Terms of Service
These are the Terms of Service for imesa.org. By continuing to use this page, you agree to follow and be bound by them.
Statutes
These TOS are an extension of our statutes:
Members
For IMESA members, we will handle their user data as per our statutes.
Non-Member Registered Users
For non-members that are registered users, by registering, they agree to be bound by our statutes for the purposes of data collection and retention. We also extend member's rights to them where data collection and retention are concerned.
Legitimate Interest
We will also store user data for the following legitimate interests:
-
Keeping records of obligations to IMESA - financial or otherwise - so that fulfilling them cannot be circumvented by data deletion and subsequent creation of a new account, and/or so that punitive bans cannot be evaded. For example:
- Keeping records of false event registrations for past events.
- Keeping records of all event registrations for current and future events (as they could become false event registrations).
- Keeping records of user data for (ex) members with negative membership fee balances.
- Keeping records of IPs that execute DoS attacks against imesa.org .
- Keeping records of all user data required to organize and host a future or current event.
- Historical data, as described below.
Banking Fees
You are responsible for any banking fees that may arise as a result of you making payments to us.
You may not make international transfers to pay us, and if you pay us in USD, not pay us via wire transfer. If you do so, you do at your own risk.
If you do so anyway, and we need to pay transaction fees as a result, these fees will be considered a financial obligation to IMESA. If you are making a donation, the fees will be subtracted from the donation value. If you are paying membership dues, the fee will be subtracted from your membership balance.
This can lead to negative balances/total donations, in which case we will remember your debt indefinitely until it is repaid. This also means retaining your personal data, as stated in the "Legitimate Interest" section.
Future donations and membership balance top-ups will count towards repaying your debt before anything else. Past donations, however, don't count. We also reserve the right to subtract your debt from any funding you may be eligible for (eg. assistance with travel/accommodation costs).
If no effort is made to repay the debt, we will consider additional measures, such as event bans and/or exclusion from making use of other IMESA resources. If there is an ongoing pattern of negative payments, we judge that this is due to malicious intent, and warnings to stop are not heeded, we reserve the right to take legal action and/or use any abuse reporting feature available to us via our financial services provider.
A side note: Of course, we don't hope or think that most of this will ever be necessary - this section is an insurance policy more than anything else. We're intentionally not publishing our BICs to make it difficult to accidentally make an international transaction. Wire transfers are expensive to send, not just receive, and also, once we publish our USD bank data, we will do so with a huge notice not to send us wire transmissions attached.
Event Registrations
Confirmed event registrations are binding. Failure to attend an event you have confirmed your attendance for without a good explanation can lead to consequences such as
- additional requirements to be allowed to attend future events (eg wanting to see documentation showing that you are planning a trip)
- not being considered for access to IMESA resources where these resources could otherwise help another participant
- in the case of repeat offenses, event bans
Another side note: The harsher consequences here are meant for repeat offenders, and people who do a no-show without trying to get in touch. We're not banning anyone from events just for missing their flight, or anything like that.
Data Collection for Venues
Event venues might require us to collect additional data. For example, they may want to check your passport, and require us to collect your passport number. In such cases, we will collect this extra data from you, share it with the venue, and retain it until the event is over. Data shared with third parties in such a way will be clearly marked in registration forms provided by us.
Historical Data
We store historical data. If user data is edited, we will remember the old version, and when it is edited. However, when user data is deleted, we delete the historical records, too.
Why?
It's either this, or never change data, but that's not practical - personal data can change. And we might need the old version of it.
For example, consider someone traveling to an event, and submitting their travel receipts to claim their refund (with the name they have at the time), then changing their name and updating it - and then an auditor comparing the receipt to the user data, and asking us why we gave that member money for a trip "someone else" made. The solution is to show what the user data looked like at the time - so we need to remember it.