Privacy notice.
How the Protestbum prelaunch website and waitlist handle your information, in plain language.
1. Who operates this website
Protestbum is a product in development. No company has been formed yet: this website and the waitlist are run by Protestbum’s founder, as an individual, in the United States (“Protestbum”, “we”). If a company is formed, this notice will name it.
To reach us, use the contact form. More in Contact.
2. What this notice covers
This notice covers this website and its prelaunch lists: the waitlist, the protester list, your page and the contact form. Today, nobody can create a protest, request or accept a booking, pay or be paid here. The planned marketplace will have its own privacy notice, published before it opens and before it collects anything described in The planned marketplace.
3. What we collect
There are two waitlists, and you can join either or both: the Protestbum waitlist, for people who want to use the app, and the protester waitlist, for people who want to protest. To join the Protestbum waitlist, we ask for your email address; you can also tell us how you’d use Protestbum (to request protests, to protest, or both) and your city, when you join or later. The protester waitlist asks for your full name, email, date of birth and city, and is only for people 18 or older. We don’t ask for a home address or ID. After confirming, you set a passcode. If you use the contact form, we keep your message. Everything else below is created by the system to run the lists safely.
The site doesn’t store protest requests, protest drafts, signs, messages for protests or event choices. The demos on this site are illustrations that save nothing.
| Information | When | Why | Kept for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email address | When you join | To confirm it’s you, then send the launch and product updates you asked for | Until you unsubscribe (then up to 12 months) or delete |
| Consent record: wording, version, timestamps | When you join and confirm | To show what you agreed to and when | As long as your email |
| Interest: booking, participating or both (optional) | When you join or after confirming, if you choose to (change it anytime) | To measure both sides of the marketplace and place you in the right early-access queue | Until you change it or delete |
| City (optional on the waitlist; required on the protester waitlist) | When you join or after confirming (change it anytime) | To decide where to launch first, place you in your city’s queue, and tell protesters about opportunities near them | Until you change it or delete |
| Full name (protester waitlist only) | When you join the protester waitlist | To know who’s on the protester waitlist and address you by name; once protester requests open, to match you with them | As long as your record |
| Date of birth (protester waitlist only) | When you join the protester waitlist | To make sure everyone on the protester waitlist is 18 or older | As long as your record |
| Passcode, stored only as a one-way scrambled value (we can’t see or recover it) | When you set it after confirming | So you can sign in with your email and passcode to see your progress | Until you change it or delete |
| How you found us: source, medium, campaign and content labels from the link you used | When you join | To learn which channels bring people who confirm | As long as your record |
| Visit context: the referring website’s name (domain only), the first page you visited, which signup form you used, and which version of the page you were shown when we’re comparing two versions | When you join | To see which pages, page versions and sites bring interested people | As long as your record |
| Device type (mobile, tablet or desktop) and approximate country and region, provided by our hosting service. Never your IP address | When you join | To understand where interest is and design for the devices people use | As long as your record |
| Referral relationship | If you joined through someone’s invite link | To count confirmed referrals. The person who shared it sees only a number, never your email | As long as your record |
| Network fingerprint: a keyed hash of your IP address, never the address itself | When you join | To flag possible self-referrals and abuse for review | Deleted after 30 days |
| Referral checks: your address without +tags (and Gmail dots), review flags, and any review decision with its reason | When you join or a referral is reviewed | To stop people crediting themselves with alias addresses, and to keep referral credit fair | As long as your record |
| Your early-access position as you last saw it, per city and role queue | When you open your page | To tell you truthfully if you’ve moved up since your last visit | As long as your record |
| Rate-limit counters: keyed hashes | On requests | To block automated abuse | Minutes to 24 hours |
| Daily visitor count: a keyed hash of your network and browser type, under a random key that exists for one day | When you visit, whether or not you join | To count unique visitors without cookies. It can’t be turned back into your IP address or linked across days | Deleted, with that day’s key, when the day ends (UTC) |
| Email delivery records: sent, delivered, bounced, marked as spam | For each email | To keep email deliverable and honor complaints | 180 days |
| Suppression list: a keyed hash of an address | After a hard bounce, spam complaint or a request | To make sure that address is never emailed again | Kept so the block keeps working |
| Session cookie | After you confirm, sign in with your passcode, or use a sign-in link | Keeps you signed in to your page on that device | 30 days, or until you sign out |
| Sign-in, confirmation and unsubscribe codes, stored only as one-way hashes | When we email you a link | To prove a link came from your inbox | Deleted 7 days after they expire or are used |
| Contact-form messages: the topic, your reply address and what you wrote | If you use the contact form | To answer you, and to handle privacy requests | Deleted 365 days after they arrive, or with your waitlist record |
| Never-confirmed signups | If you don’t confirm | Nothing further is sent beyond the confirmation email | Deleted after 30 days |
We don’t collect payment details, identity documents, government ID numbers, your precise location, or your contacts.
4. Why we use it
- To run the lists you joined: confirm your address, let you sign in, and send the launch news and product updates you asked for.
- To decide where to launch: the cities and roles people give us show where customers and protesters are in the same place.
- To keep referrals fair and stop abuse: rate limits, alias checks, network fingerprints (deleted after 30 days) and review flags.
- To improve the site: aggregate counts of visits and signups by channel, page, page version and device type.
- To answer you: contact-form messages are used only to reply and to handle your request.
