Privacy
The short version: you can send us a booking enquiry, which we keep for 12 months and use to reply to you, and you can ask us to email you about gigs, which you have to confirm before we will. The only cookie we set is the one that keeps a band member signed in to the admin, we run no advertising, and nothing on this site follows you around the web.
Who we are
D’Ukes are a six-piece ukulele band based in Chelmsford, Essex. We are responsible for this website and for the information described on this page — in data protection terms, we are the data controller.
The way to reach us is our booking page. Its form comes straight to the band, and it may also give the email address and phone number of the band member who looks after bookings.
When you send us an enquiry
The form asks for your name, an email address, the kind of event, when and where it is, and a message. It also has a box for a phone number, which you can leave empty.
What we do with it. We read it and reply to you about your event. That is all. We do not add you to any list, and we do not pass it to anyone outside the band.
Where it goes. Two places. A copy is saved on this website, in a private page that only the two band members who look after bookings can see, so that either of them can reply and the other can see it has been dealt with. And it is sent to the band as an email.
Our reply. When one of us answers you from that private page, the website sends our reply to the email address you gave, through the same company, Resend, and keeps a copy beside your enquiry so the other of the two can see what was said. That copy is deleted when your enquiry is.
Why we are allowed to. You gave it to us so we could take the first steps towards a booking, which is the basis UK data protection law calls “steps prior to entering into a contract”.
How the email reaches us. The website sends it using a company called Resend, so your message passes through their systems on the way to the band’s inbox.
How long we keep it. The copy on this website is deleted automatically 12 months after the day you sent it, whether or not the event went ahead and whether or not we replied — a job runs every day and removes anything older than that. The website cannot reach into the band’s mailbox, so the email copy is not deleted by that job; if you ask us to delete your enquiry, we will delete both, straight away.
Backups. Once a week the website’s database is copied, so that the site can be put back if something goes badly wrong. Each copy is kept for 90 days, in the private store that holds the website’s code, which only the people who look after the site can open. So an enquiry we have deleted — because you asked, or because it was 12 months old — can stay in a backup for up to 90 days more before it is gone everywhere. The same is true of anything else this page says the website deletes. Sign-in sessions, the links we email and the count of wrong passwords are never copied into a backup.
Your connection. Alongside the copy we keep a scrambled version of the address of the internet connection it came from — not the address itself, which is never stored, and the scrambling cannot be undone. It exists so that we can count how many enquiries arrive from one connection in a short stretch, which is the next section, and it is deleted with the enquiry.
If you email or ring us instead. Writing to the email address or ringing the number on the booking page is outside everything this page says the website stores: the website never sees that email or that call, so nothing about it is saved here, it is not on the private enquiries page, and the daily job above does not delete it. It is an ordinary email or call to a band member, kept the way they keep their own; ask them and they will delete it.
If you join the mailing list
The box on the home page asks for one thing: an email address. We do not ask for your name, and there is nothing else in the form.
You are not signed up until you say so twice. When you send the form we ask our mailing-list provider to email you a link. Nothing else is ever sent to that address unless you click it. That is deliberate: anyone can type anyone’s address into a box on a website, and confirming is what makes the difference between you asking us and somebody else volunteering you.
What we send. An email when a new gig is announced. Not much else ever happens to a ukulele band.
Why we are allowed to. Because you asked us to — consent, and nothing else. You can take it back whenever you like and we do not need a reason.
Who holds the list. MailerLite stores the addresses and sends the emails. They are not a UK company, so your address may be handled outside the UK under the safeguards their privacy policy describes. This website keeps no copy. Your address is passed straight to them and is not written to our database, so if you ask us what we hold about you, the honest answer is nothing.
Leaving. Every email we send has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and one click is all it takes — you do not have to ask us. If you never confirmed in the first place, you never joined the list and nothing further is sent to you; ask us and we will have the unconfirmed address deleted.
Checking the form was filled in by a person
Band inboxes and mailing lists both attract a lot of spam, so when you send either form we ask Cloudflare’s Turnstile service whether it came from a browser or from a script. To do that it looks at your IP address, which browser you are using and some technical details of the connection. Cloudflare say this does not let them identify you, and there is no puzzle for you to solve. Their Turnstile privacy policy has the detail.
We also count how many enquiries and sign-ups arrive from one internet connection in a short stretch, so a script cannot send hundreds. For the mailing-list box that count is held in memory for a little while and never written down. For the booking form it is read from the enquiries we have kept, using the scrambled address described above, so it works however busy the site is.
Visitor numbers
We would like to know whether anyone is finding the site, so we use Cloudflare Web Analytics. It counts page views and tells us which pages are popular, roughly which country visitors came from, what kind of device and browser they used, and which site they followed a link from.
