The boring-but-important bit
Privacy notice
What we collect, why, and how to make us stop. No small print you need a lawyer for.
Last updated: not yet published — draft.
Who’s responsible
Whatsdoing is run by Showday Tickets Ltd (“we”, “us”), a company registered in England and Wales, trading as Whatsdoing. We’re the data controller for the information described here.
You can write to us at Showday Tickets Ltd, 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA, or email privacy@whatsdoing.co.uk. We’re registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (registration pending at the time of writing).
What we collect
We collect your email because we email you. Revolutionary. Everything else is about picking the right things to send. Specifically:
- Your email address — so we can send you the newsletter and honour your preferences.
- The outward part of your postcode (for example
BS1, not your full postcode) and the approximate coordinates we derive from it, so we can find events near you. - Your interests and sending preferences — the categories you pick, how often you want the email, and roughly what time.
- Your country at sign-up, worked out from your IP address. We keep the country, not the IP address itself.
- Engagement counters — how many emails we’ve sent you, how many you opened, and the categories of links you clicked. This is what makes the picks get better over time. Opens and clicks are measured with a standard tracking pixel and link wrapping in the email, described under Cookies and tracking below.
That’s the lot. No name, no phone number, no full address, no payment details — the newsletter is free, so there’s nothing to pay.
Why we’re allowed to
We send you marketing emails because you asked us to. You signed up and then confirmed by clicking a link in a confirmation email — that’s double opt-in, and your consent is our lawful basis (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(a) and PECR Regulation 22).
A couple of operational things — keeping a suppression list so we never email someone who’s opted out, and handling bounces — run on legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)). We do them to respect your choices and protect our sending reputation, and they don’t override your rights.
How long we keep it
We keep your subscriber record for as long as you’re subscribed. When you unsubscribe, we hard-delete that record within 30 days — it’s a real deletion, not a hidden “inactive” flag.
We keep one small, pseudonymous tombstone for six years: a one-way hash of your email plus the dates you consented. It contains no readable email address. We keep it so we can prove consent if we’re ever asked, and so we don’t accidentally email an address that previously opted out. Records of individual sends are kept for 13 months so we can investigate delivery or complaint issues.
Who else touches your data
We use a small number of trusted suppliers to run the service. Each one only processes what it needs to, under a data processing agreement:
- MongoDB Atlas — our database. Your data is stored in Ireland (eu-west-1).
- Resend — delivers the emails and records opens, clicks and bounces.
- Anthropic — the AI that writes event summaries and news digests. We only send it event and news content, never your email, postcode or any other personal data.
- Vercel and Render — host the website and the background jobs that build your email.
- Sentry and Better Stack — error and log monitoring, configured to strip out personal fields before anything is recorded.
We don’t sell your data, and we don’t share it with advertisers or data brokers. Full stop.
Your rights
You can ask us for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. The quickest routes:
- Change your interests or frequency using the preference link in any email.
- Unsubscribe with the one-click link in any email — that deletes your record, no questions asked.
- For a copy of your data or anything else, email privacy@whatsdoing.co.uk. We’ll respond within 30 days.
If you think we’ve got something wrong, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. We’d rather you told us first so we can put it right.
Changes to this notice
If we change anything meaningful here, we’ll flag it in the newsletter footer with a link back to this page. The “last updated” date at the top always tells you when it last changed.