Privacy and cookies

Last updated 26 October 2026

Scene Patrol looks for public events — readings, gigs, talks — by acts that its users ask it to follow. That means it holds two different kinds of personal data: a little about the people who use it, and rather more about the people whose dates it lists. This notice covers both.

Who is responsible

The data controller is Walter Eugene, of Dublin, Ireland. Questions about this notice, or about any of the rights below, go to [email protected].

Scene Patrol is a beta project run on a small scale. There is no data protection officer, and none is required.

If you have an account

What is held

Your email address, and a bcrypt hash of your password. If you only ever sign in with Google there is no password, and the field holds a placeholder that cannot be signed in with.
If you sign in with Google: the account identifier Google gives us and the email address on it. We ask Google for nothing else — the scopes requested are openid and email.
Your settings: default city, and whether email alerts are on. When digests are sent is a single site-wide setting rather than a per-account one, but we do keep the timestamps that track when your next digest is due and when the last one went.
The acts you track, and the events found for them.
A record of each search run, what it cost, and each email we sent you — the address, subject, and whether it was delivered. Email bodies are never stored, so a password reset link never reaches the database.
Server access logs: your IP address and the page requested.

Why, and on what legal basis

Running the service you asked for — your account, your acts, the searches, the digest emails: Art. 6(1)(b), performance of a contract.
Keeping it working and paying for it — search run records, model usage and cost, email delivery results, access logs, failed sign-in counts: Art. 6(1)(f), our legitimate interest in operating, debugging and securing the service, and in knowing what it costs.

Digest and alert emails are part of the service rather than marketing, and you can switch them off in Settings or from the unsubscribe link at the foot of any one of them.

If you use it without signing up

Adding an act without an account creates a guest record, identified only by the session cookie in your browser and a placeholder address that receives no mail. It is deleted thirty days after your last visit. Sign up and your tracked acts move across to the new account.

If you are a performer or author we list

Most of the personal data here is not about users at all. When someone follows an act — an author, musician, academic, podcaster or researcher — we hold that person's name, the city the user wants to hear about, and the public dates we find for them: title, dates, venue, a short description, and the address of the page it came from. We list where you are appearing in public; we do not follow you anywhere else.

Where it comes from. Publicly published pages: venue and ticketing listings, event calendars, and search results for the act's name. We never buy data, and we hold nothing from a private source.
Legal basis. Art. 6(1)(f), legitimate interests: telling an interested audience where a public figure is appearing in public, using only what has already been published for that purpose. We hold no special category data, and we do not profile.
Why you may not have heard from us. We usually have no way to contact the acts we list and no address for them, so notifying each one individually would take disproportionate effort (Art. 14(5)(b)). This notice is the public substitute.
What you can do. Write to [email protected] and we will tell you what is held about you, correct it, or stop listing you altogether. You do not have to give a reason, and you do not need an account.

Cookies

Scene Patrol sets three cookies. All three are strictly necessary to do something you asked for, which is why there is no consent banner: under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, cookies of that kind are exempt from consent. There is no analytics, no advertising, and nothing from a third party — every script, style, font and image on the site is served from this domain.

Name	What it does	How long it lasts
`scenepatrol_session`	Keeps you signed in. Not readable by JavaScript.	24 hours, or 30 days if you tick “Remember me”. For guests, 30 days from your last visit.
`scenepatrol_oauth`	Carries the one-time values that prove a Google sign-in came back from the request we started, and not from an attacker. Only sent on the Google sign-in routes.	10 minutes
`scenepatrol_flash`	Carries a one-off notice for the page you land on after signing in with Google, such as that your acts were merged.	60 seconds

Who else sees it

Nothing here is sold, and nothing is shared for anyone else's purposes. To do its job the service passes data to:

A search provider, which receives the act's name and city in order to find pages about them: either Brave Search or a self-hosted SearXNG instance, whichever the deployment is configured for.
A language model endpoint, which receives the text of those pages — including the act's name — in order to extract events from them. Pages that publish their events as structured data are read in code and never sent anywhere.
Ticketmaster, queried by act name for publicly listed events.
Google, if you choose to sign in with Google.
An email provider, which receives your address and the digest in order to deliver it.
The hosting provider that runs the server, the tunnel provider that carries traffic to it, and a storage provider that keeps encrypted copies of our backups.

On this deployment those are: the Brave Search API and the Ticketmaster Discovery API for finding events, OpenAI for reading pages — its API terms say inputs sent this way are not used to train its models — Resend for email, Hetzner for hosting, and Cloudflare for the tunnel that carries traffic to it and for storing our backups, which are encrypted before they leave our server, so Cloudflare cannot read them, and kept in the EU. Hetzner's servers are in the EEA. The others are in the United States, and those transfers rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified under it, and on standard contractual clauses where it is not. Each is engaged under its own data processing agreement.

How long it is kept

What	How long
Your account, acts and events	Until you delete the account
A guest's acts and events	30 days after the last visit
Sign-in sessions	24 hours, or 30 days with “Remember me”
Password reset links	1 hour, and once used they stop working
Search runs, model usage and cost, digest runs, email log	180 days
Model prompts and responses, and the matching log files	90 days
Server access logs, including IP addresses	7 days
Backups of the whole database	14 days on our server, and 30 days as encrypted copies kept off-site in the EU
Record of administrative actions	Kept indefinitely. It never contains an email address — only which account id was acted on, which stops meaning anything once that account is gone.

Your rights

You can exercise the first three yourself, while signed in, without asking anyone:

A copy of your data (Art. 15 and 20): download it as a JSON file — your account, every act, every event found, and the log of emails sent to you.
Correction (Art. 16): Settings, in the app.
Erasure (Art. 17): “Delete my account” in Settings removes the account, its acts, the events found for them, the model transcripts and every session immediately. Cost and delivery records are kept to the end of their 180 days with your address and account id stripped out of them, because what a month cost is a fact about that month. Backups made before you deleted the account still hold it until they expire, at most 30 days later.
Objection and restriction (Art. 18 and 21), and the right not to be subject to automated decisions: write to [email protected]. Nothing here makes a decision about you.

If you think we have got this wrong, please tell us first — and you can complain to the Data Protection Commission, Ireland's supervisory authority, whether or not you do.

How it is protected

Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes. The session cookie is not readable by JavaScript and is sent over HTTPS only. Every page is served under a content security policy that allows no third-party or inline code, state-changing requests must come from the site itself, and repeated failed sign-ins are rate limited. Administrative pages are separately authenticated and every change made there is recorded.

Changes

If this notice changes materially we will say so here, and date it. The date at the top is the one that counts.