1. Who is responsible
Public Malfunction operates publicmalfunction.org and is responsible for the personal data the application stores. Privacy questions and rights requests can be sent to contact@publicmalfunction.org.
2. Data the application processes
- Purchases: buyer email, an opaque order reference, Stripe Checkout Session and payment-intent identifiers, payment status, price, currency, release and format snapshots, and purchase timestamps.
- Consent evidence: the time, exact checkbox wording, checkbox version and incorporated legal terms bundle version accepted for immediate digital supply and cancellation-right acknowledgement.
- Track commissions: the customer email, creative brief and supplied material, working title, selected concepts, commission and payment state, accepted contractual and consent evidence, and records needed to provide the commissioned service.
- Commission files: private concept audio and finished files, their technical metadata, and records of private playback or download-link issuance.
- Commission notifications: recipient, message type, delivery status and retry information for service emails about a commission.
- Fulfilment and recovery: hashed access or magic-link tokens, email-delivery status, temporary server-side My Downloads sessions, entitled formats and records of signed download-link issuance.
- Security and operations: IP address and basic request information may be processed transiently for rate limiting, abuse prevention, diagnostics and hosting security logs.
- Messages: information you choose to provide when emailing us.
There are no public customer accounts or customer passwords. The site does not use advertising profiles. Optional usage measurement is described below.
3. Stripe and billing information
Stripe hosts Checkout and processes card/payment details, billing information, fraud signals and tax-location information under Stripe’s own privacy terms. Signed Stripe notifications can contain payment and billing details, but the Public Malfunction application deliberately stores only the buyer email and limited payment/order identifiers listed above. It does not persist customer street address, city or postcode fields.
4. Why data is used
Purchase, commission and fulfilment data is used to assess and perform the relevant contract, create and privately present commissioned work, process selections and payments, deliver purchased music and commissioned files, recover paid access and handle support. Consent evidence, transaction records and some communications are kept to comply with legal obligations and establish legal claims. Security data is processed where necessary for the legitimate interests of protecting customers, the site and payment flow.
5. Service providers
Data is shared only as needed with providers supporting the service: Stripe for payments and tax; Hostinger for application hosting, MySQL infrastructure and configured email delivery; Cloudflare R2 for private file storage and short-lived download delivery; third-party production providers used to create commissioned work; and, only after analytics consent, Google as the optional analytics service provider. These providers process data under their own terms and security arrangements. We may also disclose information where required by law or to protect legal rights.
6. Cookies and browser preferences
Public Malfunction uses essential cookies for authenticated administration and the temporary passwordless My Downloads session. They are not used for advertising. Stripe may use its own necessary cookies on Stripe-hosted Checkout.
The public site can store small first-party preferences in your browser, including your analytics choice and whether you dismissed a promotional notice. These functional preferences are not used for tracking or advertising. The analytics preference records the choice, consent version, decision time and expiry time and is retained for six months unless you change it sooner.
When enabled, Google Analytics is loaded on the public catalogue homepage only after you choose “Allow Analytics”. It is used to understand aggregate catalogue and site usage and improve Public Malfunction, not for personalised or behavioural advertising by Public Malfunction. If you choose “No Thanks”, your visit is not measured by Google Analytics. Google may process device, network and usage information under its own privacy terms, so analytics data should not be regarded as literally anonymous.
You can change or withdraw your choice at any time using “Privacy choices” in the public footer. Withdrawing stops further Public Malfunction analytics events and removes Google Analytics first-party cookies that the site can reasonably clear.
7. Retention and security
Order, commission, contractual-evidence and entitlement records are retained as needed to perform the service, provide ongoing paid access and meet accounting, legal and dispute-handling requirements. Commission briefs and private concept or finished files are retained only as long as reasonably needed for the service, access, support and legal purposes. Expired access tokens and temporary sessions are cleaned up automatically. Email records, security logs and support messages are retained only as long as reasonably needed for their purpose.
Access tokens are stored as hashes where designed to be one-time secrets, private masters remain in private storage, and browser download URLs are short-lived. No internet service can guarantee absolute security.
8. Your rights
Depending on applicable law, you may ask for access, correction, deletion, restriction, objection or portability of your personal data, and may complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office. Some records must be retained despite a deletion request where required for contracts, tax, fraud prevention or legal claims.
Send requests to contact@publicmalfunction.org. We may need proportionate information to verify that the request concerns your data.