that keeps board members and volunteer leads signed in to the operations portal, and it's only set once someone signs in.

We use Vercel Web Analytics to count page views. It reports visits in aggregate, sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device, and doesn't follow you across other websites. We don't run Google Analytics or any advertising analytics on this site.

We link out to mountains, partner organizations, sponsors, and our social accounts. Once you follow one of those links you're on someone else's site, and what they collect is covered by their privacy policy, not this one — worth a read before you hand them anything. The same goes for the ticketing or payment services we may use in the future; if we add one, we'll name it here first.

Email privacy@chattersnow.org and you can ask us to:

• send you a copy of what we hold about you,
• correct anything that's wrong,
• delete your information, subject to the records we're required to keep, and
• stop emailing you about events, programs, or volunteering.

We aim to respond within 30 days. So that we don't hand your information to someone else, please write from the email address you gave us, or be ready to confirm the details of the submission you're asking about.

This site isn't directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their personal information through it. Where a program is open to riders under 18, we ask a parent or guardian to complete the forms. If you believe a child has given us information through this site, email us and we'll delete it.

If we start collecting something new or using it differently, we'll update this page and change the date at the top. For a change that materially affects information you've already given us, we'll say so directly rather than relying on you to re-read the page.

Questions about this policy, or about anything we hold on you, go to privacy@chattersnow.org. You can also reach us through the contact form.