CultureCloset privacy policy.
CultureCloset is a marketplace where people buy and sell cultural and occasion garments from each other. This policy explains what we collect, why, who sees it, and what you can tell us to do about it. It is written to be read, not to be survived.
One thing makes this different from a shop's privacy policy, and it changes what happens to your data.
We are PEER TO PEER. The garment you buy belongs to another member, not to us. When an order goes ahead, some of your information reaches that person, because a parcel cannot be delivered to nobody.
What we collect
What you give us
- Your name, email address and, if you add one, a phone number.
- Your date of birth, to check you are old enough to enter a contract.
- Delivery and collection addresses.
- Measurements in millimetres, for garments and for fit. We ask for measurements rather than a size label because a size 12 is not the same garment in two countries or two traditions.
- Your profile: a display picture and a short biography, if you write one.
- What you list, what you buy, the occasion and the date of the event.
- The packed weight of a garment you list, because delivery is priced by weight.
- Messages you send other members through the platform.
- Photographs you take of a garment when it is listed and when it is sent.
- Boards you make, garments you pin to them, and closets you follow.
What we record as you use the site
- Which listings you view and search for, so search can be improved and so we can show you things worth seeing.
- Device and app information needed to deliver notifications you have asked for.
- Signals used to detect fraud and abuse.
What we get from others
- Payment and payout status from our payment processor. We never see or store your full card number.
- The outcome of an identity check, and the two details described in section 2.
The identity check, stated plainly
Anybody who is to be paid through CultureCloset verifies their identity. The check is performed by Stripe Identity: you photograph a government document on your phone.
WE DO NOT STORE YOUR IDENTITY DOCUMENT. Not the image, not the document number, not its expiry date. Those stay with the provider who performed the check.
WE DO KEEP TWO DETAILS FROM IT: your legal name and your date of birth, as they appear on the document. We keep them for one reason, and it is better said than hidden: money can only be sent to, or recovered from, a real person. A display name somebody typed is not a person. Section 7 says what happens when money is owed.
We also keep which provider did the check, an opaque reference so it can be audited, and whether it passed.
An automated check can fail for reasons that have nothing to do with who you are. Document checks are known to fail more often on non-Latin name forms, on names that do not split neatly into first and last, on older documents, and on darker skin tones in liveness checks, which is to say, disproportionately on the communities this marketplace exists for. So a failed check is not final. It goes to a person.
What we do with it
- Take and fulfil purchases, arrange shipping, and settle payments and payouts.
- Judge whether a garment can reach you before your event.
- Resolve disputes when something does not arrive or is not as described.
- Calculate and collect sales tax where the law requires it.
- Answer you when you contact us.
- Detect fraud, impersonation and abuse, and enforce our terms.
- Improve search, ranking and recommendations.
- Send you messages about your orders and conversations. These are not marketing and you cannot opt out of them while an order is live, because they are how you find out where your garment is.
- Meet legal, tax and accounting obligations.
- Recover money genuinely owed to us or to a member, as described in section 7.
Automated checks on what you upload
Photographs uploaded to the service may be checked automatically for explicit or unlawful content before they are shown to anyone. A photograph the check refuses is not published. If you think a refusal is wrong, tell us and a person will look.
What other members see
When you order, the seller is told what they need to send a parcel: your name and the delivery address. They do not see your email address, your phone number, your date of birth, your payment details or your other orders.
When you list, buyers see the garment, its measurements, its declared condition and the approximate area it ships from. They do not see your address.
Your profile picture, display name and rating are visible to other members. Your biography is visible if you write one.
In messages, phone numbers, email addresses and social handles are hidden from the other person until an order is placed. This protects both of you and keeps the agreement on the platform where it can be enforced.
A board you make is private until you change it. A board shared by link can be opened by anyone holding that link; a public board can be found by anyone. That is your choice to make and to undo.
When money is owed
If a refund or an award is decided against you and exceeds what we are holding, the remainder is a debt.
