Privacy

Dance Seekers is a verified directory of public social and participatory dance events, on the web and in our apps. This page explains what we collect, how we use it - to run Dance Seekers, understand how dancers use it, make it better, and market and advertise it - who we share it with, and the choices you have. We don't sell your personal information.

How we use your information

We use everything described on this page to:

• Run Dance Seekers: your account, check-ins, tickets, rewards, ratings, requests and the notifications you asked for
• Personalize it: which nights, communities, styles and offers we show you first
• Analyze and improve it: how dancers find nights, what they go to, what they rate well, where people drop off - including research on the dance scene as a whole
• Market and advertise Dance Seekers and the nights on it: by email, push notification and in the app, and through advertising platforms (see “Advertising” below)
• Connect you with organizers you buy tickets from, RSVP to or join (see “Organizers” below)
• Keep things fair and safe: prevent fraud and abuse, protect rewards, check-ins and ratings, and meet legal obligations

We may also create aggregated or de-identified information - for example, “bachata nights in Grand Rapids grew 20% this fall” - and use or share it for any purpose, including with organizers, venues and partners. It does not identify you.

Accounts & sign-in

When you sign in, we store your email address and (optionally) your name and a profile image. On the website, sign-in uses a one-time magic link; in the mobile app it's a six-digit code sent to the same address. Either way we never see or store a password.

A signed session lives in a secure cookie on your device for up to 30 days. You can sign out anytime from your account page.

Saved events

When you tap the heart on an event, we save the event slug, title, date, and city. If you're signed in, that list lives on your account so it follows you across devices. If you're not signed in, the list lives only in your browser's localStorage and never touches our servers.

Public save count

We show an aggregate “X saved this” count on event cards when 2+ people have saved an event. The count is anonymous. Your identity is never connected to it publicly.

Attendance & badges

If you mark that you attended an event, we record it on your account to power badges and milestones on your profile. You choose what to record. Your badges live on your account, and sharing them more widely is up to you. You can ask us to clear your attendance history anytime.

Ratings

After a night you checked in to, you can rate the night, the DJ and the lesson, and leave an optional note. Organizers, DJs and instructors see ratings and notes without your name, and a DJ or instructor only sees a night's average once at least three people have rated it, so a single rating can't be traced back to you. Dance Seekers' own team can see who left a rating, as described below.

Email

We may email you about your account and tickets, and about Dance Seekers itself: nights near you, communities you follow, rewards, offers and news. Every marketing email has a one-click unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing doesn't stop emails you need, like ticket receipts and sign-in codes.

Submissions, claims, and corrections

When you submit an event, claim a listing, or report a correction, we store what you sent us so we can review and follow up. If you're signed in, we link the submission to your account; if not, we keep your contact info only as long as we need it to act on the submission.

Organizer dashboards

Approved organizers can edit their own listings through /dashboard. We log who made what change for our own integrity but don't publish that audit trail.

Organizers can add teammates to help manage their listings. Anyone an organizer adds can see that organizer's dashboard data, including the names and emails of people who bought tickets to their events. The owner controls who has access and can remove them anytime.

Ticket purchases

If you buy a ticket through Dance Seekers, we store your name, email, the event, and the order details so the organizer can admit you and we can send your confirmation and receipt. Your card details go straight to Stripe - we never see or store them.

Because the organizer is the seller, your name and email for that order are shared with the organizing team so they can run their door list, reach ticket holders if plans change, and invite you to their future events.

Organizers

When you buy a ticket from an organizer, or share your details with them on Dance Seekers, that organizer receives your name and email and can use them to tell you about their nights, classes, offers and news. When you RSVP, organizers can see your name on their going list, unless you switch that off. Organizers must include a way to unsubscribe and may not sell your information. Once an organizer has your details, their own privacy practices also apply to how they use them.

The door sees your name when you're going to a night. The door list an organizer's venue staff open with a code shows your name, never your email, when you said Going, hold a ticket, claimed a door sale, or checked in for that night. Being a member of their community does not put you on it by itself. As a member, the organizer sees your name in their member list only if you switch on sharing for that community.

Checking in at a night joins you to that organizer's community. You can leave anytime from its page. A Dance Command door scan counts on your Dance Seekers record only for communities you've joined, and you can turn that off for all of them in your account settings.

Ratings are the exception: organizers, DJs and instructors never see who left a rating, as described above.

The mobile app

The Dance Seekers app for iOS and Android reaches the same account and the same catalog as this website, so everything above applies there too. Four things only the app does are worth spelling out.

Location. The app asks for your location for two reasons: to show you what's happening near you, and - only when you tap to check in - to confirm you're actually at the venue. The check-in reading is a single point taken at the moment you tap. The app does not follow you, does not read your location in the background, and never has. If you'd rather not share it at all, the rest of the app works without it, and the organizer can still check you in at the door. Your location is never sold. Your precise coordinates stay with Dance Seekers: we may use the general area you dance in (your city or neighbourhood) for recommendations, analytics and advertising, but we don't give your exact position to advertising platforms.