- To meet legal obligations: consent records, unsubscribe handling and suppression of addresses that asked not to be emailed.
We don’t sell or rent your information, share it for advertising, or use it to build profiles of your interests.
5. Sensitive information
The lists never ask about your political views, party, religion or the causes you support, and the site doesn’t store protest requests. Two things can still say something about you, and we treat them as confidential:
- Being on the protester list shows you’re interested in taking part in demonstrations for pay. We never publish the list or share who’s on it.
- Contact-form messages may mention your views or someone else’s if you choose to write about them. We use them only to answer you. Please don’t send more than you need to.
Protest requests in the planned marketplace will reveal political or other sensitive views. They’ll be covered by the marketplace’s own notice and safeguards.
6. Service providers
These companies process data for us, only to provide their service:
- Vercel: hosts the website and runs its server code. It provides the approximate country and region we store.
- Supabase: the managed Postgres database where the lists and contact messages are stored, in the United States (North Virginia).
- Resend: sends our emails and reports whether they were delivered, bounced or marked as spam, in the United States (North Virginia).
We’ll update this list before adding or changing a provider. We may disclose information if the law requires it; we’ll push back on requests that aren’t properly made, and tell the person affected where we’re allowed to.
7. Cookies and measurement
We count visits, unique visitors, page views, clicks on calls to action, clicks into the email field, film plays, invite-link views and share-button clicks, signups and confirmations. They’re stored as daily totals by the link labels a visit arrived with (for example “instagram” and “waitlist_launch”) and the first page visited, and also by device type (mobile, tablet or desktop, read from your browser’s user agent) and, when we’re comparing two versions of a page, which version was shown. These totals contain no email addresses, IP addresses, cookies or anything that identifies a person. Automated traffic such as crawlers isn’t counted. There are no advertising trackers or social-media pixels on this site.
The only cookies are functional: a session cookie if you confirm or use a sign-in link, and a separate cookie for Protestbum staff signed in to the admin dashboard. Your browser also keeps the source label of the link you arrived from, and which version of the page it was shown, in session storage, so a signup can be attributed to them and you see the same version as you move around the site. Both are cleared when you close the tab.
Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control: the site does no cross-site tracking and no targeted advertising, so there’s nothing for these signals to turn off. It works the same whether or not your browser sends them.
8. Security
Confirmation, sign-in and unsubscribe links contain random single-purpose codes that are stored only as one-way hashes and expire (confirmation links after 48 hours). Passcodes are stored only as one-way scrambled values. The lists live in a private database schema with no public access; the admin dashboard is password-protected, rate-limited and logs administrative actions. The site is served over HTTPS. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your information, we’ll tell you as the law requires.
9. How long we keep it
- Your waitlist record: until you delete it. If you unsubscribe, it’s deleted 12 months later.
- Signups that are never confirmed: deleted after 30 days.
- A request to join the protester waitlist that’s never confirmed: its name, date of birth and city deleted after 30 days.
- Network fingerprints: deleted after 30 days.
- Email links and codes: deleted 7 days after they expire or are used.
- Email delivery records: 180 days.
- Contact-form messages: 365 days, or sooner when you delete your waitlist record.
- Daily visitor counts: the one-day key and hashes are deleted when the day ends (UTC). Aggregate totals are kept.
- Suppressions (addresses that asked not to be emailed, bounced or complained): kept as keyed hashes, so the block keeps working.
Deletion takes effect in our live database immediately. Any copy in a provider’s routine backups is removed as those backups expire.
10. Your choices and rights
- Unsubscribe with the link at the bottom of any email. It works in one step with no sign-in.
- Correct or change your answers (how you’d use Protestbum, your city) from your page. To change your email address, delete your record and join again.
- Delete your record from your page. It removes your email, answers, passcode, invite link and contact-form messages immediately.
- Get a copy of what we store, or ask anything else, through the contact form (“Privacy request”). We’ll check the request comes from the address it’s about before acting on it, and answer within 30 days.
We offer these choices to everyone, wherever you live. Using them never affects your place on the list beyond what you ask for.
11. Age
The waitlist, and Protestbum when it launches, is for people 18 and older, both customers and protesters. Please don’t sign up if you’re under 18. If we learn that someone under 18 has joined, we’ll delete their record.
12. The planned marketplace
None of the following is collected today. If Protestbum launches the marketplace, it’s expected to need more information, explained in its own notice and, where required, asked for with separate consent:
- Protest requests: the issue, message, sign text, place, time and instructions, which can reveal views.
- Location during a session: confirming a protester reached the agreed area, only while a session is active, with their permission.
- Check-in photos and short videos: evidence of attendance, shown to the customer in a completion record.
- Identity and eligibility checks, payments, payouts and tax details, handled with specialist providers.
- Ratings and session histories for both sides.
The aim is to collect only what each session needs, limit location to the session itself, and keep it no longer than verification and disputes require.
13. Changes to this notice
We’ll update this page when anything here changes, with a new effective date and version. If a change is significant, we’ll email confirmed subscribers before it takes effect. Effective October 21, 2026; notice version 2026-10-21.1; consent wording version 2026-10-07.1. When you join, the form says: “For people 18 and older. We’ll email you to confirm, then send occasional launch and product updates. Unsubscribe anytime.” We store that wording with the time you submitted it. You’re only added once you click the confirmation link we email you, so nobody can sign you up without access to your inbox.
14. Contact
- Contact form: protestbum.com/contact, for questions and privacy requests.