It does not identify you. There is no cookie, nothing is stored on your device, and no identifier is kept that would let anyone recognise you on your next visit or follow you to another website. Cloudflare do not sell this data or use it for advertising. We look at totals, and totals are all there are.
Why we are allowed to. We have a legitimate interest in knowing whether the site works and which pages people read. Because nothing is stored on your device and nobody is identified, this is not the kind of tracking that needs your consent — which is also why there is no pop-up asking for it.
If you are in the band
Band members sign in to a private part of this site to look after the gig list, the blog and the photographs. This part of the notice is for them; nothing in it happens to anyone else.
What we keep. Your name, your email address, a role (admin or editor), when you last signed in, and a scrambled version of your password from which the password itself cannot be recovered. When you sign in we keep a record of that session — when it started, when it will expire, the address of the network you were on and the browser you used — so that you can see where you are signed in and sign out everywhere at once. If you ask to reset your password, a single-use link is kept for an hour; the link that invites you in the first place is kept for a week. Either is deleted once it has been used or has expired.
Wrong passwords are counted. After five in a quarter of an hour, sign-in for that account and from that network is paused for fifteen minutes and the account’s owner is emailed to say so. The count is thrown away once you sign in successfully, and in any case within a day.
The cookie. Signing in sets one cookie, named dukes.session_token (with a __Secure- prefix over HTTPS). It holds a random token that matches your session record and nothing else about you, and signing out deletes it. If you tick “keep me signed in on this device” it lasts thirty days from the last time you used the admin; if you leave it unticked, the cookie has no lifetime at all — your browser throws it away when you close it — and the session record itself expires within a day. Leaving it unticked also sets a second cookie, dukes.dont_remember, which does nothing but remember that choice for as long as you stay signed in. These are the only cookies this site sets for itself, and neither is ever set for anyone who does not sign in.
Email. The password-reset link and the notice about a paused account are sent through Resend, the same service the booking form uses. Before a new password is accepted, part of a scrambled version of it is checked against Have I Been Pwned’s list of passwords found in data breaches; the check is designed so that the service never sees the password, or enough of it to work it out.
Enquiries and the diary. Booking enquiries are read and answered by the band’s admins only, the two members who look after bookings; anyone else who signs in does not see them. When an admin marks an enquiry as handled, or replies to one from the admin, the record says it was them, so the other can see who replied; a reply carries their name, and it is deleted with the enquiry. Dates you are away — recorded in the band’s private diary by you or by another member — are deleted automatically once they are more than 12 months in the past, by the same daily job that deletes old enquiries. Neither is visible to anyone outside the band.
Why we are allowed to. Running an admin that only the band can use is a legitimate interest, and keeping strangers out of it is one too. These records stay for as long as you have an account.
Cookies, and the ones we do not use
We set no cookies for visitors. None for advertising, and none for the visitor counting described above — that is the whole reason we chose the tool we did. The one cookie the site does set is the sign-in cookie described above, and only a band member who signs in ever receives it.
Your browser does remember one thing for us. If you press the light or dark button at the top of the page, that choice is saved on your own device so the site looks the same next time. It is never sent to us and we cannot read it; clearing your browsing data removes it.
The site is served by Cloudflare, which means your request — including your IP address — passes through their network so the page can be delivered, and they keep short-term logs for security. Cloudflare may set its own brief cookies (named __cf_bm and cf_clearance) when they need to tell a person from a bot. Those are necessary for the site to work safely rather than anything to do with tracking or advertising, which is why this site has no cookie pop-up.
Videos
Videos of the band are hosted on YouTube. Nothing at all is fetched from YouTube until you press play — not even the still picture, which is one of our own photographs. When you do press play, Google receives your IP address and can store things on your device under their own privacy policy. We use YouTube’s privacy-enhanced player, which limits what is stored, but from that point it is Google’s player and Google’s rules.
Links to other websites
We link to venues, ticket sellers and our own social media accounts. Once you follow a link away from this site, that site’s privacy notice applies, not ours.
Your rights
You can ask us to:
- tell you what information we hold about you, and give you a copy
- correct anything that is wrong
- delete it
- stop using it
Ask us through the form and we will sort it out. We will not charge you, and we will answer within a month.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data protection regulator. We would rather you told us first so we can fix it, but you do not have to.
Children
This site is not aimed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything about them.
Changes to this notice
If we start doing something new with your information we will update this page before we start, not afterwards. The visitor counting, the mailing list, the band’s sign-in and the saved copy of enquiries above were all added that way.
Last updated .