We may pursue that debt ourselves, place it with a collection agency, or sell it to a purchaser of debt. If we do, the file we hand over contains what is needed to identify you and to prove the debt: your legal name and date of birth as verified in section 2, your email address, your phone number if we have one, the delivery address the garment was sent to, the amount, the date of default, and the record of the order including the decision.
This is the only circumstance in which your personal information is transferred to a third party for value, and it happens only after a decision has gone against you.
Measurement, and what we deliberately do not keep
MEASUREMENT IS ON UNLESS YOU TURN IT OFF. We measure how the site is used, which pages are opened and in what order, and which advert or link brought somebody here, from the moment you start using it, without asking first. You can turn either of those off at any time, in Privacy and measurement under your account, and it stops immediately. We would rather say that here in one sentence than bury it.
We do that because we cannot fix what we cannot see. A marketplace that does not know which step people abandon cannot repair that step, and one that does not know which channel brought a good seller cannot afford to find more of them.
Here is what limits it, and each of these is a real limit rather than a reassurance.
- It is recorded against a KEYED PSEUDONYM rather than your account id, and to the HOUR rather than the second. Both are deliberate. A precise timestamp plus a page view is enough to re-identify somebody from a small population, and a small population is exactly what a marketplace for a specific culture's clothing has.
- No measurement record contains your name, your address, your email, a search you typed, or an amount of money.
- It stays with us. It is not sold, and it is not shared with an advertising network. We run no advertising or retargeting pixel. If that ever changes, this policy changes first and you get a "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link before it does.
- When you are signed out there is no pseudonym at all, so there is nothing for what we record to be attached to.
- Every record carries the basis on which it was collected, and marketing measurement is stored separately from the counting needed to run the service.
Some counting continues whatever you choose, and it is fair to name it: how often a listing is blocked, how often an order fails, how many disputes are opened and how they end. These carry no connection to you of any kind, no account, no device, no pseudonym, and could not be linked back to you by us or by anyone else. They are how we notice the platform is broken.
The complete list of what we are able to record is published in the product, at Privacy and measurement, and it is generated from the same file the code reads. It cannot fall out of date with the practice.
A choice you make here lasts a year, after which it returns to the default and you can set it again.
How long we keep it
- Your account, for as long as it is open.
- Purchase, payment and tax records, for as long as tax and accounting law requires. These survive account closure because they must.
- Condition evidence, for as long as a dispute about that order could still be brought, and then it is deleted.
- Messages between members, while they may be needed to resolve a dispute.
- Where a debt is owed, the records needed to pursue it, for as long as it may lawfully be pursued.
Your rights
You can ask to see what we hold, correct it, get a copy, or have it deleted. You can object to processing at any time, and you can turn measurement off at any time in Privacy and measurement under your account.
Deletion has a limit worth stating: we cannot delete a payment record the law requires us to keep, evidence in an open dispute, or the record of a debt you owe, and we would rather say so here than refuse you later without explanation.
If you are in California, you have the right to know, to delete, to correct, and not to be discriminated against for exercising them. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined for advertising purposes.
To exercise any of these, contact us at the address in section 15.
Children
CultureCloset is not for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children, and we delete it if we find it.
Security
Access to your data is restricted at the database itself, not only in application code. One member cannot read another's records even if a bug in the application asks for them. Sign-in codes and session tokens are stored only as keyed hashes and cannot be read back out.
No system is without risk. If a breach occurs that puts your rights at risk, we will tell you and the relevant authority without undue delay.
Where your information is held
CultureCloset is operated from the United States and the service and its data are hosted there. Our payment, identity, delivery and communication providers may process information in other countries under their own safeguards. If you use CultureCloset from outside the United States, you are asking us to process your information here.
Contact
Questions, requests and complaints: privacy@culturecloset.app
CultureCloset, Lombard, Illinois, United States.
Changes
We may update this policy. Published versions are kept and the one in force when you ordered is the one that applied to that order. Material changes will be notified.
The version that applies to an order is the one stored with that order, not this one. Publishing a new version never changes terms somebody has already agreed to.