• Your personal information collected from account registration forms that can be found on our website, as well as payment forms if you make a donation to support our community or become an official sponsor, advertising partner or a paying customer of The Open Mic.
• The Open Mic never shares, rents or sells your personal information to anyone else.
• Your personal information is only shared between platforms that we use internally, like: WordPress, Stripe, Paypal, Zapier and MailChimp. They have secure systems in place to safely store your data.
• These internal platforms help us maintain and offer our website and services to you.
• Some data (IP, location, browser, your device type, referrer, etc) is collected via Google Analytics but not shared, rented or sold to anyone else.
• If you want the data that’s been collected please, send us an email with a subject “Data Request” to yourfriends@theopenmic.co and indicate your full name and email address that you used to register on The Open Mic.
• We will process your request free of charge and as early as possible and always within one month.
• If you want to opt out of any communication, you can always click “Unsubscribe” button or follow the instructions on how to update your email preferences, located in every single email (usually at the bottom).
• If you want your data to be deleted you can delete your Open Mic profile (this article explains how).
• If you delete your Open Mic account, your data will be deleted from our server without any chance of it being recovered (this includes your profile, your articles and your comments).
• Your data is stored on our cloud server, hosted by Siteground in the United States of America.
• Our hosting provider Siteground is laser-focused on security by default. We always encrypt your data when storing and processing it;
• We store your name, email, IP and personalization details that you may choose not too provide in your profile (for example, your languages, fields of expertise, short bio, etc).
• Your data is stored as long as you are a registered member of The Open Mic or past or active sponsor or advertising partner of The Open Mic.
• Your data is never sold or rented to anyone and only shared with internal platforms that help us run The Open Mic.
• If there is a data breach, you will be notified within 72 hours—but only if you didn’t opt out of receiving communications from us.

This was a brief summary that covers some of the key aspects. If you’re interested in learning more, we invite you to explore our full privacy policy.

What Else is New?

1) We’re sending out a notice via our marketing solution called Mailchimp to all members who’re on our mailing list.

The reason for this is simple: we’d like to collect your consent, so we could continue sending out our emails.

Please, keep an eye on your inbox for an email with a subject line: [Action Required] Update to The Open Mic’s Privacy Policy & GDPR

This email will be sent from our main email address at yourfriends@theopenmic.co

We ask you to click a big blue button in this email and update your email preferences indicating in the Marketing Permissions section, that you want to receive Email from us.

If you don’t do this, your email address will be deleted from our mailing list.

Don’t worry, though.

If we deleted you you can always re-subscribe using this form.

2) We’ve updated our Registration Forms to include appropriate language that encourages all our future members to read our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service and give their explicit consent prior to creating an account with us.

3) We added links to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service in the main site’s footer and menu. Now you can easily find them from pretty much any page on our main website.

4) We have setup a process that we will use in case any of our members requests access their data that we have about them to make processing this request a bit faster and easier.

5) We wrote an article in our FAQ section on how you can delete your Open Mic account. You will be missed dearly, of course, but no hard feelings.

6) As always, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions you can direct them to our email address, or open a support ticket or simply leave a comment below this post.

Thank you so much for using The Open Mic and making it an awesome place to be in, friend!

High-fives from Toronto!

~ Dmitry