Camera. Used for one thing: reading a QR code, either the check-in code at the door or a ticket you're being handed. Frames are decoded on your device and never uploaded. The app does not request microphone access.

Notifications. If you turn them on, your device gives us a push token so we can reach that device. It identifies the install, not you personally, and it's deleted when you turn notifications off or delete your account. We only send what we said we would: a reward getting close, and what's on at the places you dance.

Crash reports. When the app crashes or hits an error it can't recover from, it sends a report to Sentry so we can fix it. The report describes the FAILURE, not you: the error and where in our code it happened, your device model, your iOS or Android version, the app version, and the last few things the app itself did - screens opened, requests made - so we can retrace the steps that broke it. It carries a random install identifier that lets us tell "one person hit this ten times" from "ten people hit it once". That identifier is not your account, and it resets if you delete and reinstall.

Two things are deliberately kept out. Your email, name and account are never attached - reports are anonymous to us as well as to Sentry. And any coordinates are stripped from the recorded requests before the report leaves your device, because some of our own requests carry your position in the address and a crash report is not a place for the location of someone standing outside a bar. Reports are kept for 90 days and used for nothing but fixing the app.

We keep what you do in Dance Seekers - the events you saved, the nights you said you were going to, the check-ins you made, your ratings and requests - and we may also measure how the app and website are used (screens opened, taps, searches, time spent) with our own tools or analytics and measurement services. We use all of it as described in “How we use your information”.

Advertising

We advertise Dance Seekers on other sites and apps, such as Instagram, Facebook, Google and YouTube. To show our ads to the people most likely to care - including you, and dancers like you - we may share a scrambled (hashed) copy of your email address, and information like the city you dance in and the styles and nights you engage with, with advertising platforms such as Meta and Google. They match it to their own users to show our ads, to find similar people, and to tell us how our ads performed. We may also use their pixels or SDKs on our website and in our apps to measure that.

This is advertising for Dance Seekers and the nights on it. It is not selling your data, and we don't let advertisers buy access to you. You can turn it off anytime in the app under You → Account settings → Privacy choices. On iPhone, anything Apple counts as tracking only happens if you allow it when the app asks.

Third-party services

Dance Seekers runs on a set of vendors. Each sees the data it needs for its job:

• MongoDB Atlas: stores all of the above (users, listings, saves, submissions). Encrypted at rest.
• Railway: hosts our application servers. Sees only request/response traffic.
• Resend: sends magic-link sign-in emails and transactional notifications. Sees recipient email + email body.
• Stripe: processes ticket payments when an organizer sells tickets through Dance Seekers. Stripe is the payment processor - it handles your card details, identity verification, and payouts directly. We never see or store your card number. Only involved if you actually buy a ticket.
• Cloudinary: stores images organizers upload for their pages (logos, cover photos, gallery images). Only organizer-uploaded images live here, not your personal data.
• Sentry: receives crash reports from the mobile app and from our servers. Sees the error, the device model and OS, the app version, and a random install identifier - never your email, your name, your account or your coordinates. Described in full above.
• Expo: delivers push notifications to the mobile app. Sees the device push token and the text of the notification - never your email, your location, or your history. Only involved if you turn notifications on.
• Google (Gemini): when you use the Ask search to describe what you're looking for, the sentence you typed is sent to Gemini to work out what you meant - a style, a night, a city. Nothing identifying goes with it: not your name, your email, or your account. The actual event results are then looked up from our own database, so the AI never sees your history and never decides what's real.
• Advertising and analytics platforms (such as Meta, Google and Rybbit): as described under “Advertising” and “Analytics”. Advertising platforms handle what we share under their own terms.
• Tockify and other organizer iCal feeds: we read public event data; we don't share user data with them.

Who at Dance Seekers can see your information

The Dance Seekers team can see all the information stored in Dance Seekers - including accounts, check-ins, RSVPs, song requests, lesson requests and who left which rating - and uses it for everything described on this page. We share it outside the team only as this page describes, when the law requires it, to protect people's safety or our rights, or as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of Dance Seekers, in which case this policy would continue to apply to it.

Analytics

We analyze how Dance Seekers is used - with our own tools and with analytics services such as Rybbit - to understand what dancers look for and what works. We may connect that activity to your account when you're signed in.

Retention

Account data sticks around as long as your account is active. Submissions and corrections are kept until they're acted on, then archived. Anonymous local saves never come to us at all.

Your rights

You can:

• See what we have on you (just visit /account once signed in)
• Clear your saved events anytime
• Delete your account, and everything attached to it, from inside the mobile app: You → Account settings → Delete account. It takes effect immediately and needs nobody's approval
• Delete your account from the website by emailing us. We remove your record within 7 days
• Unsubscribe from any marketing email with one click
• Turn off advertising matching and organizer emails in the app under You → Account settings → Privacy choices

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as Dance Seekers grows. We'll change the date at the top, and tell you in the app or by email when a change matters. If a change would let us use information you already gave us in a new way, we'll ask you first.

Children

Dance Seekers is intended for adults. We don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 13.

Contact

Questions, deletion requests, or anything else? Email hello@danceseekers.com.